It’s the first rehearsal for act one, scene one of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Basil Twist is telling the frogs how high to hop (and when to “strike,” or leave the stage) and the winged fairies how to glide through the air with grace. A crew of 12 young puppeteers does its best to make the creatures respond.

Twist and his company have come to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., for two weeks of work to stage Ottorino Respighi’s 80-minute, three-act puppet opera “La bella dormente nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty in the Woods).”

By late May, when the production premieres in Charleston, S.C., at the Spoleto Festival USA, the stage will be filled with a seemingly effortless beauty. But building a world of fantasy requires dealing with numerous hard realities.

For the preview at MASS MoCA, the piece will still be a work-very-much-in-progress. Not all of the puppets are built yet, let alone costumed. Large chunks of Styrofoam suspended on strings have been filling in as substitutes. And the music will come from a recording. Eventually, the Gotham Chamber Opera will become part of the production, adding seven vocalists, a chorus of 20 and a 34-piece orchestra.

With a budget of nearly half a million dollars, “Sleeping Beauty” is the most ambitious undertaking thus far in the rapid rise of Basil Twist. Five years ago, at age 30, Twist created an underwater abstract treatment – “puppet show” seems hardly the right description – to Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique.” It was produced on a budget of $40,000 for a four-week run at Here, a small performance space in New York City’s SoHo district. The piece caused a sensation and played for 18 months. After a national tour, it returned to New York last year for an off-Broadway run of six months.

“Since I did that, the music world opened up to me,” says Twist. “People were excited about how I treated the music.” Since then it’s been one high-profile production after another for Twist, all involving puppets.

His “Petroushka” premiered at Lincoln Center in 2001 and also played at Jacob’s Pillow, as well as five other venues across the country. It caught the attention of conductor Neil Goran, director of the 4-year-old Gotham Chamber Opera.

“I thought it was one of the greatest evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,” says Goran. “It was unbelievably inventive in every possible way, one unexpected moment of genius after another.”

The biography of Basil Twist III says that he’s a third-generation puppeteer. But that implies something a little grander than reality.

“There’s many puppeteers who belong to dynasties. I don’t come from that kind of lineage,” says Twist, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

His mom was a part-time puppeteer who mostly entertained children “very kind of `Sesame Street’-style,” says Twist while his grandfather was a professional musician. “Puppets were a hobby of his and were part of his act sometimes,” Twist says.

Even if Twist doesn’t have the finest of puppetry pedigrees, the art form is certainly in his blood. His affinity for it showed up early on.

“I made all these `Star Wars’ puppets,” he says with a bit of hesitation and a shy toothy grin. Recalling his childhood in the 1970s, Twist says, “I made R2D2 out of L’eggs pantyhose containers.”

Twist arrived in New York City in the late 1980s but soon departed for France, where he spent three years at the International Institute of Puppetry in the rural town of Charleville.

“Charleville ends up being like North Adams,” says Twist, quietly laughing again as he sits in the cafe at MASS MoCA. “(It’s) out in the middle of nowhere, but there is this incredible thing happening there … this mecca for puppetry. People come from all over the world.”

The school’s broad curriculum gave Twist a fluency in the range of international puppetry styles and techniques. Today, when he mixes traditions within one piece, such as putting string puppets and hand puppets on stage at the same time, he’s called avant-garde. But Twist thinks of himself as something of a traditionalist.

“I’m real old-fashioned in that I like the puppeteer to be hidden,” he says. “When I was in France, and in most contemporary puppetry these days, like say `Avenue Q’ (a puppet musical that’s been playing on Broadway for 18 months) the puppeteer is visible on stage. It’s almost the definition of a modern puppet performance. I got so sick of that.”

Although Twist is clearly ready for the challenges of major productions, he still has the most fun making a new puppet in a few hours for an impromptu show. Most often over the years such productions have been in the company of New York City drag queens.

