This podcast features three interviews with the founders and family members who founded and continue to grow world-class puppetry at Sandglass Theater in Putne,y Vermont, just north of Brattleboro. Ines Zeller Bass and Eric Bass, co-founders of Sandglass, set the stage in the first seven minutes, discussing how they met in Germany (where Ines is from) and their unique approach to puppetry and ensemble theater. They discuss how being part of community has shaped their work. They emphasize their unique collaborative process of creating puppets and scripts and how they nurture and value the puppet's "soul" over ‘manipulation’ to ‘listen’ to the puppet's voice. Deeply rooted in images and metaphors, they describe how their work goes beyond linear storytelling toward a non-traditional, fragmented storytelling style that invites audience participation. From about seven to 12 minutes, Eric and Ines' daughter Shoshana Bass discusses the theater's origins in Germany in 1982, its relocation to Vermont in 1986, and the transformation of an old livery stable into a 100 seat puppet theater. She says, as an ensemble company, Sandglass creates original works, offers programming for all ages, and addresses pressing community issues like refugees and dementia. She talks about Sandglass' educational offerings including summer intensives, camps, and workshops. She describes navigating a leadership transition from her parents to the next generation while exploring the theater's future and community engagement. Jana Zeller, the elder daughter of Eric and Ines, rounds out the podcast. She discusses her role in continuing the family's legacy overseeing youth programming and outreach and performing in various productions, including children's hand puppetry shows she's inherited from Ines' repertoire as well as her own original work. She discusses how Sandglass has moved beyond Putney to foster partnerships in Brattleboro whose creative mix well supports their work. Jana highlights the unique aspects of puppetry, including its capacity for metaphor and the emotional connection it fosters. She describes her own trajectory in puppetry and special fondness for hand puppets. She details Sandglass's community engagement, such as the "Puppets in Paradise" event and the "Puppets in the Green Mountains" festival, which showcases international puppetry. Jana reflects on how difficult international touring has become and how Sandglass, while maintaining its historically deep connections to the international puppet community, is excited to expand its regional reach by designing a traveling 'Puppet Wagon' to bring this meaningful art form to communities in rural Vermont communities and beyond.
This episode was originally produced by Michael Hanish for the Brattleboro Words Trail app; A subsequent interview was conducted in September 2025 with Jana Zeller by Lissa Weinmann and incorporated with original pieces to create the podcast. Ines Zeller Bass, Eric Bass, Shoshana Bass and Jana Zeller all narrate. Original bed guitar music to Ines, Eric and Shoshanna segments was by Eric Bass. Other break guitar was by Alec Pombriant, who also edited the podcast. Executive Producer is Lissa Weinmann.
For more information on Sandglass Theater please visit its website at: https://www.sandglasstheater.org/
SANDGLASS THEATER: PUPPETS, METAPHOR AND MAGIC
INES ZELLER BASS: Hi, I'm Ines Zeller Bass.
ERIC BASS: I'm Eric Bass.
Ines: We are in Putney Vermont, and we're sitting right in front of our wonderful workshop.
Eric: Sandglass Theater is a theater company. We are primarily a puppet theater company. We are also an ensemble theater company, which means that we devise our own pieces. The puppets are our co-writers. In many ways, we don't always know what they are going to say.
INES: For me, the puppet is an actor who's very easy in some ways to maintain. When you're done with it, you put it in a box and shove it somewhere, and it won't ask for money, for food, for anything.
ERIC: A lot of our work with puppetry is that strange negotiation in which we create a puppet and create a script, and then the puppet might not be able to say what's in the script, and so we change the puppet, or we change the script, or we change both.
INES: But when it comes out and you are confronted with this, you have to be there with the entire consciousness and body in order to understand what the puppet wants from you. It sounds very strange, but this is that kind of puppetry that we have developed over the years, understanding that we are not the ones who manipulate it. It's a very bad word, manipulate. We much rather like to talk about giving the puppet a soul.
ERIC: Our job as puppeteers is not to impose anything on the puppet, but to listen to its voice.
INES: I had been living in Germany. I mean, I'm German. I've been living there all my life, and I met Eric during a theater festival in Munich. So it was a very open and free kind of time for theater, a lot of explorations, and puppetry somehow made its way in there too, and that's where I met Eric, crawling on his feet somewhere outside in the open, doing a very dark piece. That's what I remember. And Eric had connections to Vermont, and we had been on tour in the States with a piece, and I could not see myself in the States, but Vermont was beautiful, and I felt an immediate pull somehow it was just lovely. We contacted friends, and somehow, over the next year or so, we created that connection to Putney. It was a really, very spontaneous decision that had no thoughts about, is it wise to come here? Can we make it here? All those thoughts were not there. It was and I think a decision of love.
