 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, good morning, good morning. Welcome here to the seventh floor of the Fine Arts Building. My name is Blair Thomas. I'm the director of Puppet Festival and we decided to move our talk to the smaller studio so there'll be standing room only. I guess they say standing room only, some podium. But anyway, I guess have a seat. So thank you for coming out. And it's a great opportunity to just take a moment and to hear from the artists themselves how they come at making their work. And so all the panelists are being presented this weekend so hopefully you get a chance to see their work. Things that I just want to point out is we have an indoor and outdoor performance at two o'clock down at the National Museum of Mexican Art by La Liga Teatro Elastico. And maybe in case you don't know but maybe you do on the fourth floor, our regular studio is a little cafe and we've got some, you can get a light lunch or a light dinner there and a coffee and whatnot and we have a couple of exhibits so check that out as well. So I have been working for a couple of years with Paulette Richards and which is excellent. Thank you. And so Paulette and I dreamed of this kind of focus to these panel discussions and we have four of them. This is the first of them and she has taken the ball and run with it and so now I will turn it over to Paulette. Thank you Blair. Good morning and thank everyone for coming out on this chilly Chicago day. So our theme for this year is the materiality of the puppet and we came to that because we've been exploring more of the metaphysics of the puppet and some people thought that that was getting a little off in the weeds. And so we're gonna bring it back down to earth and talk stuff for the whole Ellen Van Volkenberg puppetry symposium series. And as you know, whenever you get puppeteers together that's what the conversation turns to. There's been a conversation just up here now about this new material called Panther something or other. Yes, Panther cloth. So that's what we're doing this morning. I had originally planned that the artist would give you a nice PowerPoint about their work and then we'd have question and answer. But being artists, I had trouble getting slides out of that. And so we're gonna do a more informal approach. So I will ask each of the panelists to introduce themselves just basically because we have info on the website. Say your name, say the show that you're in and then we'll pass it down the line and get into the questions that I have for you. And off we go. So starting to my left. So just real short, just introduce. My name is Teresh Pipkins, aka Gighetto, a creator of the hip hoppera Spinochio. Hi, I'm Matthew Garak and our show is Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I'm Dan Kerhobart and I'm also working on Invisible Cities. I'm Michael Vogel and Charlotte Wilde and we are here with the shows Plin and Kravart. I want to, because I'm the only female artist here and I'm only assisting. I'm a musician. So that's why I'm only here to translate if it's necessary. Okay. Okay, so I hope you get a chance to see all of these wonderful shows. I am blown away by the mechanical genius that is sitting here before you. And so the first question I'm gonna ask, I will frame it first. I got into the world of puppetry as co-curator of an exhibit with Dr. John Bell, the Living Objects African American Puppetry Exhibit that was at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in 2018, 2019. That was my debut as a curator and I was very concerned that people might come to the exhibit and leave going, well, that was a tacky bunch of puppets. And so my question was, what makes a beautiful puppet? And the answers that I consistently got from puppeteers was, it moves well in performance. And so, of course, in order to move well, you have to design a mechanism. So I'm gonna ask each of the artists to pick one puppet in their show, talk about the movement that you wanted the puppet to do and the mechanism that you designed so that it could at least approximate that movement. Who wants, do we wanna go down in order or somebody wants to jump in right away? Thank you. We've got about 19, so I'm trying to pull them all out. One that, and just one more time, one that we think moves well and how we design. Well, it doesn't, I mean, sometimes we live with something that didn't quite do what we wanted it to do, but maybe the design problems were interesting, so. I've got one. You got one? Trying to explain my puppetry is like, I say it's like the matrix, I have to show you. So to actually talk about what I do without seeing an image, it's difficult, but the thing is, oh, you have something here. Oh, it counts. Yes! This is a prototype that I've built. I love dinosaurs ever since little kids, so when I started building, I started building dinosaurs. Yeah, you could blow that up a little bit. But my puppets are always a process. They're never actually done. I've done performances where I didn't enjoy the movement or wasn't satisfied. I went straight home and took it apart and rebuilt it. Like that night, I'm constantly working. If I'm not building new puppets, I'm modifying older puppets because as soon as I find a better way or a better mech to make it move better, I just jump right in. So that's my answer to that. Okay, Teresh, it's not opening, and it's also very tiny. It's a teeny, tiny t-rex. Yeah, and I don't know how to solve that problem. So I'm right clicking on the icon and see if there's a drop-down. I have the thumb panel on this mat. You might have put it in quick time, but the player is on your laptop, and you need to drag it to the other display. Ah, thank you, gotcha. Thank you. Zoom in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. May I assist with a finger? Sure. Okay, yeah. I think I can. Sorry. This is what our show is like sometimes. Yes. This is my show last night. Yes, right. All right. Yay. Thank you. Can you make it bigger? Yeah. Okay, now you've got over there. Oh, no. Let's just enjoy what we have. So that is a prototype that took me four or five days to build. I don't draw any blueprints or any sketches. I just start cutting and putting together, and it comes out how it comes out. I just know the general creature that I'm going to build or person, and then I just say go. And I've discovered that cuts down on my build time, because think of all the planning and sketching and thinking that you do. I just sum in the ancestors, and they give me information and I use it. That is all plywood, because most of my materials are found in recycled materials. This is all plywood, all cut into pieces. The teeth are wooden dowels, and the feet are two by four cut into pieces. And it's all wood stained, and the detail is burned with a mini torch and a lighter. Awesome. Do we want to see that one more time? Yeah. Okay. And while we run that, what movement is most distinctive of this character that absolutely had to work for you? The tongue. Yes. The tongue is my favorite part. That was so good. I'm happy with it for now. Okay. Thank you. All right. Who's next? There's one of our pictures. I need to get my cursor back over onto this. If you haven't seen our show, it's a collection of, I guess, devices and boxes and slideshow apparatuses. And so each story that we adapted has a movement. We tried to find the movement, I think, in that story. We tried to find the thing in that story that implied an action or a resolution that felt really good. So it was maybe a device that would be created to arrive at a resolution like Zaire. And so that was where we would start with those stories. And one of them that is described as you remember this city, like the notes in a score of music. And so that was the jumping off point for, oh, how can we incorporate music into this city? And we came up with different ideas. And then I was in a toy shop or a gift shop, and I had never seen these little hand cranky music boxes that you can punch out your own strip of music. It comes with Happy Birthday. And then you feed it through the machine and then you get it to play a song. And so the idea became how can we get the visual aspect of the city to become part of that story and what is that device? And so it became about finding an action that was appropriate to the motion or a device that was appropriate for the action in each city. And so Zora, I