Puppets of one form or another have probably been around for as long as people have. Exactly when we had the notion to use an inanimate object to represent something living is unknown, but puppet theatre was known in the time of Aristotle and Plato.
Recently, puppets were the focus of a gathering of artists at North Battleford's Chapel Gallery and the craft room of the Don Ross Centre.
The goal of Saskatchewan's First Free Range Puppet Lab was to provide a studio setting for puppet artists to share their expertise, experiment with making puppets and to collaborate in a creative way.
Organizer and puppet artist Sherron Burns said Saturday as the four-day event wound down, "It's been even better than I could have imagined."
Five other artists joined Burns in the lab, which was an opportunity to share knowledge of puppet making and performance.
"There's just all these unexpected surprises and wonderful moments of people connecting," said Burns.
Information and experiences shared among the artists meant ideas could come together to solve problems, even "simple things with construction that somebody would say, 'Oh, well, I'll show you this thing I do …’"
People were discovering things all the time, said Burns.
"All of a sudden you'd hear a squeal, and everybody would say, 'What have you done' … and we'd gather around and see what somebody came up with. Just lots of fun discovery."
Burns said the group would like to hold another lab.
"We should really do it again," she said. "We feel like it's been too short. Our hopes of building things could go on forever … We're talking right now about moving it to Calgary, because one of our members is from Calgary. Maybe it will move around and come back here in a couple of years."
The Chapel Gallery and the Don Ross Centre proved to be popular with the artists.
"This is perfect venue, everybody keeps saying," said Burns. "From Calgary, Winnipeg, Yellowknife, Tugaske, people are locking onto the Chapel Gallery and what we have here at the Don Ross Centre – all of that studio space – as just being amazing."
She added they were lucky to have the community support they did, especially from the Battlefords Allied Arts Council, the City of North Battleford and the Chapel Gallery.
"We received some grants to help pay performer fees so people are actually getting a fee to be able to perform and share their trade," she said, adding, "These people are all professionals and it's very important that we can recognize them as professionals and some of that is through some pay."
Saturday evening, the group hosted a reception and demonstrated some of what they do as puppeteers to the public. But the main focus of the lab was the collaboration among puppeteers.
Juanita Dawn of Calgary, Alta., a sculptor who has been making puppets and teaching mask and puppet workshops for several years, said puppet-making is time consuming, so while there may not have been time to collaborate on a finished project, but the sharing was inspirational.
"When we came together we were just sharing our ideas that we have worked on over the last few years and helping each other with creating new puppets," said Dawn. "Puppets are not like making a table or a chair, each puppet is individual and it depends on what you want it to do."
She explained, "It's not just making a body over and over again, or an animal over and over again, it can be anything that your imagination can come up with."
When people ask puppeteers what kind of puppets they make, it's hard to answer, she said. It depends on what is needed to tell whatever story the puppeteer wants to share.
"Sometimes a puppet is a broom, sometimes a puppet is a full-jointed character, sometimes it's just a hand. So, it all depends on what is needed to tell the story, any object that you bring to life to tell the story."
There are many types of puppets and many ways to make them, she said.
"Every artist has another way of making a hand, or a joint, or a dress, or a nose, so we all get together to see what the other person is working on so that we can learn from each other."
It’s the best way to learn, she said.
"It's usually not the type of work you can learn from a book. It's an accumulation of observations and stealing other people's ideas," she laughed.
Tamara Unroe of Tugaske, who has embarked on many journeys with puppets including touring with a stilt dancing troupe, said, "It's been really exciting working with this group."
Unroe said she mainly works with shadow puppetry and some rod puppets as well, so it's been fun working in different ways.
"It's been great. We've had four days just getting together with other puppeteers and sharing techniques and secrets … secrets to you until someone shows you," she laughed.
Natalie Laboissiere of Yellowknife, N.W.T., a cultural and language animator, said she found it thrilling to attend the lab.
"Just a thrill because there's not a lot of puppeteers in the community I live in, and there's not a lot of artists that I can have a conversation with about how to make them or how to best perform them or how to put together a story with puppets, so this has been a wonderful, wonderful learning experience for me." said Laboissiere. "Lots and lots of ideas are percolating right now, so it's been a really, really good training for me."
She was also impressed by the venue for the lab.
"In a beautiful setting like here in the Chapel Gallery, the craft room, we have just been spoiled." she exclaimed, adding, "The people have been wonderful. North Battleford's wonderful."
Her daughter, actress Marie-Ève Fontaine of Winnipeg, Man., said "I'm the one with by far the least experience in puppetry here, but my mom is a puppeteer so I've always been around and always been making stuff my whole life."
She and her mom used to collect toilet paper rolls to make puppets, she laughed.
Fontaine was excited about working with expert craftmakers and learning about and working with new materials.
"I kind of move across the country back and forth a lot so I don't have lots of stuff, but a few people brought a lot of tools that are really useful for making puppets and it's the first time that I have had a chance to [use] a sander, a drill …" she laughed.
She also enjoyed learning more about puppet performance.
"We've got a bunch of experts here of puppeteer performance, so we worked also on puppet manipulation and what are the basics of puppet manipulation for the puppet to look alive and feel alive."
Her favourite part was when five puppeteers are working on one puppet together.
"That puppet is so alive," she said, "and it's much more interesting to see an object come alive than see a person do these things."
Between the lab and her mom, Fontaine has found herself seeing puppets everywhere. Picking up a teacup from a nearby refreshment table, she said, "What if this was a puppet?"
She also said she had gone into a second hand store earlier.
"It's scary, it's overwhelming," she laughed. "The whole store is moving!"
Fontaine doesn't see herself doing puppetry full time, but the lab has been an inspiration to her.
"It opens up our practice. I'm mostly an actress, but … my range of possibilities just opened up as a performer, so it's really cool. It doesn't mean that I'll be doing puppetry all the time, but it is going to be something that comes up when I'm thinking of doing a show," said Fontaine.
Ben Nind of Yellowknife, N.W.T., who has an extensive background in theatre, said, "The fact that this workshop has drawn us from the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan I think is really remarkable and it's very much a gathering of like-minded souls."
He said, "For puppeteers, it's so refreshing to be able to find other puppeteers to sit and commiserate and share both their experiences and also share their knowledge, and this workshop being the first of its kind ever in Saskatchewan I think is going to lead to much greater things."
Nind has also been to similar gatherings at the Banff Centre and worked with others of the group, including Burns, who has been to Yellowknife to work with the puppeteers there.
"This is really a reinforcement both of the community and also of the work," said Nind. "To be able to come to North Battleford is an honour for us. To share our experience and to bring back all the experience from this to other puppeteers is really remarkable."
Nind said puppetry has multiple connotations depending on the person.
"Some people think it's only for children, others know that it has been used for everything from social purposes right though to political satire, all the way through to early visionary science fiction-type scenarios as well."
He thinks all puppeteers are interested in all forms of puppetry because it's really about telling the story.
"It really is," he said. "A puppet is an instrument to tell a story, and, of course, everyone is a storyteller."
He explained, "The connection to story is immediate, in other words, one can take a bottle and one can take a spoon and you can have the spoon fall in love with the bottle. We do that as children, [but] somewhere in there we kind of forget about the magic that happens when two inanimate objects fall in love with each other."
Nind said, "I think what you have with puppeteers is the ability to really search for the magic again."
