The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium: Artist Panels + Book Talks

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.

Materials: A Journey from the Physical and Tangible to the Ephemeral and Sublime, a Review of the Ellen Van Volkenburg Symposium Panel 2

An Essay by Noemí Maldonado Cardenales

Partnerships in Puppetry:
How Manipulation Informs the Bond Between the Human and Material

An Essay by Cheyenne Bryant

The unique bond shared between a puppeteer and puppet can often inspire the most richly layered, imaginative, and deeply personal performances onstage. For those interested in exploring the magic of such generative companionships, this year’s Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival provides engaging perspectives from artists on the relationship between the human and material. 

Founded in 2015 by renowned puppeteer extraordinaire Blair Thomas, the Chicago Puppet Fest is an eleven-day celebration of puppetry’s finest achievements. The festival is brimming with activities, such as theater performances, artist workshops and intensives, and a symposium dedicated to puppetry’s interdisciplinary study. Whether you are deeply involved in puppetry or a novice with a burgeoning fascination, the symposium offers a brilliant opportunity to hear directly from authors and artists. Each year the festival adopts a theme central to its scholarship, and for its sixth edition, artists and academics theorize about the materiality of the puppet. Materiality refers to the tangible substances that make up a puppet, ranging from rudimentary materials like cardboard and paper to complex substances, such as thermoplastics and silk. Certain materials may evoke responses within us based on their fragility, unwieldiness, rarity, cultural significance, or spiritual capabilities. As such, even the most straightforward performances can be full of emotional resonance. With the nuance of materiality in mind, how may a puppeteer contemplate and prepare for their performances with puppets? Essentially, how does a puppet’s material construction create meaning and inform the puppeteer’s manipulation? The festival’s third artist panel as part of the Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium is specifically concerned with investigating the question of manipulation with internationally acclaimed artists Natacha Belova, Tita Iacobelli, Basil Twist, and Yael Rasooly, with translations by Ana Díaz Barriga. 

For those unfamiliar with puppetry arts, or like myself still new to the scene, approaching a two-hour academic discussion may seem daunting at first, but fear not: Each artist panel provides encouraging guidance into the more philosophical side of puppetry. The third one in particular offers a moving conversation on the dualities of human nature, experimenting with one’s inventiveness, engaging with trauma for artistic introspection, and the strength and humility of collaborating with peers—and most especially, one’s puppet. (The full panel is available for viewing on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPecahL4tZc.)

“What did the puppet need to do?”

This year’s symposium co-curator, panel moderator, and puppet scholar, Dr. Paulette Richards, opened the discussion with Natacha Belova and Tita Iacobelli of the Belgo-Chilean theater company, Belova ~ Iacobelli. Belova, a master of design and construction, and Iacobelli, an award-winning acting force, are the duo behind Chayka, an exciting piece at the festival and the company’s first joint production. Chayka is a loose sequel to The Seagull by Anton Chekhov that focuses on Arkadina, an older woman struggling with her son’s death, her lover’s abandonment, and a younger woman’s professional and social ascent. In their dreamlike rendition, Iacobelli performs onstage with the life-sized Chayka puppet, an aging actress whose memory is in decline. The play meditates on Chayka’s restlessness with her past and future, disappointments and solitude, and ultimately her aspirations for a fuller life. Dr. Richards frames the conversation with a question posed to all panelists: What did the puppet need to do?

With an extensive background in theater, costume design, and stage directing, Belova’s professional transition into puppetry arts was largely by chance—one of her early performances required a marionette puppet for each actor. At that time, Belova had only worked with humans—never having built actors before—and, as I’m sure all artists are familiar with, the feat of invention truly emerged during the chaos and madness of early production. Through intuitive improvisation, Belova developed her first puppet construction technique by screen-printing the actors’ faces on fabric and draping the “skin” onto foam molds. Gleefully, Belova told the audience she felt much like Dr. Frankenstein when creating the marionettes with their exaggerated facial features. And because the actors were not formally trained puppeteers and needed a simpler performing style, Belova designed the puppets with easy-to-use mouth articulation. 

The production of Chayka adopted a similar but evolved construction technique using Worbla, a thermoplastic resin material, instead of fabric for the foam molds’ skin. This method, however, did not include a moveable mouthpiece. Belova poured her energy into formulating an expression for the puppet that was distinct yet open enough for a spectator to humanize and imprint themselves onto it. The puppet, in turn, would behave much like a canvas for the audience’s emotional projections. Iacobelli, the puppeteer, described her initial encounter with the Chayka puppet, which was a mold of herself. In front of her eyes was a strange but familiar face that had not yet come into being: “When I first saw the puppet, it was quite frightening! I saw the faces of my grandmother, my mother, and myself as an older woman.” Iacobelli soon began crafting an identity for Chayka, but this task proved difficult. It was uncomfortable, surely eerie, for Iacobelli to confront an external extension of herself. And yet, puppetry demands a kind of vulnerability from us, a releasing of self-concealment. With serene wisdom, Iacobelli reveals puppetry’s inevitable reality: “You are the puppet…the puppet is always you.” 

As Chayka’s voice and gestures developed, the puppet’s spirit materialized into being. Rather than maintaining control, Iacobelli released her authority and became an assistant within the duality between herself and Chayka—the human and the puppet. In a poignant reimagining of Dr. Richard’s opening inquiry, Iacobelli reconsiders her positionality with Chayka. The question of What am I going to do with the puppet? evolved naturally into What is the puppet going to do with me? 