ERIC: We were counseled at the time that this was a foolish thing for puppeteers to do. Who's going to come to the show there, the Arts Council is not a wealthy Arts Council. We're not even close to an airport to make touring easy. What we really discovered in Vermont is how unavoidable it is to have to become part of your community. And I think the feeling of being part of a community, of being responsible for being part of a community, has really influenced our work in many ways. It's in terms of the themes of the work, in terms of how the work is presented, in terms of who supports the work.
INES: For me, our work is about images and metaphors. And I think the word metaphor is one of the really essential things in a piece we do. We are looking for the metaphor that expresses something that we don't want to really spell out in words.
INES: Our theater is not so much interested in telling a story with a beginning, the middle and an end. I think again, we're telling our stories much more in a collection of images and metaphors and let the audience do the work.
ERIC: Stories don't need to be linear. They can be a collection of fragments, which leaves much more room for the listener to fill in the blanks. Right when we talk about storytelling, we're usually talking from the perspective of the teller. Listening is, is, is an essential aspect of the story. So thinking about the role of the listener, thinking about what pulls the listener in, it's not always the interesting plot. Very often it's the missing pieces
INES: We are always looking for the moment in the piece where we bring the audience in with their own thoughts about it, and even if they don't understand, they often sit there and say, What did you mean with this? And when they ask this afterwards, in a question and answer, we always give it back. So what did it mean to you?
GUITAR INTERLUDE
SHOSHANA BASS: I am Shoshana Bass. I'm the daughter of Eric and Ines, who are the founders of Sandglass Theater.
Sandglass was, first and foremost, a touring company touring all over the world. Was founded in Germany in 1982 and then my parents immigrated to Vermont in ‘86 and, I believe in ‘94, they renovated this old livery stable here in Putney and transformed it into a puppet theater, a venue in which we could rehearse, have an office coordinate touring, and also be able to present arts for the local community, to present an international puppet festival, to bring other artists into this community to perform from all over the world and all over the country.
We are an ensemble theater company and do mostly devised theater, which means that we create each original work with the ensemble, and the puppets are sometimes animated by two, three people, all on one form to give it life and movement and content.
This is puppetry for people of all ages. We have work that is very much geared towards adults, along issues such as refugees, such as dementia, different social justice issues. And then we have, of course, children's programming and shows for children of all ages.
We teach a summer intensive for adults every summer, which is an intensive training in Sandglass’ unique style of animating and breathing life into puppets and creating puppetry work. We also teach summer camps for kids. We teach weekend workshops in puppet building and in puppet performance.
We always come back to Vermont of course. This is where our hearts are, and this is a beautiful place to create and to be inspired. We have a beautiful community of people who really support the creation process as we develop new work, and we're working our way through a beautiful transition of the leadership of the theater and of the network and communities that we exist in, figuring out who really wants to be a part of what Sandglass becomes and what people would like to see it become, how it can continue to serve this community.
GUITAR INTERLUDE
JANA ZELLER: I'm Jana Zeller. I'm part of the Sandglass family. I'm Ines and Eric's oldest daughter, was born in Germany, and came here with Eric and Ines and Sandglass when we immigrated to the states in the 80s. So I grew up in Sandglass. I've been working there and as a performer and designer for many, many years, and just in the last couple of years, I've more formally joined the team in the office to help Sandglass have a presence, you know, in our community, regionally, nationally and internationally.
Sandglass Theater was founded in the 80s, and at this time, performed a lot in Europe and became very well known among the European puppet community. And then when settling here, I feel like Sandglass really had to in the local area grow an appreciation for puppetry. Often, people in this country are not that much aware of a puppetry tradition. So over the years, as Sandglass brought in guest artists and produced festivals, the audiences in Putney and Brattleboro really grew to know puppetry as an art form. So I feel my parents had a lot of influence in this area, just in promoting puppet culture and, yeah, promoting an awareness and a love for that art form.
Brattleboro has an interesting culture, and so many people from so many places have moved here, so many art forms are represented here. So puppetry really fits really well into this community. And Sandglass, really locally, had to expand beyond Putney, because we also need additional venues where we bring puppet companies and where we present these theater pieces, so kind of bleeding into Brattleboro was, I think, a natural way, and we've always been very well received in this community.
On top of it, we now have one of our favorite events that happens every other year, Puppets in Paradise, which now happens at the Retreat Farm. It originated in Westminster West but sort of outgrew the beautiful gardens where it used to be held there. So now we are collaborating with the Retreat Farm, which has been a wonderful partnership for us, letting us put short form puppet theater pieces all over the farm and the woods there, and the fields and among the animals, and the audience strolls from one performance to another, and there's music and food, and it's become a beloved family event that happens in in the Fall.
