Materiality in Movement: A Review of Exhibits and Panels at the 2024 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival

An Essay by Felicia Cooper

Potential energy is the stored energy in any object or system by virtue of its position or arrangement of parts. Kinetic energy is the energy of an object or a system’s particles in motion. If you allow for a slightly more poetic interpretation, in the art form of puppetry, we witness potential energy enacted and kinetic energy expanded. We may be drawn to puppetry as an art form for many reasons: whimsy, nostalgia, or the sheer act of coming together. I witnessed all of these at length at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. Taking place during January 2024 in venues throughout the city, it was a veritable feast of puppet performances, displays, and perspectives. 

Notably, following the ovation after almost every performance, audience members were invited to interact with and view the puppets more closely. For instance, after Papermoon Puppet Theatre’s Bucket of Beetles, a pair of siblings in the audience, who during the show had taken turns being afraid and comforting each other, sprinted towards the set with glee and greeted the puppets expectantly. The agile puppeteer quickly animated the bug but made eye contact with the children. This acknowledgment of the presence of the performer within a momentary suspension of disbelief allowed all parties involved to pretend together while remembering reality, a careful balancing of potential and kinetic energies. 

Seeing a puppet without the context of performance naturally leads to curiosity about materials, design, and fabrication methodology. Many of the mechanisms and materials were on full display and in plain sight, which gave way to a fascinating dichotomy: the ephemeral nature of performance and the stable reality of the puppets themselves. Our human understanding is that of concrete, real, nonliving entities, which have nonetheless expressed something meaningful to an audience. We have witnessed objects enact a story, an emotion, and yet in stillness, they are  simply well-constructed assemblages of materials and mechanisms. This potential energy is what draws us to the objects themselves—a sort of emotional potential energy, as well as aesthetic and artistic energy, only truly witnessed in kinetic performance. 

The festival also offered panel discussions from select artists to talk about their process of design. Moderated by Dr. Paulette Richards, the first of these panels focused on mechanisms, with artist Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins of the show The Hip Hopera of SP1N0K10, Matt Gawryk and Dan Kerr-Hobert of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas, and Michael Vogel of Spleen. Dr. Richards asked the panelists questions of both practical and existential nature, noting that a beautiful puppet is one that moves well, enacting its potential energy. Several themes emerged. 

Initially, the consideration of movement as a catalyst for mechanism began the conversation about process in puppet design. Gawryk named “the movement in the story” as a driving force, while his collaborator, Kerr-Hobert, spoke of the constraints of construction as being crucial to the design process. In their show, a clear focus on mechanism as expression persists throughout the performance. The primary materials include paper and laser-cut wood, all with a sense of unfolding and discovery. In this careful mechanical manipulation, the audience is held at a distance. The delicate and small work is filmed and projected simultaneously. While there is not a visible main character, each moment of movement reveals a new facet of the travelogue they tell. 

Pipkins noted that he doesn’t sketch but prefers to make puppets extemporaneously, guided by material limitations and inspired by movement as well as attention to “channeling the ancestors.” In the majority of his work, the materials which make the puppet are plainly visible: PVC pipes, wood scraps, fishing line, and more. His puppets exhibit a dynamic relationship with gravity, which comes from what Pipkins calls “millions of mistakes.” 

In Vogel’s marionettes, reminiscent of Albrecht Roser’s, there is perhaps the clearest representation of character. Vogel spoke of the limitations and conflicts that occur with material reality in contrast to his imagination. The visibility of puppets and their limitations in physical movement are a tension in his work, as the expression he desires is not visually possible. He spoke about his preference for potential energy and expressivity, that which exists in the imagination and is not possible with the physics of Earth. Another limitation is the uniqueness of each puppet. It is not often that puppets are made in duplicate, and yet the cycle of performance, storage, and travel can be demanding. Foam wears away, paint chips, even wood can crack and split. In discussion, it was noted that the biography of an object can employ multiple changes of status, resurrected from waste to necessity in art and articulation. To witness these puppets carefully and closely is to understand their connection to potential energy. The materiality is evident.

As the panel reflected on the use of the classic six simple machines (inclined plane, wedge, screw, lever, pulley, and wheel-and-axle) in their work, they spoke highly of levers, pulleys, and of the trial-and-error processes inherent to puppet-making. In the design process for a kinetic object in which form and function are often equally weighted, there is a necessarily iterative process. Ideally, this struggle is a delight in discovery. 

A few floors below the panel discussion in the Fine Arts Building, there were several exhibits on display. One, “The Beasts Wait Inside,” was an elegant presentation of the puppets from The Beasts Dance performance. In the puppets built by Jacqueline Serafin and Iker Vincente, the assemblage of objects makes apparent their source: Accordions create ribcages, leather is evident, and a cascade of crocheted yarn allows for traces of movement even in stillness. In the symposium panel on materials, Serafin and Vincente identified the importance of craft, noting that their connections to leatherwork, carpentry, and even crochet were inherited and passed down from hand to hand. This happenstance of heritage informs each artistic endeavor. They further noted that Mayan cultural relationships to the use of things is one of honor and respect for the process of life. Things die, and they may be used in new ways. 

Finally, the exhibit “The Materiality of the Puppet” exhibited puppets in progress, including the initial sketches which came to be the show Bucket of Beetles. Papermoon built the puppets based on the drawings of director Maria “Ria” Tri Sulistyani’s then-four-year-old son, during the lockdown period of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Without the typical resources available, they looked to the natural materials in the jungle surrounding them. The original versions of these puppets were created from sticks, leaves, and other materials. Also notable were sketches from Alex & Olmstead, articulated cut foam from Federico Restropo’s Lunch with Sonia, and a diagram of a tentacle mechanism and prototype puppets for Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster from Mo Willems and Manual Cinema. We feel the potential of the material in the objects on display. Nearby was a collection of simple hand puppets, and I witnessed families playing with them joyfully—and kinetically! 

It is too easy for us to view puppets as mere objects made of wood, foam, fabric, glue, etc. It is too simplistic for us to write them off as well-articulated dolls. Witnessing this materiality up close, both in the design process and in practice, allowed the reality of puppets outside of performance to continue to hold the specificity, care, and repeated experimentation with form that creates their magic.

In all of this, the idea that “everything can be alive” ran throughout the festival, almost to the point of being murmured in the elevator of the Fine Arts Building by those attending. The agency bestowed by our perception goes far beyond performance, extending into the potentiality of all materials. By decentering human life as the only version of experience, we are able to examine new realities and explore the relationships between human consciousness and the material world. The act of watching puppetry enacted and examining the materials involved in the creation of a performance asks an audience to think through this potential and live inside the worlds it creates. We can recognize what a panelist called “an implicit gift of trust” in the triangulation between a puppeteer, a puppet, and an audience. Here, in the collective trust and implied imagination, anything is possible, and we remember that life is made up of energy on an atomic level.