The Chayka puppet is made of thermoplastics and paint—materials we can touch and see. But what of the materials unseen? If puppeteers bring tactile substances to construction, wouldn’t they also, whether by intention or not, transfer their histories and memories into their puppets’ composition? What then would “life” be for a puppet ingrained with the selfhood of their puppeteer? As puppeteers develop techniques for manipulation, they must negotiate not only their puppet’s physical form but an internal spirit that transcends material tangibility. This is particularly true for both Iacobelli and Belova and how, when working with Chayka, thoughts of their late mothers arose. Chayka provided a reflection for the mothers the artists had never seen grow old. Instead of initial aggression, Iacobelli turned to compassion when handling Chayka, and an open trust developed between the two. A mutual, collaborative bond was born from a human’s willingness to listen to a puppet’s guidance. And, as is especially resonant for the next panelist, what magic occurs during construction between the puppet and puppeteer can manifest itself onstage. 

Internationally acclaimed artist, director, and third-generation puppeteer, Basil Twist, joined the conversation by discussing a lively, albeit at times turbulent, journey of his recent project with composer Huang Ruo, the Book of Mountains and Seas. The operatic epic, based on ancient Chinese mythologies, was created for the ARS NOVA Copenhagen vocal ensemble, and under Twist’s direction, the singers would also perform onstage as novice puppeteers. “No way, that will never work,” he said with humorous disbelief. “But when I did meet [the singers], they were actually pretty game for the process.” Twist described a collaborative construction where he worked closely with the enthusiastic ensemble, teaching them simple techniques, such as building limbs from cardboard and articulating the puppets’ legs. The artist spoke fondly about the group creating Kuafu, the largest and most figurative of the puppets, who in the early stages of development completely fell apart. To everyone involved, what could have been a production nightmare was an unplanned but deeply moving spark of genius. Kuafu’s eventual destruction became a central feature of the production’s performances, with the puppet’s assemblage and disassemblage occurring onstage. Being the mythical giant who chases the sun, Kuafu’s predetermined collapse creates a beautiful irony in the show: An enormous, domineering figure begins his life in front of our eyes only to return humbly into the earth, a life cycle that mirrors the fragility of our own.   

Twist improvised the remainder of the puppeteering, and similar to Belova’s production, slimmed down the design’s intricacies for the operatic singers, who unfortunately could not memorize the challenging music Huang had composed. “I knew it!” he said, with a laugh. Although the production underwent minor alterations throughout its run—such as hiring trained puppeteers and adapting the written script for Chinese viewers—the Book of Mountains and Seas still retained its original inventive character, and the material evolution of Kuafu was one such example. Beginning his life as a lightweight, cardboard rod puppet, Kuafu became a heavier, more robust creature made of driftwood, silk, and strings. Surely the materiality’s transformative nature added another dimension to the puppeteers’ relationship with Kuafu, for the puppet they performed with is as alive and dynamic as themselves. 

The panel’s final artist, Yael Rasooly, brought the conversation to a thoughtful close as she described her journey from an ambitious young artist wanting to leave Jerusalem to a celebrated singer-actress-puppeteer. As a working student, Rasooly, much like other aspiring puppeteers, found a creative solace in puppetry arts at the Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières, France. Where a more traditional path in drama and theater was challenging for Rasooly, she discovered a profound freedom in puppetry as an independent artist; in this art form, Rasooly could create works of her own at a self-determined pace—a true sign of strength for women artists like herself. When constructing pieces, Rasooly gained inspiration from paper, everyday objects, and her contemporaries’ work, such as Belova ~ Iacobelli’s Chayka. From her first show out of school to recent productions, Rasooly’s works have a wide diversity in design and intention, ranging from Bon Voyage, a surrealist paper-theater melodrama, to The House by The Lake, a somber musical cabaret about three young Jewish sisters who find safe refuge with their dolls while hiding during the Holocaust.

To Rasooly, these puppetry creations serve as more than just artistic expressions, rather they are acts of survival. One of the artist’s more emotionally striking pieces is a trilogy based on the sexual violence she endured throughout her life. In How Lovely, the first of three episodes, Rasooly performs as her younger self with a cello case turned transformation puppet—when opened, the case doubles as her loving parents, but when closed, a frightening image of her predator, the cello instructor, emerges. After touring How Lovely, Rasooly revisits the child’s story in Silence Makes Perfect, a show about the continuation of trauma and its eventual healing. After a years-long process of self-introspection, Rasooly debuted Burning Blue, the trilogy’s finale. A rod-and-glove puppet Edith Pilaf accompanies Rasooly onstage to provide a lighthearted comfort to an otherwise heartbreaking performance about the artist’s horrific kidnapping experience. While these performances can become quite heavy, Rasooly offers an empowering space for audience members to voice their own stories of abuse in aftershow talk-backs. In this sense, puppetry becomes a necessary outlet for bringing to light topics so often ushered into the dark. While Rasooly focused less on manipulation than her peers, she emphasized a crucial aspect of puppetry—community. Even during a tense recollection of her work, Rasooly generously dedicates a decent portion of her presentation to thank the puppeteers who’ve inspired her along this journey, as well as the audiences who embraced her and her puppets. Her story showed me that during the painful and exhausting times in life and work, in puppetry, there exists a community that will welcome such difficulty with an open mind and heart. 

As the conversation comes to a close, I feel a newfound appreciation for puppetry arts. These performances, no matter how small or impromptu, are layered with physical and emotional dimensions. When manipulating, puppeteers connect not only to a puppet’s materiality but also to the spirit inhabiting it. These partnerships can be challenging at first but ultimately are rewarding. And, as I’ve witnessed with today’s panel, the puppetry community, although niche, is thriving with new, encouraging possibilities. 

Building Visions: Puppet Artists Discuss Construction

An Essay by Mary Ahern