think, whenever we find it, but we created a music box out of it and it was very satisfying. And I think the resolution of it was very enjoyable. That's my story. I'm still looking for your images. Hey, there we go. That's a slideshow. Make a copy, go to the slideshow. That's great. Good take. Good take some time, Dan. Did you have one? Yeah. For our show, we're not trying to solve animal or human movement as much as I think Matt spoke to. Try and find imagery that supports the story. We're using a lot of dense text. So we're trying to create an interplay between listening and watching that holds up the text. So it's funny to call it a mechanism. But there's a city that is about a city that is always disposing things and they end up living on a pile of their own. They're so obsessed with replacing things and always having new things that they end up living on a pile of trash. And so in ours, we've set it in a tissue box. So the mechanism for telling the story is the reveal of these prints on tissues. And so we're able to create the pile of trash by discarding the images we use throughout the story. And I think that's an example of the way in which we're trying to play with supplying imagery, almost like a can of story or a cranky, we're using a lot of these devices to have an image pass through and then also end up building an image for the end of the piece. And the game for us has been to find as many different ways of telling a story based on the constraint of a box or a tin or a card as we can. So, yeah. All right, thank you. Okay, Matthew, you brought your puppet. Yeah, but I think I'd choose another puppet. Okay, let's hear about it. So what is a good puppet? That's the question. What is a beautiful puppet? For me, it's a puppet who teaches you something but you don't know. And it's an interesting point where it starts like you also don't make sketches or a plan. So I choose from the show what we showed yesterday a little frog that's only big like this. And as I remember, I made it only as a sketch. So I thought I want to try something in a model. So I said later I will make it big and real. But it's on stage now, it's still the model. And so I just made this puppet and the puppet without an idea what show it could be. So and then the whole, it was kind of a starting point of the spleen show that okay, there are frogs. And so this was the first and then the content came because the director what we worked with came into my workshop. I love these puppets. I would like to combine them with the poems of Baudelaire. So he was inspired by this and what has Baudelaire to do with frogs. But that came later because there are poems where frogs are entering the take over the world. That's one picture that there are frogs eating you. But that comes much, much later than what I meant. So these puppets teach all of us something and that also is in the show, in the performance still that I can just follow the puppet. So I can listen with the puppet and I can look more listening with the puppet and just follow. So I have no idea every evening what he will do. There's a plan and there are some things but it's always in a different way and I have to follow it. Then it's a good puppet for me if I don't control it. That's a very interesting insight and so now we have a pop quiz because I used to teach at Georgia Tech. My job was to help the engineers communicate what they were building to the lay audience. And so the pop quiz is I'm going to give you six simple machines because all mechanisms are based on one or more of the six simple machines. And I'm going to ask you how have you applied any one of the six simple machines in a mechanism that you've built. So I'm going to give this to everyone so it's not a quiz where you have to pull this out of your head from sixth grade or wherever you've first heard it. The six simple machines are a pulley. Everybody that's dealing with marionettes, you're working with that. A lever. An inclined plane. A screw. A wheel, an axle. And a wedge. I believe I have a couple of designs to incorporate all of those. Except one except the wedge. It's a spider marionette puppet. Okay. Are there any images that you sent me that might demonstrate that? No. You just have to believe me. I just want to say I plead the fifth. I had to. I just had to do that. But I remember your installation at the Center for Puppetry Arts, and it was interactive, and there were all these cool dinosaurs and robots that the public could actually manipulate. And if I remember correctly, there were levers that the public could push, and they were attached to strings, which were essentially pulleys that made the puppets move in the way that you wanted them to move. Yeah. So you're using it. You didn't have to plead the fifth. We use a lot of wheels. We have a lot of cycles, loops. I think there's an image of a tiny little record player that we use to build an image. There's a camera, and you basically see the top of a spinning record player. It's the last one. This slide show didn't seem to update from when I edited it. Well, you have to believe me. Or it comes in a show. Yeah. But also, crankies. We have a lot of crankies. The music boxes are cranky, and we also have an internal cranky, so I think that would be the axle wheel mechanism. And I guess a pulley, because we have a drive belt on our cranky. So we have two and one. Yeah. Crank the thing in the image camera. There's a cranky on the slide show. Oh, there's that one too. So that's another axle and wheel slide show. And then this has a ribbon of an image and then a mask over it as well. But that's the mechanism of the little hand cranky. And it works for an endless loop. I'm trying to miniaturize the single direction loop into one. It's harder to gather paper. It's harder. But I'm sure we could do it. But I guess that's kind of what the other one was. Okay. What is a pulley? A pulley. So there's a mechanism at the top. The string runs through. And basically a pulley, you pull down to lift something up. Yeah, I have something here. Okay, great. I think this is the cover of the screen. And it's here. Yeah, there's a pulley here. That's also a lever? Do you have your thumb on a lever? Yeah, so I left that up and this is going down. Because this is going up and down. That's a pulley. Can you turn the other way so they can see? You want to see it? No, but you turn it. They can't see it from this. Yeah, so if I push up this one up there, and this is going up and this is going down. Cool. That's a pulley. That's a pulley. Yes, thank you for showing that. Thank you. Wouldn't the slide mechanism count as an inclined plane, maybe? Maybe, yeah. Yeah. The inclined plane. It's good. Two for one. Two for one. Great, so we could play with that more maybe in the Q&A. But the next one I'm going to ask you is a little bit about your training and how you develop the skill of building these mechanisms. No formal training for me, a lifelong artist. When I decided to jump into this insane world of puppetry, I intentionally isolated myself from the rest of you so I can develop my own style and didn't get any influence from anyone. Yeah, and I think it worked, because everyone says I've never seen anything like that. And that's the number one quote I think that an artist wants to hear. But just now you also mentioned something about the ancestors? Yes. As far as my building process, I think when I started building, I'm all trial and error. So of course when you first start, I say I was like a 50% success rate where I would think of something and it would work. Now 20 years later, I think 95%, I'll think of a concept and apply it and it works. So now I'm like 5% mistake, 95% success now. Just not because I'm a genius or anything, I just made millions of mistakes and I paid attention to everyone and knew not to do it again. You're a genius. Thank you. That's my son. You're a genius too, son. This is my first puppet show. This is my first time performing even. I'm mostly... It's good. It does feel good. And I think that a lot of people who come to it and are also surprised by how good it feels or even how good it is to watch, there's a first time surprise. So I'm having a first time surprise. It's great. My background is a lighting and scenic designer for traditionally for theater. I like a lot of storefront theater. That's what I grew up doing here in Chicago. And I came to this by starting in