Adelka Polak / Sova Dance & Puppet Theater

Artistic Director Adelka Polak founded Sova Theater, a visual performing arts company based in CT & mainly serving schools, arts venues and community organizations in New England and NYC, including recent shows at Madison Square Park and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Adelka is a dancer, puppeteer, mask-performer and movement director whose work has brought her to Denmark, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. The company now offers small-scale “Arts On Call” lawn performances as well as virtual offerings including livestream performances, online workshops & professional development for educators & parents learning the values of the art of puppetry for nonverbal communication as well as literacy skills.

In an original theatrical production of “Ajijaak on Turtle Island” at the New Victory Theater Adelka worked with puppets from the Henson Creature Shop in a show led by artists Heather Henson, Jim Henson’s youngest daughter, and Grammy-Award winner Ty Defoe. She also worked with Squonk Opera who went “from junkyards to Broadway” and performed at Lincoln Center Outdoors and LaMama, E.T.C. with the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater of NYC. Ms. Polak was featured on CPTV’s “Spotlight on the Arts” with Masque Theatre & Larry Hunt in a segment nominated for a cultural Emmy in 2010 and produced by Ed Wierzbiecki.

She shares her knowledge of dance, puppetry and crossing artistic disciplines with audiences across the U.S. and abroad, especially in NYC, CT, and the Hartford Public Schools where she has worked with children to make over 1,000 frog puppets every year since 2016 through Hartford Performs. She also assists the Jim Henson Foundation & Wonderspark Puppets in Professional Development training for teachers, parents & teaching artists in the art of puppetry at the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC & now virtually as well. She has worked as a professional puppeteer now with a background in dance for nearly two decades, since she graduated from Chatham University with honors with a B.A. in Theatre and Cultural Studies in 2002. She often works with local musicians, artists and performers.