Pulling Strings: Hudson Valley Puppetry Renaissance

By Pauline Uchmanowicz

Puppetry, the art of making and manipulating puppets for use in theatrical shows, stretches back at least 4,000 years. According to puppetry scholar Keith Rawlings, string-operated figures and toys pulled by string were fabricated in Egypt as early as 2000 BCE. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that puppet shows have existed in almost all civilizations and in almost all periods. Indeed, many scholars believe that the form represents the most ancient style of theater, the origin of drama itself.
Local celebration artist and producer Jeanne Fleming traces puppetry to primitive ceremonial pageants and processions in which wearers of sacred masks invoked gods and goddesses, praised the seasons, or performed ritual magic. A medievalist by training, Fleming found that celebration art (e.g., festivals, parades, and pageants) connected communities of the Middle Ages under what she terms “a common sky of beliefs.” Among a group of artists who today devote their lives to creating public celebrations for our times, she is likewise at the center of a puppetry renaissance currently flourishing in the Hudson Valley.
Dozens of local puppeteers and apprentices are presently hard at work in studios and workshops designing and building giant puppets that will lead the 27th Annual Village Halloween Parade, to be held in New York City on the evening of Tuesday, October 31. The papier-mâché, complex rod creations with movable parts are carried and animated by nearly 1,000 volunteers. Fleming, who joined the parade staff nineteen years ago and is now its director and producer, characterizes the event as “the most open and creative in the county—there’s nothing like it.” Puppetry traditions from all over the world are showcased “because America is so diverse.” Meanwhile, she has witnessed the celebration escalate from 40,000 spectators to 40,000 performers and an audience of millions. This year, it also will be broadcast live on USA Network and the Sci-Fi channel.
Fleming’s credentials include producer of the 1986 Centennial of the Statue of Liberty, a three-day extravaganza that drew 12 million people—according to Fleming the largest public event in the world to date. “We invited all the great statues of the world to her birthday party and created giant puppets to represent them,” Fleming explains. “Each one arrived accompanied by native music, so we got involved in global traditions that have processional forms. Our recent work grew out of those discoveries.”
The “we” of Fleming’s oral history includes Superior Concept Monsters, official puppeteers of the Village Halloween Parade. The ensemble takes it name from an old sign that hangs on a puppet-making barn at Rokeby Farm, long-time estate of the Aldrich family located on the Hudson about two miles north of the Rhinecliff Bridge. The philosophy and spirit in which the Rokeby artists make their monsters, such as Giant Luna Moths or a 75-foot sand worm, extends beyond simple allegory. Rather, each creature reveals meaning through its own language of light and movement, open to thousands of interpretations independent of and “superior” to the concepts of its creators.
The high, ribbed ceiling of Superior Concept Monsters Barn gives the interior the look and feel of Noah’s ark. On a typical afternoon six workers scramble about the decks, serenaded by gypsy music. At the bow of the building, master puppet designer Alex Kahn wields a blow torch, forming rattan into monkey ribs as assistant puppet designer and technical director Sophia Michahelles lends a hand. In addition to marshalling the Village Parade in October, Kahn’s creations will open the Henson International Festival of Puppetry at New York’s Public Theater on September 6 and 7.
“To us, Halloween is about ancient traditions—carnaval, masquerade, harvest—rituals of transformation,” Kahn states, describing the process whereby SCM creates the theme of the Village Parade each year. Schooled as a painter and sculptor, Kahn became interested in ritual art when a top prize earned at Harvard allowed him to travel to Nepal. There he studied Buddhist thangka (spirit paintings) and processional art, which he defines as performance that happens in stages, with puppet theater being a natural for the form.
In choosing this year’s theme of “Evolution: Body, Mind, Spirit,” Kahn and Michahelles claim to have channeled a creative zeitgeist. Their resulting puppet show will pay tribute to the science fiction canon and to what Michahelles calls our “collective mythologies” about prehistory, history, and posthistory. Flipping through a Leonardo da Vinci-like sketchbook to narrate, the puppeteers divide their pageant into the three stages—mirroring the structure of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Parade goers can expect to see Cro-Magnon man tossing an eight-foot bone, followed by astronauts rotating in a Ferris wheel-size space station, with ET look-alike star children bringing up the rear as they slowly rise out of pod mothers and soar two stories above the crowd. Kahn says, “It’s the metaphysical journey of the same entity passing through various states and arriving at what Robert Graves calls ‘the golden age,’ or what Buddhists call ‘nirvana’.”
Across the river from Rokeby, master puppeteer Amy Trompetter, a director, scenographer, and Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Barnard College/Columbia University, heads up puppet building crews at Blackbird Theater, her newly formed workshop on Main Street, Rosendale. Trompetter’s connection to the Halloween Parade initially followed her work on the Statue of Liberty’s birthday party, which Fleming hired her to design and direct. For the first time this year, Trompetter is designing a parade segment, for which she plans to refurbish giant puppets she recently moved from Maine to Rosendale. Originally Greek centaurs, the puppets will undergo “a sex-change operation” and become pod mothers, with midwives accompanying them in the final movement of the SCM procession titled “Ubu Apocalypse.”
