The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium

Listening to Puppeteers: Meditations on Puppetry

By Deniz Başar

The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium was part of the 2025 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and had four panels that spanned the two weekends of the festival. Many puppeteers who contributed to the festival came together with acclaimed puppetry scholars to discuss the craft and philosophy of puppetry. Named after Ellen Van Volkenburg, who coined the term “puppeteer” in 1912 in Chicago, the symposium gave the opportunity to discuss and document rare insights into the medium.  

On Saturday, January 18, the first panel presented was “The Puppet That Brings Us Together: Thoughts on Intercultural Puppetry Arts.” The first question put to the participants by Gabrielle Houle (University of Lethbridge, Canada) was about their most recent experience of creating intercultural puppetry. To this Peter Bakwill from Old Trout Puppet Workshop (also part of the Canadian Academy of Masks and Puppetry, University of Calgary, Canada) shared a short documentary, which was a 2024 Siminovitch Prize Finalist, about their work. Afterwards, Bakwill stated that he considers that “land is a culture” and explained how long hiking tours and camping trips in Alberta with their ensemble are the root of their practice and that the land itself, by proposing challenges, cultivates social environments for humans to “open ourselves to art and friendship.” Judd Palmer from the same company notes in the documentary that they “were philosophically communist at the beginning so [they] liked the idea of a bunch of lunatics creating a commune.” In the same line of thought, Bakwill described how they take new collaborators to mountain hikes and always get lost, which is a metaphor for the puppet show–making process because everyone needs to contribute to find their way out and that is also the case when it comes to making a puppet show. One of the running themes of all four panels was childhood experiences of puppeteers, which—like invisible rods or strings of destiny—brought them into the medium. Beginning this thread, Bakwill told us how he started at age twelve with a puppet of a monk and had a slightly out-of-body experience, noticing that “you are not in control of the puppet” and was fascinated by “having the adults in [his] hand as a child.” This made him aware of the power of the puppet. This little introduction to the running theme of childhood memories also brought forth another belief that is firmly rooted in the global puppetry community: that the puppet summons its puppeteer and that this metaphysical aspect of the medium creates a kinship of puppeteers because—as Bakwill puts it—“We recognize each other.”

Teresa Teng Teng Lam and Kevin Chio from Rolling Puppet Alternative Theatre, Macau, started by explaining that they studied in Prague and that Chinese people in Macau were influenced by Portuguese culture, as it was a colony of that country until 1999. They continued with a discussion of how they adapted famous Chinese short stories, beginning with “The Drug” (also translated as “Medicine”), which was based on a selection from Lu Xun’s collection Call to Arms (1922). They used a birdcage in this production to symbolize the rib cage of a child suffering from tuberculosis. Their adaptations from Chinese literature continued with works by Xiao An and Yan Lianke that deal with media censorship, for which they used many video techniques. Their next adaptation was from Fang Fang (“Strange Stories from Oriental Society”) for which they developed a dramaturgical structure designed to show a mixing of cultures in both past and present. When they worked on The Withered Wall and Object 15, both adaptations of various short stories and novels by Liu Yichang, the “beyond-sexuality” nature of the puppet enabled them to question the construction of gender. Similarly, they adapted the novel  The Day of  the Catastrophic Typhoon of 1874 by Inaciso Chan (by turning the title into Back to The Day of  the Catastrophic Typhoon of 1874) and poems by the Tang Dynasty–era writer Li Shangyin in a production titled 7 Doors. 

The gist of these adaptations and the crux of their practice is their position as artists who are “Chinese but not really Chinese,” explaining that they are the first Chinese puppetry group in Macau. They know how to speak as a minority in almost all of their encounters due to the changing of the border, which also makes them the last generation to have lived in both Portuguese and Chinese Macau. This is why they think that puppetry in particular can provoke critical thinking because the puppeteers can give very little to the audience, who patch together the bigger picture themselves and, by doing so, reveal many things about their cultural paradigms. 