sort of a toy theater idea and even that cranky mechanism started as like a little proscenium stage. That's where it was. That was just a cyclorama on the background with some miniature figures. And then once we started putting things in boxes, it felt like, oh, what else can we put into a box and how else can things that come out of a box tell a story differently? So I arrived at this, to play that from a different direction, mostly from a design point of view. I've always made things. I studied acting in college. I was really frustrated with the role of the performer in the creative room. And so I started, after college, I started a company and we started doing outdoor work, public spectacle work. And so immediately started making puppets and large masks. And then I had fortunate work with Blair for years and really enjoyed the kind of process of collaboratively like building images, bringing puppets into the room, seeing what they wanted to do. And I think, yeah. So that's my journey. I like being in a room with stuff and saying, how can we tell a story? Great. Yeah. I think I always did it. That's what my parents say. So I started in kindergarten to build puppets and always built stages and make theater with that for my friends. Very alone. It was before the internet and I didn't know that there are other people doing that. So maybe he's stupid. He's playing with puppets. And then I, because they always came into our city, the theater, Spabel and Houvinek, it's a puppet, string puppets from Prague. And so they are also played for adults in the evening. Yes. So I had a huge influence of them and the only idea I had when I had the possibility I go there to work with them because they were the only people I knew. And then slowly it started that I get to know the people in Stuttgart around Albrecht-Rosa, the puppeteer. And first I went to Prague to be an eleve, like a student. Like an internship. And it was beautiful to work to see how they do it and how it works. And then I went to study in the Stuttgart School and that was my training. So I work every day in the workshop to build something that I don't know in the morning. So I try to do that every day. And the building is happening every day. Sometimes nothing happens, but sometimes something happens. And training to perform and to make research and rehearsals every day. Yes. Thank you. So for those of you in the audience I think an important takeaway here is that you do not have to have a specialized training to enter into puppetry and to create amazing things. It's just the persistence of working at it day after day after day. But that said, I also want to signal that puppeteers, because they are always solving creative problems, do produce some incredible feats of engineering. Some of them are patentable, like the Waldo that Jim Henson developed, the Waldo is a remote control device which uses the same technique of the puppeteers' hand inside the muppet with, well, I think it's radio-controlled sensors that transmit those movements to a puppet that is not touching the puppeteer at all. And so that's the technology that goes back into the 80s. Puppeteers are creating amazing things all the time. Some of you might be doing patentable stuff. So you should keep records of what you're doing in case it has to be argued in court at some point. Okay. So then my next question is what design problem are you still trying to solve? What one is just like, oh, I can't get this to work? As of now, I don't have any. I figured everything out. Sorry. Not sorry. Just in terms of the show, I guess there's 55 cities in the book that we've adapted and we have about 19 of those cities. So there's more cities in there that appeal to us. And we've talked about taking them into some wild places and I think one of them would be a globe and just sort of a globe that we can interact with but that also I think would want to come out of a box. Or somehow. We don't know yet. But just that the sphere shape is a challenge I think that I can immediately think of. I think almost every piece in our show in my mind I'm like, oh, what could we like we get off stage and we're like, oh, you know what? The seam of the paper is the problem. Maybe we need a, you know, so I think we're kind of in constant discussion of like, oh, actually another engineering problem is we don't have backups of these puppets. So we're in the process of making a second for each puppet because the problem is if one of them prepped out, which they do, we'd be stuck. So we're also in the process of being like, what are the ones that are going to be the hardest to remake? That's big in our mind, just the life of the show. Yeah. I really don't know what, but for me it's always a fight with material in the work show. So sometimes it works and it fits together this new material but in the end I would, it's also a research of the invisible puppet. What do I really need? And then it would be great to get rid of this material and stuff that we're carrying all the time. And I'm a little bit jealous about musicians. They have their instruments but the art, what comes out is invisible. You can only hear it. So I'm always looking for what is between the puppets and to make that bigger so that we can all see it. I do have a challenge. I was at a performance at a library and an audience member was blind and they said, can you find a way for me to enjoy the show? Yes. So yes, I do have a puppet show for the blind. Maybe some texture or sensory type of thing. None of them thinking about it. That's a great problem. Okay, so thank you, Michael, for bringing the question of materials into the conversation because your mechanism is intricately connected to the materials in which you choose to execute it. And a lot of our fails are the material. It's not the mechanism but that the material can't do what we're asking it to do. It's too much stress or it weighs too much and it works perfectly but we can't get through a performance with something that's that heavy. So if you would all talk for a minute about a situation where the affordances of the material either facilitated or frustrated your design. I was speaking to him earlier. I was commissioned to build a fireproof puppet for a show called Random Acts of Flinus on HBO. So the director, he, you know, scattered the Zoom call so we don't know how you say can you make a fireproof puppet because he wanted a creature to crawl out of a campfire. So I was like, sure, no problem. I got off the Zoom call and was like, how am I going to make a puppet? So like, you know, problem solving. So he actually put me in touch with his effects team and the guy that I spoke with, he said there's this material called Panther Cloth where it's probably like an eighth of an inch thick and this is the material that stuntmen use when they get set on fire and run. And it's like an eighth of an inch thick, which is really heavy fabric. And it was really hard to work with because it was so dense. But it was still at 2,000 degrees. So I laid it, my son's got to tell you, we laid it on our hand. I put a mini torch against it and it dispersed the heat. So I had to figure out how to turn that material into a marionette. So I just did a wood structure and I just wrapped and stapled the stuff to it to cover the whole thing. And they burned it like 10 times before it actually caught on the inside and fell apart. So the first frame I built for was copper because I was like, you know, metal. But the metal, I couldn't find a good connector that wouldn't burn. So I just like, I'll just use the wood and send it up to New York with a prayer. And it works. That's great. That's a fascinating story. Yes. A material frustration? Or, you know, a success if that's more satisfying to talk about. I mean, I think in terms of what you were just saying about it's the material and not the device, the music box is a finicky thing in that the way it's currently printed, it's in multiple sections, so it has seams. The seams cause like a gumming of the works inside the device. It's also the one strip we're using right now, which is a stock of paper that I still have plenty of. I've printed it multiple times and the only time it's ever worked is the one strip that we're using. All of the backups. And if you've ever made these things, you have to punch out every single hole. So I've punched thousands and thousands of holes on so many different