“What attracted me to the art form is the convergence of sculpture, acting, playwriting, dance, painting, movement. It’s a great canvas to work on, this puppetry,” Trompetter enthuses. She worked for twenty-five years with Bread and Puppet Theater and also led communities in making large outdoor pageants in Italy, Nicaragua, Japan, Botswana, and other countries. “I’ve done theater with people who don’t normally do theater all over the world because the language of puppetry is so very accessible. It’s possible to do these large street performances in a place like Rosendale.”
Trompetter maintains that puppet-and-mask theater descends from a global, historical tradition of spiritual healing. Despite the realism-based world of American theater today, puppetry is being re-explored in places like Blackbird, where Trompetter plans to experiment with the Rosendale community to uncover what stories need to be told and how.
A similar goal motivates JOY Presenters, a group of local artists that includes actor Greta Baker, author/illustrator/calligrapher Barbara Bash, Jeanne Fleming, and veteran mask-maker and director Shelley Wyant. The foursome’s current project is Tree Tales, a mythic adventure with music, masks, and giant puppets that will unfold in sculptor Harvey Fite’s bluestone earthware at Opus 40 in Saugerties, October 6 through 9. At director Wyant’s home in Stone Ridge, she and Bash discussed the roots of JOY Presenters and its latest theatrical undertaking.
For the past twenty years, Wyant, currently a professor at Bard, has taught mask work at major American colleges and universities, including Smith, NYU, Brown, University of Iowa, and Yale. In the early 90s, she saw one of Baker’s Noh Theater productions. Inspired by the work and by the fact that Baker is one of the few women in the world to hold a certificate in Noh, an old Japanese form, Wyant began performing in plays, all of which involved masks or puppets. She has since directed and produced Hudson Valley performances at Oddfellows Theatre, Byrdcliff, Holy Cross Church of Kingston, Performing Arts of Woodstock, Widow Jane’s Cave and elsewhere.
“Puppets are a major part of my work,” Wyant explains. “When you put on a mask you enter another world—a fantasy. Mask work can take you so many different places.” As Jack Tresidder writes in Dictionary of Symbols, the mask suggests transformation, protection, identification, or disguise—all emblems informing Tree Tales.
The idea for the performance stems from books by Bash, whose tree tale titles for children include Tree of Life: The World of the African Baobab and In the Heart of the Village: The World of the Indian Banyon Tree. The author explains, “I explore the tree as a sacred space. In terms of an eco-system, it provides for many inter-relationships.” Bash also brings to Tree Tales her background in calligraphic performance, working with brush and ink “on the spot” on stage to bring a story to life.
In creating the drama for Tree Tales, Bash moved from her books to scripting a lyrical poem contained in “nine beats.” The mask makers, puppeteers, and actors—many of them students of Wyant’s from Bard—will improvise around the nine beats to create a three-part script. “They’ll have the opportunity to go into fantastic animal forms and exaggerate, keeping them exalted,” director Wyant explains. Meanwhile, the setting of Tree Tales shifts between the primordial underworld and the upper world of reality.
Like Leo Marx’s investigation of nineteenth-century pastoral literature in The Machine in the Garden, JOY Presenters’ exploration of mythic landscapes in Tree Tales questions the displacement of the natural, perhaps idyllic landscape in the terrain of industrial wealth and power. Puppetry seems suited to such quests, as evidenced by the Hudson River Valley based Arm-of-the-Sea Theater, a puppet company “working on behalf of the entire biotic community.” In recent productions, such as Parable of the Great Fish and the currently touring Rip Van Winkle and the River of Time, writer Patrick Wadden and artist director Marlena Marallo indite forces threatening our environmental and evolutionary experiences. As pageant-size puppets who attended the recent WTO protests in Seattle and the Biodevastation 2000 march on Boston testify, puppetry has political as well as celebratory uses.
In film director Spike Jonze’s 1999 cult send-up Being John Malkovich, a failed puppeteer rises to stardom by temporarily inhabiting the actor’s body. Asked, “Why do you love puppeteering?” he replies, “The idea of becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another skin. Thinking differently. Feeling differently.”
Thanks in part to a Dutchess County Arts Council grant, no-experience-necessary volunteers may also try on the role of puppeteer at upcoming workdays at Rokeby Farm and Blackbird Theater.
Volunteers, who will be trained and fêted, can help construct the pageant-size puppets for the Village Halloween Parade and participate in other major puppet-building projects in the Hudson Valley. Rewards for participation in workdays include a chance to manipulate puppets in the parade; a performance and backstage tour of Symphonie Fantastique, an underwater puppet show at Bard College directed by world renowned puppet master Basil Twist; and attendance at Tree Tales. Workdays at Rokeby Farm—Superior Concept Monsters Barn in Barrytown, New York run every weekend from September 1 through October 13. To sign up or for more information, contact Jeanne Fleming at 758-5519 or visit www.halloween-nyc.com.
A workday at Blackbird Theater, Main Street Rosendale is scheduled for September 2, with a trial parade along Rondout Creek canal to be held on September 3. To sign up or for more information, contact Jeanne Kelly at
334-8818.