Torry Bend & Howard L. Craft: Dreaming

Award-winning puppet artist and Associate Professor of Theater Studies at Duke, Torry Bend, collaborates with Howard L. Craft, the lauded poet, playwright, and arts educator who created the first African-American superhero radio serial, The Jade City Pharaoh, to reimagine an iconic American cartoon. Bend, who premiered Love’s Infrastructure at Duke Performances in 2014, joins forces with Craft on Dreaming: a new theatrical work that investigates the legacy of influential artist Winsor McCay and his famed comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1911 in The New York Herald.

Dreaming confronts overtly racist imagery in McCay’s work, using puppetry to tell the story of McCay’s cast of characters on the event of his death; the characters must reconcile the fame they each found as stereotypes. Having first appeared as a work-in-progress at Sheafer Lab Theater, the final production of Dreaming debuts at the von der Heyden Studio Theater before its New York premiere at La MaMa in 2020.