We've learned to count on the Walker Art Center to bring some of the freshest, edgiest performance troupes in the world to the Twin Cities, from venerable modern masters like choreographer Merce Cunningham and Japanese  dance legend Kazuo Ohno to young companies that fuse theater, dance, video, and installation art in unpredictable ways.

Tomorrow night (January 6), the WAC inaugurates its 2011 Out There series, an annual showcase for eclectic, genre-bending and -blending stage performance, with Show Your Face!, a decidedly grown-up puppet drama. It's a collaboration between Betontanc, a theater group from the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, and Latvian object-theater creators and puppeteers Umka.lv, and it tells the story of an empty suit--an empty little white snowsuit that makes its way through the calamitous twentieth century.

The Slovene pop-electronica band Silence accompanies the little puppet-Everyman's dark journey. Post-communist black humor, on stage in the Walker's spooky-gothic McGuire Theater. (The show runs through January 8.)

Besides leading off Out There, Show Your Face! is the second show in another Walker series, Adventures in New Puppetry, which kicked off back in October with the Canadian troupe Kidd Pivot in a performance that fused theater, dance, and a single puppet.

Next up in the New Puppetry series is a series of short pieces called Toy Theater After Dark, debuting March 10. Following Betontanc in the Out There series, on January 13, will be the German-British troupe Gob Squad, with Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good), a feverish take on the Andy Warhol world, "updated for the reality-TV generation."