strips. And each strip just seems to not have the right clearance or the right whatever, or maybe just not being fed right, but this one that works does. So we hope it stays perpetuity. So working on that spare. We had a thing happen this week where, so we have an image. It's in there somewhere. It's the next one actually. It says Falkus on top of the ladder. And so it has like a foam insert where the whole, the thing is built on telescoping legs and by inserting the ladder it holds. And it's all based on this little foam base that held it beautifully for a year and a half. And then the foam just starts to wear away, wear away. It's like, do we take the thing apart? Do we put a new foam thing in? And we wanted to fix the image for this run. And we were eating the little baby bell cheese things that were wrapped in the wax. And I'm like, no, I think I had an idea. So I created a bunch of little wax panels. And so now every show we put the little wax panel and it holds, it's couldn't be, it's better than the foam was, you know. It adds to our reset, which is also infinite. We also have little bottles and a cork dried and broke. And we had no cork for this little bottle. It was hard enough to find the one that fit tightly. And it has to seal the liquid in the same baby bell cheese wax. So we're using cheese. We're going through like two cheeses in a show. Brought to you by Baby Bell. The question is what kind of material I hate or what the problems are with. Yeah, if you want to talk about that. In the world, I always have to choose a material that I fall in love with. So even if it gives me some strong things to do, I remember when we did the French show and the theme of wax came up. So I started to work with hot wax on stage and to build the puppets on stage. But out of this hot wax or the fire came in then. And then the theaters, they get fried. They have hot, rather burning wax on stage. They need water for that to cool that down. It's interesting. I'm fighting then more with the theaters, with the security of the theaters. They have interesting material, but they don't allow it. In Germany, we have... I think theater will be dead when the puppet theater will be dead if we have to follow all these rules for materials. So for the Frankenstein, we had also paper on stage. So fire, water, everything. Then one theater said we can buy some paper, what is fireproof, what is allowed in the theater. But it's incredible expensive, a piece of that. It's hundreds of euros. But we needed the whole stage full of that. That's an interesting fight going on. I think all the puppet theater festivals will be closed down if the fire engines come in. Is this really fireproof, this material? If it's not, you have... So that could be interesting ones. So we need the government to save the puppet theater. All the puppets will go off stage. We always say yes, yes, it's water, it's fireproof. Of course, all of us paper. So that's what I'm fighting with. It's a ramble. Okay, that's a wonderful story. So let's come back to the idea of mechanisms and movement. And so what is a puppet that's not yours that you are just in awe of the way it moves? I've seen online the story of Pi, that tiger. Yes, that's all I'll say. I don't have a sufficient background yet to comment on this one. The first one that came to mind is that there was a production in Chicago of Old Man and Sea with Salal, the worst kind of unlucky. Humans operating one life-sized wooden puppet built by Jesse Mooney Bullock. And it sat around the Red Moon Studio for years and years and in a chair you felt like you were in a room with somebody. Like it just lived, it just breathed. And if I remember, it had a light chamber in the top of its head that caught stage light so its eyes would like have life. They would glow blue and just move beautifully. Beautiful puppet. Wow, that's a really hard question to choose from. It's all the puppets where colleagues from us, where the puppets can talk to our souls. So for me they are, maybe I have to say too that nobody has one, the puppets of Neville Trenta in a place where they had beautiful puppets, all this technique and how he was connected to them. And one of the other colleagues, Frank Söhne from the theater in Tübingen, he had a puppet that was out of the show, Wurzschildsgeige. The puppet was Marfa, the old woman. It was big like this. And this puppeteer was so beautiful connected to that and the puppet could be everything she was telling the whole story. There was an old woman who was an old man. It was the forest. The puppet was everything in the story. That was really amazing. It was technically nothing, this puppet, but everything was going through that. So for me it's Marfa from Frank Söhne. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so still kind of keeping with that theme, puppets that you've operated, please talk about a mechanism in a puppet that you've operated that you're just like sweet. It does what I need it to do and you have just an excellent relationship with that mech in that puppet. I think one of my favorite, I call them the good mistakes, is that there's a puppet that's touring with Richard Termine's photography show. It's a raptor, like a bird. And the feathers, I learned this feather-building technique from a workshop that I did at an art school in Durham, North Carolina. They took a piece of wire and they put two pieces of masking tape together with a wire and then cut into a feather shape. I love that concept so I use that. And the bird hangs from my chest and I control the wings of my hands. And what I did was, the neck has like a tentacle mech to it where the strings run and you pull it back and forth. The head lifts up and it looks back and forth while it's flying. I have a fishing line connected to the head on both sides running through the body and out to the string. And you can't see it, but when I pull the wing back, it's a pulley for the head and people can't see how it moves and I was like, yes, this is one of my favorite mechs. It was a good mistake thing where I didn't know it was going to work out that way I just tried it and it worked. So it flaps and it looks around at the same time with the head moving. The magic of poetry. Oh, I don't know. All I can think of is fights. I need a minute. The fights with the technique. Fights with the object. No, it sounds so negative. I don't feel negative about it. I love them, but I'm totally... All I can think of is wearing a big head and a bow for me where my whole neck is moving the thing and it's like, for the audience, the experience is painful inside, but... I can only think of fights, that's all. I also remember that Charlotte starts now to say very often, stop with these techniques. It always breaks 10 minutes before the audience comes in and then you have the big trouble. So don't do it anymore. So especially when it's digital, then it gets really interesting. I just want to show you this. I hope it works now. It also was interesting with this puppet because it was also not planned. But then by the rehearsals, it would be nice if the puppet can do that. In the rehearsals, it would be nice if he can move the mouth. It would be great. And then the tongue... It's a traditional trick, Marjonette. Nothing new. In the rehearsal, the tongue with language, that's important. So the puppet who doesn't speak has a tongue. It's also completely not a material. It's latex. So it's not something like this. I was looking for a material that could be wet or something. I needed a contrast in the puppet for that. That's fantastic. So since the topic of fights with the material and the mechanisms came out, have you had occasion to modify a design for yourself or for another puppeteer who physically couldn't do what you needed to do to operate the mechanism in the puppet? I'll go back to the spider, Marjonette, that I have. When I first built it, what I do, I build the puppet and then I walk away and I come back to figure what makes it needs to move the way I want it to move. It's not on that. When I first built it, it's eight legs and two parts of the body. I was like, yeah, I'll just do a marionette. And that was a train wreck. I couldn't even hang it. I just divorced marionettes altogether. I was so frustrated for a while. I actually threw it in the corner for like a year. I wouldn't even touch it until I came up with a concept. Then I was watching some Czech