Events:

Puppet Making Workshops with Edwina BridgemanThu 1, 8, 29 Aug · 10.30am / 2pm £4 per person Suitable for children aged from 5 years (no maximum age)

Interactive Storytelling - Family Workshop with Lizzy Cummins 3-6 Years - Thu 15 & 22 Aug · 10.30am / 11.45am 7-10 Years - Thu 15 & 22 Aug · 1pm £2 per person

All children must be accompanied by a parent/guardian. Tickets must be booked for all attendees.

Robert Anton (1949-84) was born in Texas to a family of Russian-Jewish decent praised a ‘child wonder’ for meticiously recreating Broadway stages en miniature.

Anton’s extraordinary miniature plays quickly reached cult status upon his arrival in New York in 1970 and yet his theatre remained one of the city’s best-kept secrets. He allowed a maximum of 18 people to see his plays and he vehemently denied any documentation of the performances. The intimacy of his theatre was to be experienced in person and nothing else, any mediation would have broken the magic circle.

He called his �gurines ‘actors’, meticulously sculpted heads, no larger than a thumb, with shockingly vivid features constantly changing character, gender, identity in rituals of animism and alchemy, from beast to humanoid to matter and back. The protagonists of Anton’s plays – anti-heroes, bohemian monsters, fantastical creatures, wise men and witches - were inspired by people he observed at Verdi Square Park, close to his 44 West 70th Street apartment. Though they have no names, there are types – the bag lady, the artist/vampire, a group of clowns dedicated to Fellini’s 1970 movie The Clowns, the pope degraded to cardinal and then bishop, the rabbi, the glamorous dancing skeleton of Josephine Baker, the haughty chanteuse, the gypsy lady, the Nazi, whimsical beasts like the horseshoe crab and the bird woman, and many more characters, exposed during one archetypal play to multiple transformations and reincarnations.

An alchemist of the mundane – Anton transformed the debris, the considered abject of New York City - be it object, human, animal - into an alternative world beyond judgement and limitation and with simultaneously devastating or marvellous outcomes. Anton’s debut in Europe began in 1975 when he and Robert Wilson represented the United States at the International Theatre Festival in Nancy, France,

causing an avalanche of enthusiastic reviews. Subsequently in 1976, President Francois Mitterand and Jacques Lang designated the Château de Vincennes near Paris for Anton to set up his studio for one year. Here Anton presented his plays and co-founded a visual/mime theatre program for the deaf-mute at the Chateau.

Upon his return to New York in 1978, Anton moved to a large loft on 96 Spring Street and presented nightly performances of the Paris Spectacle. In the early 1980s Anton’s experimentation took him to a new stage in which the ‘actors’ fade into the background. Anton created glamorous miniature sets as “an homage to the 1940s” (Benjamin Taylor), sets like Radio City Hall animated with grand and witty gestures to the tunes of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley. From there, Anton further radicalized his concepts. His last work was a play composed purely of light, exploring the psychological impact and metaphysical dimension of colour: “A third �nal spectacle remained un�nished at this death. Totally unpopulated, it would have been an evocative constellation of set, sound and light.”(Genii Grassi, Robert Anton in Retrospect, Theatre Ex, 1986).

The core of his theatre - over 40 ‘actors’, intriguing miniature props and a suite of exceptional drawings and sketches giving another insight into the artist’s genuine imagination – survived after Anton’s sudden tragic passing in 1984, leaving behind an oeuvre so intense and yet only spanning one decade.

This exhibition is curated by Anke Kempkes.

Our special thanks go to the Bette Stoler Collection, New York.