My name is K.Ruby and I have over 20 years experience in the visual and performing arts including professional employment as a performer, director, designer, consultant, builder, costumer and teacher for the past 15 years. I am best known for my work as founder and Artistic Director of Wise Fool Puppet Intervention, a puppetry and street theatre group dedicated to community, celebration and change, but I have also worked with nationally recognized theatre projects such as In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theatre (Minneapolis), Geese Theatre Company (New Hampshire) and the dance theatre group Contraband (San Francisco).
I have offered courses in Theatre and Social Change at the college level as well as teaching maskmaking, puppetry arts, theatre games and stiltwalking extensively in schools and community centers. I am an accomplished sculptor and ceramist and have shown my work in galleries throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Finally, as a community organizer and arts administrator I have organized and facilitated projects ranging from community celebrations within my own community, to giant puppet making workshops for social change events to the highly successful PuppetLOVE! Festival of Radical Puppetry.
I believe that art and artmaking of all kinds can act as powerful vehicles for community building, self-expression and empowerment. In street theater we create "visual metaphors" to talk about important issues. These images are a means of communication that reach out to people of different ages, classes, cultures and languages. The puppets and the stilts seems to inspire people, to incite their imagination and to propel them into taking action. I was compelled to make a street theater piece about the Tobacco Industry because this industry exemplifies the inherent injustice of the current trend in global corporate culture. To these corporations, making money is far more important than the health of the people they sell their product to. I hope that this piece helps young people to think twice about buying a product that lends to the economic, environmental and personal destruction of people worldwide.