Frank Ballard was the American puppeteer and designer who founded the University of Connecticut’s Puppet Arts Program, the only puppetry degree programme in North America.
He was hired to do something else
Ballard came to UConn in 1956 to teach scenic design in the drama department. He began teaching puppetry, the classes filled, and by 1964 the programme existed formally. It has run continuously ever since.
The argument he was making
Ballard held that puppetry was a sophisticated theatrical art form capable of handling serious material — not a children’s entertainment and not a craft sideline. Establishing it inside a university drama department was the practical form of that argument, and it is a large part of why puppetry has any academic standing in the United States at all.
The productions
He designed and directed large-scale puppet stagings of works most people would not attempt — The Magic Flute, Peer Gynt, Kismet, HMS Pinafore — built by his students under his direction. Hundreds of those puppets survive.
What happened to them
In 1987, alumni formed a committee to preserve his work. That collection became the Ballard Institute and Museum of PuppetryThe Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry is a public pup..., which now holds more than three thousand puppets and is one of the three largest such collections in the country.
The pipeline
Ballard’s connection with Jim HensonJim Henson (1936–1990) was the puppeteer and filmmaker who... More allowed him to send students directly to the MuppetA Muppet is a puppet built in the soft foam-and-fleece style... workshop, and a considerable number of working American builders and performers trace their training back through him.
He described a puppet as the artist’s soul set free, and built the institutions to act on it.