Great Small Works: 2025

Thursday, December 11, 2025

YEAR-END SPAGHETTI DINNER, Call In the Giants!

Celebrate the coming of the New Year with pasta, puppets, music, and each other!

Monday, December 29, 2025
doors and pasta at 7:30PM
Tickets: $20, no one turned away for lack of funds

Judson Memorial Church
Entrance at 243 Thompson Street, NYC
No advance reservations
For info: 917-319-8104
Live at Judson Church and livestreamed here on Facebook Live.

CALL IN THE GIANTS
Eight giant puppets from eight different artists will participate in a Convergence of Giants to celebrate the ways that oversized puppets have performed festivals of resistance from the Middle Ages to the 1980 Women's Pentagon Action and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement.
Participants to date: Ronnie Asbell, People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, Chinese Theater Works, and Amy Trompetter.

Also featuring:
Music by FRANK LONDON and friends

A new dance by JENNIFER MILLER
with NOA RUI-PIIN WEISS and ZO WILLIAMS

Cranky by ERIK RUIN
text from "On Another's Sorrow" by William Blake

Film by MEREDITH HOLCH
"Brother Bird"

BOXCUTTER COLLECTIVE
"Witches, Women and Witchcraft," a cranky

Great Small Works is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Additional thanks to: the Puppet Slam Network, the Scherman Foundation, and the Constance and Jarvis Doctorow Family Foundation.

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

SPAGHETTI DINNER with Archive-Based Creative Arts

GREAT SMALL WORKS SPAGHETTI DINNER

“Our Lives Hold Archives” -- Willie Kearse, Archive-Based Creative Arts

At The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center

107 Suffolk St, NYC

Doors/Dinner: 6:30 PM. Performances: 7PM
Tickets: sliding scale, $20 suggested (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Info: 917-319-8104
Walk ups welcome

Featuring:

SPECIAL PREVIEW
"Creative Writing Workshop Vol. 1," The Eastern Correctional Facility creative writing anthology, assembled by the men of the Lifers & Longtermers Committee Creative Writing Workshop and published by Archive-Based Creative Arts.

Archive-Based Creative Arts is an arts program, publishing platform and archiving collective building collaborations across the prison wall. The new anthology emerged through a creative writing workshop created and led by Lamarr "Streets" Reid and Santos "Pikasso" Lopez at Eastern Correctional Facility, and was edited and compiled by ABCA's resident archivist Serious Soul Brother. The workshop and its anthology were created by incarcerated people from behind the wall, and ABCA is thrilled to preview their work for the public -- and tell the story of how it all came to be.

It’s a Living Newspaper! Diverse artistic voices will be heard via live call-ins! Poetry! Music! And a new cranky created by the ABCA team with Great Small Works.

Pickle and The Deli Guys
"Sandwiches Are Beautiful: And What Else Is True?"
Emma Alabaster, Mary Feaster, Jenny Romaine/GSW, Willa Folmar, Alexander Udis, Joe Dobkin and a cranky scroll by Mor Erlich

Marlee Miller
"Black Femme Dreaming," a cranky

Gretchen Van Lente
“Annabel Lee”

Klondyke
aka Wes Olivier, live music and drag by the King of Kreep and The Professor of Grotesque!

@klondyke-drag

*******
Spaghetti on site or to go
We'll have food to go for folk who choose not to eat on site, and a big basket of KN95's to offer you to make the evening more fun and accessible.

Space Access: Teatro SEA is in the process of renovating their building for access (hopefully by Spring). Currently there are 5 stairs to enter the building. Public restrooms are on the third floor. There is a restroom on ground level that can be made available, but it isn’t spacious enough to fit a chair.

Great Small Works is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Additional thanks to: the Puppet Slam Network, the Scherman Foundation, and the Constance and Jarvis Doctorow Family Foundation.

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

SPAGHETTI KAREVAN

Great Small Works and Fihi Ma Fihi present

SPAGHETTI KAREVAN
A seasonal Spaghetti Ramadan remix

“Still many rivers, still one ocean; but with some extra rivers.”

What’s Spaghetti Karevan?
A seasonal offshoot of our annual celebration, a NYC-based spiritual solidarity project of nearly a decade between Muslims, Jews and other friends… breaking bread at the nexus of art, theater, community and alternative marketplace-building.