Ty Defoe (writer, actor, interdisciplinary artist, Ojibwe and Oneida Nations) talked on behalf of All My Relations Collective, explaining how their practice is based in resisting colonial ways of telling stories, exploring fluidity, and understanding how to handle materiality. The interculturality Defoe emphasized was a broader one that went beyond human cultures through being rooted in North American Indigenous communities’ metaphysical/spiritual paradigms. Defoe defined puppetry as a medium to work towards a pluralist society for those two-legged and four-legged, the winged, and the rooted, which are the four categories of living forms on Earth in the North American Indigenous worldview. 

All My Relations Collective works on the principle that “Not one person knows everything, but together we know a lot.” When they were working on the show Skeleton Canoe, their practice acknowledged the frustration inherent in trying to get a consensus among all 25 participants, which was enactment of the philosophical stance of dismantling colonial legacies to actualize new ways of doing things and growing together. Significantly, Defoe talked about how decolonial knowledge passed through the materiality of making puppets, which in this case were the canoes used in the performance. The group used the Anishinaabe language throughout the process, which also meant working through that language together, for example by investigating how to say “computer” in Anishinaabe. Defoe stated that “Time is the biggest colonizer” and asked, “What is decolonial time?” Doing material and poetic justice to their practice and philosophy, Skeleton Canoe ends with giving back the material to the land after making the puppets and performing with them.  

Dr. Paulette Richards answered the question of how she frames intercultural practice by describing part of her research from Chapter 13 of her book, Object Performance in the Black Atlantic, which is titled  “African American Puppet Modernism: Alice Swann and the Wonderland Puppet Theatre.” The first Wonderland show was The Magic Onion, made by Nancy Schmale (a White woman) and Swann (a Black woman) for their small but influential puppet company established in 1961 during the time of segregation in the United States. Richards investigated the idea of interculturality as a form of social justice solidarity in this particular example.  

On Sunday, January 19, the second panel, “Humans and Objects,” took place. Moderated by Richards, the discussion started with the question “If you had an unlimited budget for actors and sets, would you be able to tell this story without the objects?” and continued with the question “What is the relationship between the puppeteer and puppet and character?” To the first question Gildwen Peronno, maker of I Killed the Monster, simply stated that objects are play partners not props for this show. Peronno explained how he used old toys and made a map of North America with the outline of a rope, and these abstractions allow him to stage things that are impossible to fit on a theatre stage. 

Pam Arciero, director of Aanika’s Elephants (for which Richards was a cultural consultant), explained her stance on this question through the difference between photography and painting. She suggested that using the idea of the thing instead of the thing itself works better for representing animals, which otherwise simply cannot be staged. She also noted that this is a memory play from protagonist Aanika’s point of view, and materiality, the line quality of the elephants, is suggesting that ephemeral element of memories. Arciero explained their process of using natural materials, noting that there were some branches used in the play which still had living items in it, such as insects, and argued that the material has an immediate effect on the performance.

Choiti Ghosh, creator of Maati Katha, explained that this wasn’t a small-budget production, so they could have employed actors if they wanted. However, they chose to use contemporary doll arts from West Bengal and clay as the base of the puppet stage to make the show instead. Ghosh claimed that clay has its own philosophy, underscoring the materiality of the story; therefore, they had to have dolls made from the clay found in the Sunderbans jungle to be able to tell a story based there. The materials used for the show were essential in order to play with the question of status, to play with the question of hierarchy, and to question who has power, when, and for how long. At its core Maati Katha was aimed at discussing identity. The team’s philosophical approach to the show was “The puppet is, therefore, I am,” which means the puppeteer exists because of the puppet. Ghosh continued by explaining that it is the dolls that bring the cultural, contextual information, but it is the clay—sourced each time from the city of that particular performance—that makes the story universal. It is the dolls that carry the culture, but it is the clay that localizes the play. Thirty percent of the play is told by the puppeteers, and the rest is played out on the table with clay and dolls. Throughout the play the dolls oscillate between puppet and object; they come to life and die again. 

