P is for puppets, and that’s good enough for me

Whether comforting or terrifying, chances are that everyone remembers puppets in their… Whether comforting or terrifying, chances are that everyone remembers puppets in their childhood. If it wasn’t through Saturday morning television, it was through ventriloquists at carnivals and birthday parties or giggle-inducing shadow puppets shown in elementary school. But in Pittsburgh, puppets are more than just child’s play. Avant-garde puppetry comes to the city for the 10th Annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival this month, and with more than 25 events, including performances, films, workshops and lectures, there is something for everyone, no matter what their puppeteering past. The Black Sheep Puppet Festival is the country’s longest festival for marionettes, shadow puppets and everything in between. Like puppets themselves, the world of puppetry festivals is a small one.’ Mike Cuccaro, the managing director of the Black Sheep Puppet Festival, and a group of his friends associated with the Brew House witnessed various puppet exhibitions across the country, and they were intrigued. ‘This is really different, we should try to do this in Pittsburgh,’ said Cuccaro. Even though the festival will include some hand and shadow puppets, the Black Sheep is known for combining and skewing many forms of puppetry in nontraditional ways. Several puppeteers will put on cantastoria puppet shows, a style of puppetry that drops the ‘fourth wall,’ a theatrical conceit that usually exists between the performers and audience. Additionally, toy theater puppetry, a puppet art form from the Victorian era in which immobile objects are attached to sticks and animated, will be big in this year’s festival. ‘We’ve never done this much,’ said Cuccaro. Along with the performances and lectures, two events are of particular interest. Handmade Puppet Dreams, a collection of puppet films put together by Heather Henson, the daughter of Jim Henson, will be shown from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Melwood Screening Room in North Oakland on Sunday, with the help of Pittsburgh Filmmakers. The 24-Hour Puppet Reality Experiment performance is a new venture at the festival, too. Taking place tonight from 7 to 10 at the Brew House, three teams of five puppeteers each perform shows that they created from scratch in the 24 hours beforehand. Now a decade old, the festival has gotten bigger each time around. This year brings local, national and international puppeteers to the South Side. Child’s play Puppeteer Laura Heit, who hails from Los Angeles, will display her uniquely named Matchbox Shows, which has puppets that fit into matchbox worlds and are attached with glue to matchsticks. ‘Each matchbox has its own story,’ said Heit. ‘I sort of dump out this can of puppet shows on a table and perform this variety show.’ Even though she’s been doing this cabaret Matchbox Show for nine years, Heit has been adding new shows to the lineup since. This year, she brings a Matchbox Show to the festival with a circus theme for kids. ‘All of the little acts are circus acts, and they all come out of a little matchbox train, a circus train.’ Heit does all the voices and sounds of the characters, and while the display is tiny, the performance is projected live onto a giant screen behind her. ‘I’m playing with scale. You see me on stage performing these little, tiny shows, but then you see my hands and the puppets huge behind me. My thumb can be 3 feet tall,’ she said. Beyond scale, Heit said that because she plays with small toys and puppets, it brings about a sense of play in the audience. ‘People feel like it’s very reminiscent of their childhood.’ Puppeteers’ strong sense of playfulness and a lack of acting grown-up is certainly part of the puppeting world. ‘I’ve been telling stories and building strange things and wearing different outfits and becoming other characters, and all the things that puppetry involves for as long as I can remember,’ said Beth Nixon, a professional puppeteer from Philadelphia who performs and holds workshops at the Black Sheep. But puppets are much more involved than fun and games. Tavia La Follette, a local performer and the founder and director of ArtUp, a nonprofit gallery/performance space in the Cultural District, presenting at the Black Sheep, discussed Bread and Puppet Theater, a political puppet troop from Vermont that gets its name from the tradition of one of the puppeteers from Germany making his own bread to serve to the audience after every show. ‘Puppetry has been commenting on society since the day it was born,’ said La Follette. But don’t let a dose of social criticism fool you ‘mdash; puppetry is meant to be fun. Puppeteers come to schools and the community to do workshops and shows to entertain and educate. Some local commercial puppet companies perform shows reminiscent of Lamb Chop or other childhood favorites. Do it yourself Puppetry also has its punk rock, starving artist side, too. ‘Puppetry is a terrific art form for being able to have a voice when you don’t have a lot of resources to fund that voice, and that’s how it’s been for thousands of years,’ said Cuccaro. But beyond trying to communicate a message,’ puppetry is an entirely different art in its own. ‘I use the term puppetry very loosely. It’s a lot of clowning and acting and storytelling and object manipulation,’ said Nixon. ‘It’s exciting because of its flexibility ‘mdash; it’s on the fringes of acceptable theater.’ Puppetry doesn’t require actors because there is no face. It’s a magical art because what it comes down to is animating an inanimate character or object. In that way, it’s also a cheap form of expression ‘mdash; all it takes to make a puppet is some cardboard, paint, funny voices and an imaginative mind. Nixon will deliver workshops at the festival on how to make materials for puppet shows. A lesson in history The ancient Greeks in 500 B.C. were the first people to play with puppets, possibly making puppetry an older art form than written drama. Puppets weren’t meant to be without political tensions, though. ‘ ‘You have someone who wants to protest against the king. They can’t hire messengers to send out a royal proclamation everywhere, but they can get some cloth and a stick and go stand in the market square and put on a little puppet show about how the taxes are unfair.’ So if taxes are too high, roads are too poor, or wars are too deadly, hither come the puppet shows. The king will laugh, but it doesn’t mean he’s not considering the concerns. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s taken seriously. If he’s laughing, at least he’s recognizing that it’s an issue. It’s brought out to the public, as opposed to it not being presented at all or pretending that nothing is wrong,’ said La Follette. When the king would become furious, though, the puppeteer did have a good excuse. ‘It’s also a way to deflect attention: ‘I wasn’t saying that, it was this character,” said Cuccaro. Punch and Judy, two characters from a puppet show who can be traced back to the 1600s, embody this form of political puppetry best. The show is about Punch, an insane character who tries to live his life with his wife and child, eventually defeating the devil himself. ‘It’s classic commentary on society,’ said La Follette. Yet, as puppetry has changed its shape, form and style in the thousands of years that it has been around, one theme of the performances never goes away. According to Mike Cuccaro, ‘It’s a great tool for the un-empowered and disenfranchised to have some power and to have some voice.’