Beech Tree Puppets was founded in spring of 2012 by Ingrid Cowan Hass and Ole Hass with the idea of bringing puppetry into the public schools. We opened our first show, an adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ The Crystal Ball, almost exactly one year later with seven performances at the Greenbelt Elementary School (GES) in May of 2013, reaching more than 500 students. Ingrid’s one-woman show, Butterfly Wonder, also came to life around that time, and she performed it at local nursery schools and the first grade of GES. Since then, we presented both shows dozens of times, have premiered a third, and are working on the fourth (The Hollow Stump) and fifth. We both hold Masters Degrees in Opera Performance from the North Carolina School of the Arts (Ole also a Doctor of Musical Arts from UMD in College Park). Since moving to the Washington DC area around the tide of the millennium, we have sung and played with many of the great performing institutions in classical music around here. With the arrival of our children Felix and Cecilia, we have become much more involved in education and performing for children. Our shows are inspired by the magical puppet shows at Acorn Hill Waldorf Kindergarten in Silver Spring, but also by our own performing experience. In crafting the puppets and stage, Ingrid draws on her visual arts expertise (she majored in studio art from Smith College) and her experience with wool and fabric, dyeing, spinning and felting her own wool.