The story of the play is based on the friendship between Durga and Salma, two fisherwomen. Salma is a Muslim name, and Durga is a Hindu goddess, so a friendship between these two is very important within the cultural context of the region. Ghosh notes that Sundarbans is a region where people of different faiths pray to the same gods at times. Durga and Salma in the context of the play are also clay dolls, who are put together with superglue during the performance, creating composite bodies. 

To better contextualize the show, Ghosh explained that the youngest age they perform for is twelve because younger audiences cannot follow the allegories in its second half and they find the length of the show challenging. After stating that her favorite audiences are people in community centers in India who have never watched live theatre, she said that she is looking forward to the July performance of the show in Sunderbans later this year. (The artists from Sunderbans who built the dolls saw the show, but in Bombay.) Ghosh contextualized Sunderbans as a people and geography that is influenced by what the rest of the world  does ecologically and climatically. She noted that a lot of the sustainable continuity of traditional arts were damaged because of cyclones. The forest, its water and earth, and the humans and animals inhabiting it are not separated in this culture, which is why in the performance they approached the puppet-puppeteer relationship in a similar way. 

In their original context the dolls used in the show were made for two  purposes—worship and child’s play—however, some were custom-made for the production. Ghosh noted that the crafting of such dolls has continued for “thousands of years unchanged in technique and material.” The making of many of these dolls has mostly stopped because they can’t compete with nonbreaking plastic toys. Ghosh added that these are traditional arts, but they are only manufactured when they are commissioned right now because it is a dying genre, although this is just one of thousands of doll types in Bengal.

When it was Alex Bird’s turn , he stated that unlimited resources are not a good thing for creative projects because creativity is shaped by obstacles, too. His play Concerned Others is about substance addiction and recovery in Scotland. He asked himself, “Should we even tell this story?” When the eventual “yes” to this question was answered in his heart, he took time to understand (by interviewing sixty-plus people one by one) the institutional routes of healing in Scotland, which he slowly discovered was difficult in multiple ways. The show aimed to speak to the national crisis active there. Dramaturgically speaking, Bird and his team decided to rely on  minimal materials to allow for maximum imaginative space. Bird noted that there is a lot of artistic material about substance abuse that attempts to shock its audiences, and they were very careful not to do that. Eventually they decided to work with paper and cards in miniature (including city streets). Bird explained that it was time-consuming to make due to the medium, which actually helped them with being more patient and careful. 

A week later, on Saturday, January 25, the third panel, “Notes on Sounds and Words,” took place, again moderated by Richards. Unterwasser Company from Italy—comprising Valeria Bianchi, Aurora Buzzetti, and Giulia De Canio—joined the panel to discuss their show Untold. Additionally, Paula Riquelme, who did the scenography and installation choreography for the show Organismo (thanks to her circus background), was there to discuss how she worked on the idea of her knitted designs coming alive as puppets, which is essential to the show. Andres Anavena, musician, DJ, music producer, percussionist, and multi-instrumentalist of Organismo along with the technical director Luka Gyoha were also there to discuss their process as well. Finally, Yael Rasooly, director, puppeteer, and singer, who created both The House by the Lake and Edith and Me; Anthony Michael Stokes, director and puppet designer of the musical The Scarecrow; and Lara Foot (from Baxter Theatre), co-creator of  the production Life & Times of Michael K (which was initially a Baxter Theatre and Handspring Puppet Company co-production) was there to discuss their processes. 

The main axis of the discussion was centered around the following questions: “Do the puppets speak in your show? Why or why not?”; “Do the puppets make sounds that are not speech? And what do those sounds add to their animation? (Including the sounds that the body of the puppet makes as a material)”; and finally “Is there music in your show? What does it add to the story? Would the same kind of music and soundscape be appropriate if you were telling this story with live actors but not puppets?”. 

