Adelka Polak

founder and artistic director

Adelka Polak, founder of Sova Dance & Puppet Theater, based in CT & mainly serving schools, arts venues and community organizations in New England and NYC, including performances at Madison Square Park and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. In 2023 we had our first tour that included Wolf Trap Children’s-Theatre-in-the-Woods, the Ballard Institute & Museum of Puppetry, and the Puppet Showplace Theater! Adelka is a dancer, puppeteer, mask-performer and movement director whose work has brought her to Denmark, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Scotland and Turkey.

In an original theatrical production of "Ajijaak on Turtle Island” at the New Victory Theater she 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. She has worked with children across CT & the east coast building over 10,000 puppets with participants over the years. She also teaches with Z. Briggs and the Jim Henson Foundation in order to train educators, therapists and special education professionals how to use puppetry effectively in the classroom. She has worked as a professional puppeteer now for two decades, since she graduated from Chatham University with honors with a B.A. in Theatre and Cultural Studies in 2002.

Kendra Garnett

Company Performer & Puppeteer

Kendra Garnett is a CCSU BFA Theatre Performance graduate with a passion for acting and dance .

She has appeared in many productions such as Sweeney Todd as The Beggar Woman, Mother Courage and Her Children as Mother Courage, Kimberly Akimbo as Debra and more.

She also had the pleasure of performing in the one woman show, The Shape of a Girl as Braidie in The New York City Fringe Festival in 2018 and also at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. Kendra is excited to be jump starting her grad life with such fun and influential work like that of Sova Dance and Puppet Theatre and can’t wait to see what this further exploration of the art form does for her future in the theatre companies she works with.