“There are not many puppeteers hanging out in that world,” says Twist, who has performed at many of Manhattan’s gay nightclubs as well as at the famous drag festival Wigstock. He even has immortalized as a puppet the Lady Bunny, Wigstock’s founder and host.

“We would do duets. The real Bunny and the puppet Bunny … the stupidest stuff, but when a puppet does it, people just die,” says Twist.

Becoming an opera director allows for less spontaneity.

“I used to do everything myself,” says Twist, “but once a show gets so big, I can’t possibly build everything myself. It is a struggle for me to let go and have others do the work.”

With “Sleeping Beauty,” Twist is getting plenty of practice at delegating.

“He’s very easy and very silly,” says Jessica Scott, a puppeteer in the current production. She also assists Twist at his studio in Manhattan’s West Village, where work on the current production will continue after the MASS MoCA residency.

“Something that characterizes Basil (is) the way he gets you to commit,” says Scott. “He’s consciously cultivated a community.”

Twist has been building his team ever since “Symphony Fantastique.” As an administrator at Here, Barbara Busackino commissioned that piece and has produced each of his subsequent projects.

“He is extremely controlling, extremely decisive, and he is wonderful because of that,” says Busackino. “If he says there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs, there will be a dance of 12 rose nymphs in the end. … You can get a team behind that and realize it. Of course there’s tons of experimentation and failures along the way.”

It’s not just other puppeteers who are getting behind Twist’s vision. Prestigious institutions also continue to seek him out. Lincoln Center has recently come on board for “Sleeping Beauty” and will present the production at its annual summer festival this year.

In the meantime, Twist is keeping busy creating more stage magic.

“I’m into spiders. That’s part of what sold me on this show,” he says. “I saw spiders (in the story) and was like, `Great!’”

Originally appeared in the Times Union, February 13, 2005.

Also available in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.

Albany artist Kevin Bruce is describing his feelings when in the midst of creating.

“You can spend a whole day painting and not eat and suddenly feel really faint and nauseous and dizzy and sick,” he says. “And you’ll still be like `Oh, I have to work on this more.’ And then you’ll force yourself to go and take care of your body. You really are just getting nutty. That’s how it’s always been with every painting I’ve ever done.”

The need to create might be a common denominator to the more than 70 artists who, like Bruce, will be exhibiting their work at Saturday’s Art on Lark. But if his work habits are typical of the artistic mentality, Bruce’s subject matter is unique – at least in Albany.

Through paintings, drawings and comic books, Bruce depicts what he knows well – mostly drag queens and other slices of gay life. More than an observer, Bruce is himself part of the local drag scene. His persona, named Patti Kettleton, is as colorful and fantastic as his visual art.

“His drag is art as well,” says a fellow Albany drag performer who wishes to be known only by his drag name, Frieda Munchon. “Once you see him talk or perform you realize there’s something there under all the paint.”

“I made a decision before I moved here that I wanted to pursue art at any cost,” says Bruce, 38, who came to Albany in 1998 after a year in Waterbury, Conn.

After being here about a year, Bruce began curating art shows in the modest gallery on the top floor of the Capital District Gay and Lesbian Community Council. It became his passageway into the local community, as well as into a new creative pursuit.

During his two-year tenure, each show was an opportunity to help other emerging artists, and each opening a platform for his emerging drag persona.

“That’s how I started doing drag, at the openings,” says Bruce. He recalls saying to himself, “I’m going to wear makeup and crazy hats, ’cause I’m the curator. … I’ll dress up for all the openings, and they’ll know I’m important cause I’m nutty-looking.”

It didn’t take long for Bruce to become part of the more traditional drag scene, which is centered at Albany bars like The Phoenix and Fuze Box. But he’s always looking for new and unexpected venues for his friendly style of performance.

About a year ago, for example, he led a monthly bingo night at the now defunct Mama Rosa’s Pasta Cafe on Albany’s Lark Street. But rather than call it “Bitch Bingom: as such events are known in New York City, he gave it the name “Queenie Bingo.” “People won’t want to eat there if there’s some evil drag queen cutting them to ribbons,” says Bruce.