The members of the Unterwasser Company answered these questions by stating that their puppets don’t speak and that they seek a puppet theater that can be understood worldwide. In their shows they rarely use words unless they think they are absolutely necessary, but they sometimes use made-up grumble sounds. In total, they aim for the rhythm and the sound to come together. Unterwasser takes music as a fundamental aspect of their shows, a major player contributing to scenography and puppet design, with the aim of everything working together in harmony. Unterwasser uses a methodology in which music and the soundspace are like one track scoring the performance, and they follow it as if they were dancing. They also note that “everything [they] don’t say with the words is said by the silences, music, images” and that it is impossible to imagine their shows with actors. 

Riquelme explains that in this show the puppets speak, but it’s really more like inarticulate sounds coming from holes in the scenography that makes them feel as if they were alive. Riquelme notes that she starts “with covering human faces because [she doesn’t] want the facial expressions to cloud the perception through a direct delivery of emotions,” to be able to bring forth another kind of meaning-making. Therefore, what the puppets say is not the primary objective but the soundscape they create, which also has roots in the fact that they are a multilinguistic company: Little sounds from all the languages spoken in the company combine to make up a new language for the show. Anavena adds to this by noting that a lot of the sounds are a capella and they pre-recorded them to be able to switch between music and sound, creating an effect of call and response. Riquelme continues by stating that she has always started by making playlists when working on a show, even though she didn’t know about the language of music. For his part Anavena didn’t know the language of puppetry, but they learned each other’s medium and cocreated their own language. So, Riquelme considers everything to begin with transmissions through music. She aims to create things that cannot be told through words, so trying to explain the work with words is also not adequate. Anavena used many different kinds of instruments, both Western and Indigenous, along with digital music and sound-making materials. Anavena states that in Organismo music sets the mood of the performance, but the performance sets the mood of the music. 

Rasooly explains that only in the last few years have her puppets started speaking, and The House by the Lake is in four languages. Rasooly likes experimenting with music to understand the characters, using the soundtrack as a generative tool of her dramaturgy. Having a history as a classical pianist and singer who ran away from that world, she also provides interesting insights about the work process of these two mediums. She claims that puppeteers have a lot of time for being lost and confused, while classical musicians don’t. Therefore, collaborations between these two mediums are particularly difficult, but the results can be amazing. Rasooly concludes that, in the intersection of music and puppetry, many inner worlds can be revealed because the medium has the potential to hold complexity in ways that are unique. 

Anthony Michael Stokes explains that in The Scarecrow, there are life-sized Bunraku puppets who speak. They speak about racism, justice, self-identity, fantasy, representation, and activism. Stokes knew that the words would be important to the theme and the puppet characters from the beginning. He moves on to explain how there is a specific duality in this show between the operators and the puppets that creates composite characters, so their transformations were marked linguistically, too. He also notes how the voice is a huge element of the piece. For example, when the Sawhorse comes to life—in a reference to the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz—a physical sound emerges from the straw that constitutes the puppet. Breath is hugely important in this show, being directly connected to George Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” and the Black Lives Matter movement. Stokes highlights the fact that lynching is an act of stopping people from breathing. Music was integral to the show, since it’s a musical, and Strokes created the songs for the show by rewriting ones that were in the public domain. Stokes notes that there is a section of the show in which no puppets are used. The rehearsal process of this section was based on the question: “What was the Scarecrow doing hanging in the field before Dorothy found him? Let’s use ourselves as the puppets as well and see how it works.” Eventually the team ended up using their own silhouettes as shadow puppets to perform this section of the show. 

