Linda Hall’s Puppets in Ghost Bird Theatre

Adjunct Professor and Multimedia artist Linda Hall has made puppets for a play called Orbs for Ghost Bird Theatre in Fort Myers, FL. The play takes place at Koreshan State Park on Friday, February 16 and Saturday, February 17, 2018. Hall has employed her vast talents to cloak actors with the puppets and headgear they wear to portray the animals and ethereal beings who populate playwright Barry Cavin’s world out at the Koreshan Historic Site, where an epic battle wages between Koreshan founder Cyrus Reed Teed and the natural world. While Hall may not share the Calusa’s belief, she is nonetheless a logical choice to assist Cavin and Ghostbird in their worthwhile endeavor, namely explicating the connection between humans and the natural world. “With painting and sculpture,” Hall says of her art, “I explore the delicate bond and the disconnect we have with the wilderness within ourselves and the earth.” 

Ghostbird’s collaboration with Hall took shape following an exhibition earlier this season at Florida Gulf Coast University titled Untethered, Stories Come Like Charms: Barbara Balzer and Linda Hall. Among the works she exhibited in that show were soft sculptures that function as containers for spirit. “Sometimes bare, sometimes adorned, they create a space to be filled with unfamiliar and elusive intensities: an animal energy that suffuses what is human, and a humanity that resides in objects and beasts,” Hall stated in the catalogue which FGCU published in conjunction with the exhibition. Untethered was a compilation of work that has occupied Hall for innumerable years. As far back as 2010, she was consumed with fabricating animal attire “left open for a human body to occupy, or animal forms endowed with human attributes.”

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