style marionettes where the steel rod goes through and that makes it stable and they just use the strings for the limbs. So I went back to the spider and I put two steel rods in the front and abdomen and the front rod controlled the first four legs and the back the last four legs and I rigged it where they moved opposite of each other at the same time like a spider. So I was like, yes, victory. So that worked for two years and I was like, I'm not satisfied with this anymore. I was like, I can collapse it and make it simpler. So now I just have one rod and I have a piece of wood going across and it's in the middle and now I just move it up and down like a seesaw and the front moves it. It's a lever. It's a lever. So that happened like a year ago so I'm happy with it for now until I figure out a way to do it without any mix because my whole concept of approaching the movement is to have the most movement with the least amount of controls. So if you see my work, it'll be one controller but it'll, like I have this a sea serpent and it's two controls front and back. When I lift the front control up on the lever, the fins raise up and the head pops up. When I put it down, the fins drop and the head drops but the mouth opens. So it's just like little subtle movements that happen and it has a tongue too. I'm gonna purpose have tongues. It doesn't drop out though. I did repairs on like a mid run of the House Theater's Nutcracker and inherited these rats that have had many lives. You've probably seen a version of them this month. But when I inherited them, so first of all, wait, always wait. Every puppeteer that's ever, I feel like people are like, can you make it lighter? And so gutting puppets, done a lot of gutting or subbing a material for a lighter material. These, one of the things was make them lighter but also they were like, they don't move quite right and the fulcrum was in the wrong place. So I did a lot of like assessing weight and trying to find the midpoint and then moving the fulcrum. And then I was like, okay, lighter and I went inside and it was full of rocks. It was literally full of rocks that they had offset the wrong fulcrum point by just loading it with literally rocks. So, yeah, so we cleared out all the rocks and there we go. Way better. Oh God, I should have. I don't know where those rocks are. Okay, yes. That's great. And so just to remember that a fulcrum is the point that the lever rotates around. We're talking levers. Yeah, we're talking levers. Six simple machines. Yes. I remember one show that was a seagull by the Chekov thing and the seagull and the seagull was the seagulls are always shitting on you. Yeah. So it would be nice if there's always coming from the ceiling on the puppets and on the puppeteers but a little bit by accident. And I worked very long with machines to put a razor shaving cream into machines and then it was in the theater it was too hot and it was half an hour was enough and the puppeteers were always down and looking at something coming or nothing coming. So it did not really work. And then years later I found this very simple foam soap where you push and then the foam comes out you push and... So I was... That's it. You only have to... And I used that in another show. A colleague, the Stefan Wenzel maybe he can perform that in this... You ask for some little scenes. Maybe you will see this little machine. So sometimes you find in a normal shop a beautiful little machine. Yeah, that's it. Thank you. Good. So we had interjection from the audience. That's great. You all are a wonderful audience and to me that's the signal that people have questions and also unfortunately we're going to use Luz Jagedo in a few minutes. So I want to make sure that if anyone has questions for Jagedo you get to ask them. So we'll open it back up to the floor and then we'll see where the conversation goes. I will come to you with the mic. We are live streaming and recording this so we want to make sure that the... Virtual audience... Oh, Blair has the mics. Great, I can stay here. So the first question was right there. I was just wondering if you had with the pyro technique or the fire one that you did if there was... If you looked into a nichrome wire for... I can't put your wire. It's like for kiln firing. I have not and I probably won't be revisiting the... If she were here a year and a half I would have been awesome info. Thank you. That's one and done. Your favorite material to prototype with? A cardboard. And then I can transfer it to wood because it's basically wood. But yeah, if I have something I need to physically see what it does I just grab a piece of cardboard fold it and cut it and it's very mild one sheet. It's basically free because my wife loves Amazon. So I have lots of boxes at the house I can use. Is that question down the line? Yeah, I'm cardboard too. Or paper, yeah. This is a mixture between some plaster and clay and dust from the Hoover and water, different kinds of... No? It's just... Blues? Different kind of blues. I mix that together and every day something else comes out and then there's there's something wet and dry in that because it gets dry and can take it off. I still love that. I love that. That's my favorite too. I have a tool pitch if anybody for cardboard lovers out there. There's a Kickstarter right now for an object that's essentially a cardboard table saw. So it has a little nib and you can run it for precision cutting and then it gathers all of the cut remnants. So you can get like detail cardboard cuts. Great for prototyping. So nice. Kickstarter right now. I can't... Hang out after... Yeah, I'll... Let's look it up after we hang out. Let's look it up now. When you have a puppet that requires multiple puppeteers to operate like how do you work that out in a rehearsal setting? With rehearsal. Yeah, but especially if it's like a person I switch positions and we'll even do it mid-show where one person will hold the puppet and then one person works hands and the third person works feet if it takes three people. But I think the more the merrier where you get that fluidity where if everything is moving at the same time the more movement, the more realistic it is. So that's the answer to that. There's lots of rehearsal. I have your puppeteers who are working together have all of them try the different positions and see what person is best on that puppet because with my two sons my oldest son, he's the strong one so he holds the puppets and me and my son, Taren, we switch doing hands and feet. I think he's better on the feet making it walk and run. You know, the puppet shows. I think we have several that we've discovered work best as a two person because of the show and because of the way it works. But it makes me think that the operators are just the apex mechanisms. It's about trying to find out how the machine works and we're just the other moving parts of where does this moving part have to stand or be at and operate so then we just become part of the machine. That's my favorite kind of work. I love that and I feel like switching perspectives and taking breaks. Is this question going to how you work in an ensemble together with other people? It's mostly just like if you had a bunch of people how would you get it to a point where they were fluidly doing the same puppet? For me it's a complex question always to work with more people together and my experience is that what I like to find out from every person who is in the group to find what is speciality and that can be very different so that somebody is more working with objects and better with a glove puppet and other materials that's so different also like musicians who choose different instruments and that's my expression also in the puppet theater and then to find a material or kind of a puppet where everybody can connect to and if you go on this trip you don't know what kind of puppet will come out in the end because it's a mixture between different aesthetic things and for me you get a nice result it's not the aesthetic thing then but you see that different people working together on one idea or on one story so I know there's this classical tradition of playing one puppet together but where is the puppet coming from who built the puppet that you don't have this so much this questions so that's what comes into my mind by this question working together on one thing I'm probably supposed to say