For Life and Times of Michael K, Lara Foot explains the dynamic between heavily speaking puppets and their design and scenography. Foot continues by explaining that the puppets created by Adrian Kohler are very expressive because they interact with light during different moments of the show. Adapted from Nobel Prize–winner J. M. Coetzee’s book, the show follows Michael’s journey through a war-torn South Africa. Foot asks (and begins to answer) these very important questions much debated in the puppetry community: “How much text can a puppet hold? How long can a monologue be for instance? Twice in the show an actor breaks away from the puppet and expresses thoughts and feelings in a monologue. And all of the dialogue is played by the puppets.” In the show, puppets breathe, pant, and cry; water, wind, and footsteps are used as part of the soundscape. Background videos are used as part of the setting and atmosphere. “So there is the film score composition kind of work, where the soundscape is thought through in immense detail.” Foot indicates that, for the scene in which Michael K goes underwater, if it were to be staged with live actors, she wouldn’t have used the same soundscape since “it would have been too big and sentimental.” Foot concludes by noting that, when it comes to the creativity and interpretation of the puppet, the audience is essential. Michael K doesn’t change throughout the show but the music changes, so the audience interprets things differently in each scene as the story progresses.

On Sunday, January 26, the final panel took place under the title “The Image Aspect of the Puppet,” inspired by Claudia Orenstein’s 2024 book Reading the Puppet Stage: Reflections on the Dramaturgy of Performing Objects. Moderator Dr. Dassia N. Posner (Northwestern University) explained the gist of Orenstein’s book as an interrogation of how the movement design and the look of the puppet speak to each other to cocreate meaning in a puppet performance. In this panel Josh Rice (Kayfabe), Julian Crouch (Birdheart), and Frank Maugeri (The Cabinet) discuss their shows as they unpack the details of their practice. 

Josh Rice told the story of the making of Kayfabe as rooted in his lifelong fandom for professional wrestling. Another point of inspiration was Samuel Beckett’s mime play, Act Without Words, which introduces objects to the world of the character that are not friendly to him. Therefore, he was interested in a “Becketty exploration of this world” of professional wrestling and the surrealness of the audience aspect, where the audience knows that they are watching a fake performance (as the name of the show also immediately alludes to) but stays engaged anyway. The final result, according to Rice, was a show that became a bit “meta-autobiographical” because professional wrestling was a performance that Rice consumed particularly with the male members of his immediate family. He made use of this nostalgia, especially in moments when the  puppets talk about playing with wrestler action figures. 

There was a lot of new music composed for the show, underscoring the world of the performance. Rice calls their show “very Shakespearean” in the sense that it plays to the crowd by speaking directly to them. They also created puppeteer characters who are wrestlers with fully embodied personas and colorful outfits who then play with the tiny puppets, which creates duality (and perhaps underscores the genre’s absurdity). They also included fictional commercials in the show which nostalgically recalls the commercials that came on during professional wrestling matches. For example, there was a “pizza pie-zes” commercial, drawing on real-life “bagel bites,” or a commercial for the “Meatstick,” which is their version of a “Slim Jim.” Perhaps the most metatheatrically absurd of all was a commercial in which the puppeteer-wrestlers are selling action figures of themselves. The commitment to the meta-narrative aspects of the show was immense, including podcasters who analyzed the wrestling matches (which take place between the puppet and the puppeteers). Rice himself acted as the commentator, positioning himself like the gidayū (singer-narrator) in Bunraku. At the very end of the show, there is a part based on the kuruma ningyō style developed by Koryū Nishikawa V and Tom Lee, which is a form of puppetry where one puppeteer sits on a wheeled cart to operate an almost life-sized puppet (scaled as approximately two-thirds of an adult human). The entirety of the show heavily leans into audience participation for its meaning-making.  

Julian Crouch starts with a very inspiring explanation of his career stating that if he was in his twenties now he would probably have been diagnosed with something for low attention span because he never had a plan and because of that he could notice opportunities and go through the doors they open. That’s why—he reasons—he did so many things for so long without focusing on anything, therefore people who focused on things were always getting further than him in their chosen fields. But now being in his sixties, he concludes that someone now might call him “a Renaissance man” or polymath. After this introduction he showed pictures from some of his previous shows and gave insights to the audience about them. Crouch explained how he is interested in the rough and prone-to-failure elements of puppetry and gave the example of a time when he used paper and magnets to make his puppets, not listening to another puppeteer’s advice (possibly Tom Lee’s), which was to avoid working with magnets. This meant that they had puppets that “couldn’t survive the night,” which required them to stay engaged with the performance, as the inevitable moments of disaster opened up possibilities for improvisation. 

