Dan Hurlin stages Fortunato Depero's lost puppet plays at Bard College

In 2013, performer Dan Hurlin (born 1955 in New Haven) discovered that Futurist artist Fortunato Depero had written four puppet plays during World War I that were never performed. Hurlin, a puppeteer, traveled to Rovereto, Depero's hometown, to examine the archive. He found instructions for staging the pieces but no drawings of the puppets or dialogues. Determined to recover and realize the works, Hurlin has now completed the project, combining the four texts into a single script. The show runs until July 17 as part of Bard Summerscape, a seven-week program of opera, film, music, dance, and cabaret presented by Bard College and the Fisher Center of Performing Arts in New York. The performance synthesizes Depero's Futurist sensibility with Hurlin's interpretive skill, developed during his residency at the American Academy in Rome. Hurlin previously presented an animated documentary on photographer Mike Disfarmer in Ascoli Piceno with writer Giorgio Vasta and Christian Caliandro. The ballet, central to avant-garde art as the "total work of art," also featured in Depero's work through his collaboration with Swiss Egyptologist and writer Gilbert Clavel, replacing humans with toys and automatons in his Balletti Plastici. The Center for Italian Modern Art in New York has also engaged Hurlin for a lecture on the subject. A behind-the-scenes video was produced by The New Yorker.