Sova Dance & Puppet Theater

Sova Dance and Puppet Theater celebrates humanity and the environment by engaging audiences through workshops and live performances combining the moving body, puppetry, mask, video, dance, and artistic installations. The combined ingredients communicate that which cannot be described in words, and therefore are accessible to communities around the globe.

“Sova” means “owl” in Slovak and also refers to an asteroid belt named by a Czech astronomer.

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 recent performances 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.

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, 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 in Professional Development training for teachers at the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC through a grant from Next for Autism. She has worked as a professional puppeteer now for nearly two decades, since she graduated from Chatham University with honors with a B.A. in Theatre and Cultural Studies in 2002.