Crouch stated that he likes the “broken nature of puppets because, when they are more sophisticated, they lose something.” As a major addition to that train of thought, he also noted that he prefers working with non-puppeteers as well because “people who have done so much puppetry seem to say [to him], ‘See how invisible I am.’” I think this is an insightful comment on the kind of mastery that also draws attention to itself. Crouch also talks about the improv element in the design aspect of his puppets, which he defines as “designing something to be a found object.” Another very insightful comment about his practice that Crouch shared with the audience was sparked by his 1999 show Shockheaded Peter: A Junk Opera (inspired by Heinrich Hoffmann’s nineteenth-century children’s tales). In this puppet play there is a scene in which a boy who constantly sucks his thumbs has them cut off by the Scissor Man. Crouch explains the almost-universal reaction of the audiences to this scene as first an “Oh!” full of fear and shock, followed by laughter. The thumbs of the puppet were really cut out, and they flew away as red ribbons came out. According to Crouch, that’s when the audience is going like “That’s meant to be a boy, and those puppeteers are meant to be there.” It is a momentary Brechtian estrangement effect resulting from having been perceiving the puppets as humans throughout the performance, and such a moment breaks it to the audience that it is silly to project humanity and liveness onto an object. As Crouch concludes, “They were so invested in the puppet they felt the pain, and then they laughed at their own investment.” As a response to this powerful anecdote, Posner quoted Peter Schumann who said that “Puppetry is an anarchic art, subversive and untameable by its very nature.” Posner highlighted that messiness and spontaneity are actually at the core of the art form. Frank Maugeri also added that Shockheaded Peter changed the way he thinks about puppets, remembering the show as being very well-crafted, as opposed to the self-narrative of Crouch, who described the show as having bad sets and bad puppeteers. 

Maugeri, just like the first speaker on the  panel, Bakwill, also started with a childhood memory to find the roots of his investment in the medium of puppetry. Starting with comic books as essential reading/learning tools in childhood, Maugeri worked various jobs throughout his twenties, including doing night shifts at a care center for mentally ill adults. He met with puppet artist Blair Thomas (artistic director of the festival) and Redmoon Theater, when he wanted to turn from comics to puppets due to a fascination with their three-dimensionality. With Thomas, Maugeri found the right partner to explore absurdity with curiosity. He notes that he “didn’t feel alive most of [his] life but something happened in the act of puppeteering.” In his own practice Maugeri generally works with dancers because “they understand time and space very well” since the core question to his dramaturgical practice is “How do things move through time and space?” At the beginning of his practice, Maugeri was curious about the potentiality of scaring people with puppets and objects and decided to explore this question by putting it in dialogue with the aesthetics of German Expressionist cinema. This is why one of his first puppet shows was an adaptation of Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M. He adapted this crime story into a puppet show in which three men play with dolls. “It worked, people were upset and disturbed.” Maugeri then adapted the 1920 movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, reconsidering it as foreshadowing for the impending German occupation and tyranny. It was a very difficult show to make the first time, but—to his surprise—the second time was as difficult as the first. When they needed to make the same show with new sets for a bigger audience, Maugeri realized that they were not remounting a show but remaking one—and he had to get curious all over again. 

Oral narration and dialogue have a fluidity that written language cannot have, as I have explored methodologically as a puppet researcher documenting various puppetry cultures of Turkey through interviewing puppeteers. Listening to the diverse voices (rooted in diverse experiences) of puppeteers and puppet masters through the four panels of The Ellen Van Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium, I was once again reminded how important it is to come together as a small but prominent global artist and researcher community who “recognize each other.” As we come together, share experiences openheartedly, and listen intently, we not only contribute to the medium of puppetry, but we also learn the ways to shape our material worlds. I look forward to many symposia like this in the future, where the insights of playing with the material world can be shared with everyone, so curiously and delightfully.