Puppets in the Green Mountains is our international puppet Festival, where we bring companies from all around the world to venues in Putney and Brattleboro, mostly, and we also ask community members to house and feed our puppeteers. So there's a lot of interaction between the international companies that come and the local families that open their arms to welcome them here. It's a wonderful event, and we inhabit different venues during this time. Sand class is a very small theater. We only seat 60 people, so we also work with the Latchis which has been a wonderful venue for us. There, we can host big performances. We invite a lot of the local schools to send their students to see performances from Brazil, from Africa, just to name a couple. And we work with New England Youth Theater, Hooker Dunham. So we've really dug into the sort of using the local venues and the Brattleboro community to have this interchange.
Puppets in the Green Mountains lasts for about two weeks, stretches over two weekends, and then there's a week of workshops and lectures. It always has a theme. The last theme was roots and wings, and so we try to find performances that fit into that theme or enhance that theme. And my sister especially curates a series during the festival that brings together international puppet companies and local social justice organizations to create a dialog that is given to the public, where the public is invited to listen to the Leaders of these social justice organizations and the artists on a particular topic. So a really interesting forum for exchange.
It's Shoshana who really comes up with the vision for the entire festival and then fills out the program with the different performances.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
I made my first short puppet piece sometime during my college years, And it's funny looking back now, because as a teenager, I wanted nothing to do with puppetry, but, of course, it got into my blood. And then when I was at college, suddenly there was no puppetry around. So that seemed very odd to me, and I felt inspired to make a puppet piece. Ever since then, I've also trained with my parents as mentors in the Sandglass Training Intensive program that we run each summer, and I've developed four of my own shows for adult audiences, and I perform a lot of children's work, sort of a sand glass repertoire of children's performances that still hail from the days of my mother. She inherited me these shows, and they are still so much fun, and audiences to this day love them, and we're still on the road with them.
Puppetry brings another dimension I feel to a theater piece, because, well, the puppet is alive, but we know it's not alive, so we have to, we buy into that illusion, in a sense, as an audience. So that in itself, is magical.
Puppetry has a big capacity for metaphor. The Puppet is just a really different actor than a human actor. It can flip upside down, it can fly, it can crumble up. It can fall apart into different pieces. So there's a lot of ways in which a puppet can present an idea that a human actor can't.
I feel the puppet has really good access to people. I work with children a lot, and I feel children, even children who are shy or otherwise not very social, they are never shy when they hold a puppet and do a puppet performance in front of their class. So that's special.
In all the years of working with puppets, and I've worked with many different puppet styles I am most fond of the hand puppets I came upon. They actually have a long tradition in German culture, and that is where my heart is at. I already inherited a hand puppet piece from my mother that is a children's puppet show, but I've since created my own puppet, hand puppet show that is for adults, And hand puppets can be pretty ridiculous. They have big heads, small bodies, so they look a little grotesque, which I like. It sets them apart from trying to create something that's really, I don't know, real. I like that little bit of distance that it gives and that potential for comedy. Breathing life into a puppet is a really specialized and almost magical occurrence. It takes a lot of training in the way we teach this to actually not control a puppet, but breathe into it and let the puppet discover the world around itself, and then allowing the audience to discover the puppets world through The eyes of the puppet.
I feel really excited about a puppet wagon that we are in the process of constructing that is going to be touring through Vermont to bring puppetry into the tiniest rural communities. Our passion is really there, bringing this culture to people who would otherwise never go to the theater or just don't have access to culture. our love for the International puppet community will always stand as a priority. But we do have to be realistic about the times we're living in now, and so this puppet wagon is going to help us to be able to bring our work around, but we will work more locally, and we are really excited for that adventure.
Puppetry can touch people in a really deep and emotional way. It can be mysterious. It can leave the audiences with questions that we as performers, we appreciate these questions. We feel it gives the audience the opportunity to let their own imagination enter our world and hopefully awaken people's imagination. I feel now more than ever, we need puppetry to light up our light up that imagination and kind of, yeah, touch people on this emotional level, bring humor, bring connection, and this suspension of disbelief, of well, we see a puppet, and we know it's not real, but it becomes real in front of our eyes. That is something magical. And we keep working on becoming masterful, as our parents are, and we have taken this mentorship that we've gotten from Ines and Eric, and we plan to bring it forward and to keep exploring the art of puppetry and to keep inviting our community in to experience this world with us.
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL THEME MUSIC BEGINS…
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was produced by Micheal Hanish. Narration is Ines Zeller Bass, Eric Bass, Shoshana Bass and Jana Zeller who appear in that order. Guitar bed for Ines, Eric and Shoshana is improvised by Eric Bass; Additional guitar music and also podcast editing is by me, Alec Pombriant. Executive Producer is Lissa Weinmann. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.