ERMINIO PINQUE, Creature fabricator / performer and Director: BIG NAZO LAB, Instructor RISD

How to make fantastical puppets and masks with Erminio Pinque, Artistic Director at BIG NAZO LAB

Erminio Pinque is founder & director of BIG NAZO LAB, an audience-interactive, international performance troupe and creature-making studio based in Providence, RI, USA that employs a variety of mask, puppet, and wearable sculpture techniques to create mobile, visual spectacles of alien configurations in the “real” world.

Erminio and BIG NAZO artists have designed, constructed and animated original characters, props & costumes for countless stage productions, parades, TV projects, and festive extravaganzas throughout the US and overseas, stretching as far and wide as Singapore, Scotland, Indonesia, Portugal, Japan, Canada, Italy and Holland.

 Erminio is an instructor at the at Rhode Island School of Design’s Film/Animation/Video Department where he teaches the intensive six-week course “CREATURE-CREATION”.

Creature Adventures in the Real World

The real aliens are here, only they’re not actual beings from outerspace, they’re people who can imagine themselves  as something other than human. Digital fantasies satisfy the needs of the many, but for some, the ideas of the mind manifest in a corporeal forms: physical “creatures” on the streets of the real world. Erminio Pinque of BIG NAZO LAB will demonstrate aspects of his film/ performance/ and wearable costume-sculpture career, alternating between video samples and live performance while connecting the ways alternative street theatre, touring with a puppet-creature rock band, teaching alien character fabrication and independent video work are intertwined.  Emphasis will be made on how to achieve cinematic quality suspension of disbelief  outside of conventional  theatre, social media and entertainment viewing  outlets and impact real-world environments.