something about breath too I think there's like there's building the images and hitting the images and hitting the marks and then there's also like the improvisational like learning the flow and the rhythm and the way the thing wants to move in a more improvisational just like how does it just like do whatever but I also feel like knowing those marks and those images and hitting it depends on the piece of course but I also think about like build the image then what's the next image locking that into the body also I think is a always a priority for me just on what you sort of threw at the very end before taking breaks and new perspectives I think deserves a little bit more than that I think that that exact thing of when you start with something you seem to get it's easy to get locked into I built the puppet and so this is how I designed it to work and then having someone else come in and have a whole other perspective on it is really useful to try to take a break to unlock any sort of expectation of how it's supposed to work in order to try something new and that's useful. That's exactly the point I was coming to I have a background in special education special education, special education is that two educations but anyway I've worked with children and I do a lot of young people performances and I have a show titled where I invite the children up and they can work the puppets and I'm always paying attention because it's a one-time little adorable girl she was like four years old so I handed her a puppet and I said how would you work and she said oh you mean like this and the way she controlled it was the exact opposite how I did it and it worked better and I'm like thank you for that I'm quick to hand the kid a puppet just to see like I won't even show him how to do it I say how would you figure out how to work this and I like to see their brain work and the way they move things I'm always learning from everyone who touches the puppet that's the same concept that comes back around that's great so I just want to take a moment to explore this because we're all cardboard fans in here and so we need to know about this thing I think we may not get the sound um yeah I'm just gonna cut the sound but we can at least see what this is the ad go away okay are you that tearing? do we have to get one of these? so good I gotta start somewhere hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha hahahaha this is actually way more fun should I say kickstarter? yeah that was a wig okay so we have an idea we have an idea of what it does and um let's go back over here it's on inventable and it looks like you can pre-order one oh yeah that's important too $189 estimated May 2024 delivery yeah it won't be May too you know it kickstarter he's been there it's gonna be 2025 hahahaha so that that was a nice interlude we have more questions yes please how many of you use interior lighting and LED lights in your puppets and how have you seen that or use the advancing technology to increase the beauty and marvel of the puppets through lighting yeah that's good I tried the internal lighting things I have a science fiction puppet show with robots in it and it's too many cues I have to worry about puppeteering and placement and then I would forget to turn the lights on for the eyes and I was like you know what I can't do this the batteries were you know and then you know all the bike bicycle lights they had the usb charging which is a better thing but then I wouldn't charge it before the show so I kind of pulled away from that but I just let the light people at the theaters beautify my puppets I gave up on the lighting I think that exactly that the intersections of durability of the material the use of batteries or not queuing it is it something that's on the puppet or the box in our case or is it something that someone else can control I think there's so much potential some we use LED strips we use LED like very cheap ones and it's maybe worth upgrading to get those but then you always will run into the battery problem and then it becomes a weight problem if it really needs to be along you know so it has a lot of potential and I think there's some great stuff that we've found that works really well for us and yeah and this is so this is a fun one this was attempting to be so this is a single LED diodes that just light from behind a postcard so in front of the postcard you know the images lit up in these windows and everything and then was playing with this stuff it's just copper tape and so you need a couple layers of it to make connectivity really good I've made like three or four iterations of this by now and the one we have works well I think and this was a fun thing to try to merge paper tech with electricity that's why I specifically used this and didn't really go for wire on it because it's a postcard I was trying to honor the medium so thanks I did also interesting with these lights in puppets so if you I have one puppet where it's now very old 20 years old now there are the old glass little lamps inside and you have a normal control a piezo it's not a piezo just a very simple even not a dimmer it's a 40 40 meter and you turn it and it goes on and off very very simple and because it's 20 years old I always get remembered by that and then now with the LED things what I need for that is to control it in a very nice way you need a little computer or a Raspberry Pi to make it work so my experience with that is that if you need something really independent where you are not touched to then the LED and the Raspberry Pi and all this technique is beautiful where you need a cold for me it's a cold information so something spooky or yeah from another star so not human then I have for me I get some nice results and on stage with this old technique I'm very much connected to that so immediately I feel I'm in that there are two different things what you would like to do so that's not nothing better or not something completely different and I'm working a lot at the moment at this digital world and the analog world and the puppeteer has to connect that in a way but it's also different worlds for my feeling I will fix it thank you so for anybody that wants to play with paper circuits and does not want to shell out for copper tape because it's expensive you can use aluminum foil it has just enough connectivity for you to light up your circuit there's also a paint a conductive paint that's a really fun there's a kit but you can also just get it and you can screen print with it it's incredible material and this actual device did come from a kit exactly that there's a lot of really great educational kits that come with just a few diodes some copper tape and a few other things about how to make one yeah I haven't found it terrible I think I found it pretty cheap by the foot but in the adhesive part of the tape is the really clutch thing as well I enjoy it very delicate very delicate do you have any examples of puppets that you've built with a mechanism that then once you started working with it you either stopped using the mechanism or you took it out entirely a tech that didn't work yeah like working on a mech and then deciding ultimately oh this is too frustrating it's unnecessary always oh I start with an idea of a technique and it never works in that way that I thought it would I don't remember really but something else comes out so and sometimes it comes back years later right sometimes it's unnecessary but then sometimes it's like we cut a moment we're limited hands oh we've got a hand for this there's a support another image but we have a tiny slide projector that Matt built gobo textures on to hit a moment of language and combined with like there's not quite time in the image and also the image wasn't hitting and the auto light balance and playing along we kind of cut it but then yesterday we were like actually if we built in a little like tiny cycle like that like then it might play so it might come back in so there is this kind of like sometimes you're like oh we didn't need that another time it's like we should get that it'd be nice to get it and I suspect what you just said too about trying it like I think keeping the images the objective like the images oh we want this thing the text the text says there's this shaft of sunlight that talks about the foliage it talks about shadows that seems important to us and it didn't work the one way and