Coming up with fresh outfits for Patti sometimes interferes with time for Bruce’s painting. But both pursuits emerge from the same source – the need to create.

“He can take a burlap bag and make it artistic and beautiful,” says Munchon, whose own getups benefit from Bruce’s imagination. “He made a dress out of Altoids ads, and it was amazing.”

Drag may be a world of fantasy and play, but in the mind of Kevin Bruce and the character of Patti Kettleton it is also an art of expansion and possibility.

“You can turn an event from everyone socializing and being quiet into people being willing to let their wilder side come out, because somebody (else) already did,” says Bruce. “I’ve taken the first step for them. Nobody is worried about being the biggest fool anymore – because I’m here!”

Big hair, ruby-red lips, black leather, rippling muscles and oversized angel wings populate Bruce’s paintings. His elongated forms are backed by brick walls, cyclone fences or abandoned docks: a potent mixture of dream figures and urban reality.

Bruce is well schooled in fantasy art. His former mentor is the widely known graphic artist Greg Hildebrandt, who is best known for the original “Star Wars” poster from the 1970s and a popular series of “Lord of the Rings” calendars published during the 1980s.

In the late 1980s, Bruce studied at the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J., where Hildebrandt was a faculty member. But Bruce actually came to know the older artist through Hildebrandt’s two daughters, Mary and Laura, who also were studying at the school. Bruce became a regular presence at the Hildebrandt household.

“His daughters would never get up until noon, so I had all these hours to discuss art with Greg, and we’d pore over art books,” says Bruce. “And he said (for example) `I suggest you look at Botticelli … to learn how to draw elegant hands.’ He (also) introduced me to art of Paul Cadmus, who’s one of my real heroes.” Cadmus, who died in 1999 at age 94, was known for his virtuosic figurative style and often homoerotic subject matter.

When Bruce was living in Waterbury about eight years later, he developed another student-teacher relationship with the late painter Jules Moison. Where Hildebrandt taught craft and professionalism, Moison passed on something more personal.

“He didn’t do the whole art-theory thing so much,” says Bruce. “His was more about what I could bring to art spiritually as a gay man.”

In Albany’s ever-changing grass-roots art scene, Bruce has become an old-timer.

“I’ve never been to an art opening where I’ve not seen him,” says painter and photographer Shaina Marron, who has made Patti Kettleton a subject of some of her own works. “He’s been around a long time and seen the changes … and the galleries that come and go.”

And the traditionalist leanings of Bruce’s painting style are not lost on his colleagues.

“Kevin is actually quite classical and does a great deal with highlighting and painstaking detail to make his paintings vibrant,” says Albany artist Stephen Mead. The two met several years ago when Mead’s work appeared in one of Bruce’s shows at the gay and lesbian center.

Most any weeknight, Bruce can be found in the center’s little coffee bar, or out on Lark Street chatting with friends. “I know everybody,” he says.

But not everybody may recognize him if they’ve only met the flamboyant Patti. On a normal day, he embodies an entirely different archetype — the nerd.

Large dusty glasses, drab T-shirts and slouchy jeans adorn a slight frame and pronounced belly: a sharp contrast to the colorful and shapely figures of Bruce’s painting. Yet his sparkling eyes and easy, hearty laughter, as well as the friends that often surround him, suggest there’s more beneath the surface.

“Kevin is a free spirit,” says Munchon. “He’s crazy, but that’s good. His outlook is different than anybody else’s.”

Bruce is also admired for his generosity. He regularly donates paintings to benefit auctions – seven sold at last fall’s “Art for AIDS” – and an illustration of his is on the cover of this year’s “Pride Guide” program for this month’s gay-pride events.

“Beyond his unique performance flair and sense of humor is a deeply serious and thoughtful man committed both to his art and to the betterment of his community,” says Mead.

Originally appeared in the Times Union, June 4, 2004.

Also appears in Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region.