Featuring:
The Brooklyn Nomads
A cross-cultural ensemble rooted in musical traditions from the Arab world

Julia Patinella
Flamenco Fusion singer

Keri Egilmez of The Whirling Imaginarium
with Jenny Romaine/Great Small Works
"The Caravanserai Story: Part 2, Merchant's Hidden Treasure"

Suggested admission price: $20
For more info: 917-319-8104

Great Small Works is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

This project is made possible in part with funds from a regrant program supported by the Howard Gilman Foundation and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Additional thanks to: the Puppet Slam Network, the Scherman Foundation, and the Constance and Jarvis Doctorow Family Foundation.

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

HAPPY SUMMER FROM GREAT SMALL WORKS

Happy summer!

We are sending love, respect and grounding…don’t give up hope! We were made for these times.

Our company will be in two residencies this summer getting our fully staged "Myceliad" show ready for 2026. A week in June in Craftsbury, Vermont. And a week in August in Trois Rivieres, Quebec, hosted by puppet company Les Sages Fous.

On July 13th, see us in a revival of our classic street show, "Three Graces."

We’ll be performing at Clark Institute of Arts' Community Day in Williamstown, MA

https://www.clarkart.edu/event/detail/2881-92426

Save the date for our next Spaghetti Dinner -- Spaghetti Karevan, co-hosted with Fihi Ma Fihi, on August 24th at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden on East 9th Street

And if you are in town check out the work of our colleagues and friends:

Puppets Come Home, a puppet slam for the whole family

June 24th, 12 - 2PM in Brooklyn Commons Park

https://www.instagram.com/p/DKlXPaUsRuH/

The Lunatic Fringe Society Orchestra -- Lily Pink and Allison Sniffin

June 21st and 22nd at the Westbeth Community Room

An intimate evening of animal songs for adult audiences

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Save the date. Spring Spaghetti Dinner

Great Small Works' Spring Spaghetti Dinner

"When We Are Among the Trees"
(with a tip of the hat to Mary Oliver - see below)

Puppet shows in the garden!
Featuring --

New work by
Jenny Romaine (GSW) and Keri Egilmez (Whirling Imaginarium)

with special song bird Luisa Muhr

"The Caged Bird's Escape"

And a collection of peep shows, lambe-lambe shows and other tiny gems:

Samantha Sing
“Keep Swimming”

Bark and Branch Theater
“Family Trees”

Stephen Kaplin
“On the Pulse of Morning” by Maya Angelou

Tom Cunningham, Boxcutter Collective
“Opinion Man”

Tom Tuke
"Oracle / Coracle"

Patrice Escandon
“Man in the Moon”

Erika MarLand
“Al Otro Lado”

Emmanuel Elpenord
“The Amazing Cosmo!”

Alicia Gerstein
"Cranky Town"

Kim Fraczek, Sane Energy Proect
“Turn the Crank, Shut it Down! From Toxic Past to Justice Found!”
About NYS largest fossil fuel facility in the heart of North Brooklyn

-- PLUS, TO CAP IT OFF --
Hearts of Steel Jouvert Pan Band!

Suggested donation: $20
Info: 917-319-8104

WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES
by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Great Small Works is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Additional thanks to: the Puppet Slam Network, the Scherman Foundation, and the Constance and Jarvis Doctorow Family Foundation.

Friday, April 4, 2025

Spaghetti Ramadan 2025 Resource Guide

As we take a pause from Spaghetti Ramadan this year, we express our spiritual solidarity with the following resource guide:

Spaghetti Ramadan 2025 Resource Guide

Nowruz & Ramadan Edition

Published by Fihi Ma Fihi Worlds

For the next 35 years, this has been the last Ramadan to fall during Nowruz. Let’s honor that convergence with depth, beauty, and clarity of direction. Spaghetti Ramadan has always been about weaving unlikely connection -- Muslim, Jewish and non-Muslim -- across ethnicities and generations, the spiritual and political, dinner and du’a.

This guide is an extension of that spirit. It’s a call to connect with people, places, and practices that nourish the soul and serve the world -- from sufi circles to Palestine organizing hubs, from healing spaces to gatherings that remind us we’re not alone.

🌍 Spiritual & Cultural Gathering Spaces

🕌 Jerrahi Dergah (Chelsea, NYC) Instagram @jerrahidergah Thursday night zikr gatherings, rooted in Ottoman Sufi tradition. Music, prayer, and loving presence. → A sanctuary of remembrance.

☕ Barzakh Café (Brooklyn) Instagram @barzakhcafe A spiritual-cultural community space with nightly programming: poetry, study, prayer, arts, and dialogue. → Heart-centered, creative, rooted in liberation.