A mystifying thing happens each autumn in the city of Hartford. As the sun begins to set, some night in early October, hundreds gather their lawn chairs and picnic blankets. An encampment of food trucks and merchandise tents cradles the crowd on one side, and on the other, a stage pops up–complete with two elevated scaffolds housing lighting equipment, and a large, tented white dome.

This is the setting for Ann Cubberly’s Night Fall an artistic, colorful performance that has been occurring somewhat secretly in Hartford since 2012. One park in the city–a different park each year–is chosen to host what is most conveniently described as a stage play, where performers dressed as a troupe of forest animals carry out a fun, spirited narrative with little-to-no dialogue at all. The main draw of Night Fall, however, are the puppets; giant marionettes, around 3-4 times the size of a person, controlled from within by a puppeteer (occasionally aided by two external puppeteers, depending on the size of the puppet). The puppets are all personally designed by Ann Cubberly and, much like the rest of the show, are created with the aid of some very generous volunteers (this year including our own writer, Kim). Even if you haven’t been to Night Fall, you may have seen these puppets before; they have a tendency to pop up at other events in Hartford. My own first introduction to the cast of Night Fall was when I met three giant dancing monkey puppets at the Knox Urban Greenhouse party; an event we’ve covered on this blog previously.

This year’s Night Fall was hosted in the heart of downtown at Bushnell Park; and was appropriately the largest Night Fall I have seen thus far, with a crowd that seemed to stretch from Asylum Street almost all the way up the hill toward the gold-domed Capitol building. The performance itself featured many of the cast we’ve become familiar with at this point–squirrels, beavers, badgers, bugs, foxes, and of course our beloved monkeys–with some surprising new additions. Two puppets waltzed together with a surprising amount of grace for their size (a testament to the performers manning them and the design that kept them light enough to do so, I can only assume), and Studio 860, the local dance studio, put on a brilliantly-choreographed hip-hop dance display. All-in-all, it was a wonderful show that I was overjoyed to return to.