then you know but keep trying to find continuing to try to find the image is what then leads to the new solution yeah I would say too I was thinking about there's at least two cities that are made out of paper inside of tins that didn't work for a variety of reasons where like my my paper engineering isn't there yet but when you're when you think about the Altoy 10 it felt to me when I was first designing I was like it's just a book mechanism but the actual the way the planes are moving where the lid meets the surface of there and the hinge it's actually a much more complicated action and so the paper requires some extra folds some extra material and then how does that material get out of the way when the lid closes so coming up with that this one city that I'm thinking of was ended up being a much bigger headache and frustration and I never got there and so it got cut yeah okay thank you since I see Alex and Olmstead sitting up front and you pose that question it brought up something that I should have looped in before Tarrish left earlier we were talking about the invisible puppet and about puppets for people who can't see the visuals even though the visuals are the center of what we do and I'm thinking about your show marooned and the way that you used iconic computer sounds almost as a character itself and so I'm thinking about what sound contributes even sound is immaterial and yet what sound contributes to the show and we have the musician for spleen up here as well so what does sound contribute to the show then that I guess is the immaterial materiality do your puppets not make sounds absolutely yeah we play with sound yeah in a way I'm not the right person to answer that because I'm not trying to contribute I'm trying to do my own part in a show but I do think that sounds coming from puppets or material or actions on stage can be really wonderful and interesting and then maybe things also can get together we have a few shows where we use piezos on something or the latest show we did for children I do have a violin on stage also but mainly the music is coming from things that I do on a table which has a piezo plus a microphone so I'm doing things I'm doing sounds so children can see where the sound actually comes from and it's not so much a technical process where nobody including myself knows how it actually works yeah maybe like that we do have sounds we have the music box but I was thinking that you've added for one of our cities that ends with you know at night you can hear a door slam trying to add that little, not just the motion the little sound we built the show for being for very small initially audiences 15, 20 and with ideas of how we can support a larger room but this is the first time we've had so our hope is we could just show up and we could just do it and suddenly the festival is like have all the support which is incredible but then we're like what do we use so there's a sound person in the room and for documentation we love that in the recording that we're doing so we've got a little mic on stage to capture some of the sounds that have always been for that 15 or 20 people but now we're like a little hidden mic would be a gem so and we were playing like we have a moment of glass and things like that and like do we mic that or is it hitting the room just right maybe that sound is already filling the room and it's at the right scale but once there's a mic on stage it's hard not to be like oh you know and even then we had earlier talked about some sort of diagetic kind of sound making and I was just thinking about your slam and I was like but I could have a wood block and a mallet and that kind of thing and that starts to change a bit of the visual texture of the show to do like live fully as part of it but we you know that I think there's potential for it it would be a fun addition Michael is thinking deeply do you have examples? No I'm thinking of this invisible thing and people who are blind can't see that that's the next show but that's something else what I was thinking about this situation I'm sure it's also happening here in Germany we have more and more puppet also puppet theater in the normal theaters they do it normally for blind people to make this somebody description of this happening and we did it for one show it was very interesting if you go through the show but it's really visible and it's like a dramaturgical work because you also get the feedback where shit is happening on the stage nothing is really happening you can't describe it if it has a content it's easy to say what is what is going on also it comes back that was I was thinking of it's a dramaturgical work also to people who but that's what I was thinking about that's a significant contribution has anyone ever read James Thurber's 13 dead clocks it's a wonderful little book there's a line at that moment something indescribable and unlike anything else in the world ran by which is sort of like what that stage direction probably great so Blair there's a gentleman here with a question no he has a hat in the second row actually I just stole this idea from her but old time radio was invisible and sometimes if you've ever listened to the radio of a sportscaster you really have invisible puppets in the sport field and one of the ones that made me think of it most about your invisible was there was a invisible race on a record called beetle bomb and I think it was what was that the 1930s or something and they would do what you described and maybe just stealing some ideas from the past would work it gives me one more thought there's a photographer here in town named Joe Maza hopefully you've had a pleasure of meeting him but he and I made a show it was a flea circus where Dr. Folderall was to prove the existence of love using nothing but these fleas and so it's all about observation and relay this idea of like he witnesses the show to explain to you the experience that he is the overwhelming experience of proof of love which is happening in front of you but you're unable to see it so allow him to translate kind of okay so now we have questions popping so we'll take the orange jacket and then the lady there is there is there anything in the field of like technology or robotics or something that you want to play with but don't have the tools for or like can't isn't super accessible say with like a raspberry pi or something because of money or like knowledge or either sometimes those are the same thing in terms of like I'm sorry let me rephrase those are the same thing in terms of like developer time I'm asking because my background is in robotic software and I want to I don't know looking for like what are the things you want to play with so I could like write ways to make it faster or make it more accessible back all of you you can't clap before I made it speaking specifically to the invisible cities show because again I have limited context here the digital thing offers magic we have a screen inside of one of our boxes and I think people really enjoy it and find it very magical simply because technology being shrunk is kind of amazing so I mean yes there are I think there's some cool potential to make something that seems impossible really cool out of that and not just like hand crankies it's like you can see I'm the machine and I'm the operator but the technology where's that coming from I think that is magical and has a lot of potential but I have no specifics at this time I'd say always I thought of this with the LED question I think that I'm finding frustrating a lot I'm really interested in technology that's emerging a ton of it comes through like a weird quasi lifestyle or like apps supported technologies that are being designed to be supported by this device and they never play well our cameras are a great example of there's highly automated and then there's deep in the weeds and kind of nothing in between and so when you use a tool that's like a commercial tool it really it's grossness shows up it's hard to make stuff I think Phillips Hue lights are a great example of what an incredible tool but you're like using this app on your phone you can use it to make magical things but there's something about the texture of it it just feels like a lifestyle product and I feel like it shows up that way and I think that the same is true of cameras and all this stuff there's so much technology to get it to match this lifestyle