Feisty Elephant, Pam Arciero Productions, and Little Shadow Productions: Aanika’s Elephants

Little Joys and Winter Elephants in Chicago

An Essay by Felicia Cooper

In the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, a herd of elephants, crafted from spare, naturally toned rattan, take the stage in midwinter 2025. We, the audience, are transported to the Kenyan bush, where our guide is a cheerful and openhearted narrator named Aanika. Aanika performs as though telling a story to an older, slightly judgmental companion, whom she occasionally embodies to voice questions and opinions that move the story along. Jimmica Collins plays Aanika as a young girl and as an adult. She also plays an eight-year-old African-American girl who comments on the story—usually with disgust.

Through the course of the story, Aanika narrates about the time she took care of the elephants at the sanctuary where her father worked, connecting to one particularly vulnerable elephant whom she names “Little.” For the duration of the performance, we join Aanika’s world under her guidance, witnessing her memories and taking on her perspectives. We feel her fear and joy and share her hopes. Adult humans onstage are represented by simple accessories like a hat and gloves, manipulated by a puppeteer. Her father, depicted as a wide-brimmed hat and work gloves, teaches her to survive in the Kenyan bush but dies unexpectedly. Aanika’s remaining family is her father’s brother, who is rumored to be a gambler and is represented by a fedora and a snake. If the adults in the audience fill in the blanks, he also appears to be someone who is not to be trusted around young women. Aanika quickly escapes her uncle’s home, where she is expected to serve him. For the rest of the performance, she and Little survive together in the bush. Annie Evans’s script is nimble and straightforward, which creates space for connection with the main character and her world. The performance was underscored by hand drums and percussion, elevating moments of joy, tension, celebration, and relief.

All the performers, aside from the actress playing Aanika, wore black, including hoods and gloves concealing their faces and hands. The elephants themselves were made of light rattan, creating gestural lines indicating  the shape of elephants but with space in between. These minimalist forms had the effect of a sketch come to life. In an interview, the designer, Marty Robinson, stated that, “Puppets are best in my opinion when they’re highly stylized…and aren’t  trying to re-create nature.” He speaks of the puppets being inspired by Pablo Picasso’s line drawings of bulls. In the same interview, he mentions being particularly moved by the lines of material within the internal structural of the Mr. Snuffleupagus (or Snuffy for short) puppet that he observed over many years of playing the famous large pachyderm Muppet on Sesame Street (Deffinbaugh, 2023: 13:00-15:15). The patterns created by this internal structure inspired the design of these puppets. 

The puppets, directed by Pam Arceiro, moved with great precision and grace and seemed to engage with physical laws that would affect actual elephants: Their presence was large, but their movements were light. This puppet manipulation style allowed the audience a view into Aanika’s relationship with the elephants themselves, which was one of great care as well as playfulness. Using the design and movement of the puppets was an understated and well-crafted way to illustrate this multilayered relationship, framing the elephants as both elegant and imposing. Also worth noting is that none of the elephants were fully realized on the stage—that is, no single elephant had all the elements to create a full form. Each animal represented onstage had a combination of ears, trunk, and face, and some had front legs or a tail, but no single elephant had an entire cohesive body with the exception of Little, Aanika’s plucky primary companion. 

The spareness of image created space for the puppet to act as an emotional landscape and allowed the audience to center the inner journey of this performance. In the puppet’s movement, the audience has the opportunity to engage with its actions not physically but psychologically. We connect the physical movement of the puppet with its inner emotions and fill in the blanks as viewers. In this direct involvement with the creation of the internal image, we become part of the story, which reinforces the first-person narration’s relatability. We were not only listening intently but also intently imagining, all the while connecting with our narrator. There were also times where the elephant puppets seemed to emote directly to the audience, pointing out a dangerous situation or joke without Aanika seeing it. The audience, and in particular, the adults in the audience, connect with this subtle commentary and enjoy Aanika’s naivety and antics. The puppets continue to establish the world of the play with a sly nod and a knowing look, despite not having pupils, eyebrows, or eyelids.

When witnessing a puppet show, we understand and take part in the tension between the life of an object and its theatrical life onstage. This performance made excellent use of this tension, embracing the material reality of the sculpture in its movement and expressiveness. Puppeteer Eric Bass expands upon this dynamic between what an object is or how it appears and what it does:

The relation between the physical and the visual is just this: the dramatic visual image, sustaining a special tension, contains the need for an object (or puppet or human) to physically move. Such an image seems to demand that the actors, puppets, or objects fulfill a task in which their identity is at stake. They contain a need to transform: the need to achieve balance, for example, or to hold themselves together or to transcend the material of their creation (Bass, 2014: 105).

Bass’s observations proved especially true in witnessing a section of the performance where Aanika and Little, deep in the bush, encounter several animals. The lion, the antelope, the monkey, and other creatures walk down a runway onstage, encouraging interaction and connection with the audience. The world of the play extended into the audience, to the delight of the children and families in attendance. Still, the emotional framing of this performance prevailed, and even in celebration, we felt with Aanika. 

The performance centered Aanika’s empathy for elephants and allowed us space to experience empathy for her, while celebrating her ability to survive when caring for others. With support from the Jim Henson Foundation, the Center for Puppetry Arts, and a host of acclaimed puppeteers working in American children’s television, Aanika’s Elephants is a shining example of what well-resourced puppetry for family audiences can achieve.