product world you're talking about that home that home lighting system that you can control with your phone but also comparing it to the way in which our cameras have the autofocus and autolight adjust which really supports a lot of our moments and then also other moments we're fighting with it because the automation that's built in is trying to do the opposite of what we're trying to do and we can't get in there or when we do get in there we get overwhelmed by the amount of coding in there just like well okay never mind the product itself was I think what you said earlier the product itself says it can do something but it is so new itself it's not great at doing it yet and not enough people have broken it for the people to fix it in the right way and this is the unfortunate thing about kick starters and all new technology is there needs to be a million people to break it first before they're gonna fix it to do what it can do or find out that it can't actually do what they said it could do which is why we can rely on the lever and we go back to these things that we can control Michael did you want to speak to that question as well if I understood it right of course there are all these the temptations look there do that do that always when I followed that and I was I had to program something but I don't but I'm not a programmer then my whole rhythm of the day or the rehearsal or the rehearsal period gets smashed so I'm really trying to what I can do and what I can can come out of my fingers in that moment yeah to get more simple and yes all these things are existing but not for my generation anymore okay there's a question over by the wall there hi kind of going along with the materials but going the opposite direction I oversee a collection of marionettes that were made from the 30s to the 70s and when I talk to people about them their question often is who cares I know believe me I fought about it and so I think that's my question is what can I bring back to them what can I tell them about why using something that is not a movie or a TV show but that is something that you actually do in person why is that important how is that still important in 2024 1934 boy I do I do puppet theatre and play with these puppets because it's my my instrument to talk to other people I think when especially when we also perform for children children are more open and get direct feedback I think what's different with the movies in the theatre we all have to be active to animate the puppets or this object on the stage it depends on the piece and on the puppets of course but what we try to do that the children or the adults get active with their own brain to animate that and if it works then you have also a conversation with the children after the show they're open it's not oh I'm so much impressed by everything what's happening on the screen or on the stage I think for me it's this moment in puppet theatre to activate imagination or the fantasy to do something with the own brain and with the hands and the fingers that's something we still need that of course it gets more difficult and complex but it's something different the movies that has nothing to do with our work similar impulse I feel like I understand the impulse why people say that and I feel like to me they're meant to be operated and they're meant to be held and they're meant to be interacted with and we're to compare it to the rock and roll hall of fame which I went to and hated I thought it was a very boring place to be because it's full of these things it's mostly guitars and they should just be played and to concentrate them in one place exhausts me museums make me tired too and one time I was in Cincinnati and they were redoing their natural history museum and they didn't have a place to put the things so they took all the dinosaurs and they scattered them around the city so everything that was once in one building was in all the buildings all around the city and one is enough one is a lot so in some ways it's like the concentration of still inert puppets that people can't play with is torture and there's something really exciting about can we distribute this can we get this out to have more intimate interactive one-on-one engagement with it or smaller room engagement with it because if I walk into a room with a bunch of marionettes that I'm not allowed to touch hanging from the walls I don't know how long I can stay in that room and that's as a person who just loves them adores them but wants to pull them off the wall you know I think that's what I was going to say is that the dead puppet is a scary thing but that the because they're meant to be touched and played with when you have the life I think the important part is seeing is being able to see the making them as an object it can be off-putting and I think then the idea too that at least the idea of manipulating any object or puppeting any object even if it's not figurative is like a fun sense of play I think for the younger kids especially is something to nurture and to get going but yeah perhaps the museum could display them with animatronic hands that have and then the technology so this is what we need we need good robots that can articulate a puppet in a museum so that they're not as scary to the people who come and see them or hire a puppeteer to always be on hand at the museum would also help do we have more questions yes there's one in the back there this question is for all of you but Michael you spoke about your love of frogs and then later on finding the concrete context for the frogs through the poetry I was wondering if any of you have ever built a puppet or were working on a puppet that you're just obsessed with the movement and you don't feel like it needs a concrete context and the movement itself for the existence of the puppet itself is its own context of course it's always different but I find it's more the most the nicest thing when the things are coming together so I'm not doing that alone so there's a musician comes in or the director or a drama tour people and everybody brings in brings in something and then something out of these different energies something independent starts to work so it's not only me but somebody has to start something always so you start to have a frog today let's do it let's follow this first impulse and then a lot of things are coming up there's only a few projects we did where the idea was in the beginning to tell this story with these puppets and with this style it always other things came together and say oh you have this puppet and let's see where this one comes there how to explain this every puppet I can show you tell a different story so this this puppet for example I built it more than 20 years ago for a piece where I thought it was a piece about we were working on Schumann's music and about this romantic art I would like to have a puppet like this and then the puppet was on stage all the rehearsals it never went in and then another rehearsal starts with another project the puppet was there but that doesn't work here it doesn't make sense so it gets older and older the puppet was always hanging there and in Spleen it's there that's the moment where so the lines are very different and I like that when the puppet finds its own way I can talk I don't talk about music in Spleen there are puppets who have no poems they're just there so it's yeah is it okay? I'd add that I like gathering mechanisms and junk I hoard I go to the thrift store for nothing and I find things that I don't know what it's for yet but I had a boot expander for years there was a thing here and it would make this go out and I was like I don't know what this is for but I know that this could go in a puppet and do a cool thing so it just sat on a shelf until it had a need and then the thing I'd add is I have an artistic home and we do short work all the time and so it can be iterative and I can make a thing an image, an object a piece that I just get in front of people and it doesn't have to be its final form and I'll probably recycle that impulse in a show we do so it does help to have community and audience and reflection and the ability to get it wrong or not even wrong just like a form of right or a zero draft or... Great, so I think this last few questions and answers have really underscored something important about the materiality of the puppet which is that even though we like MEX and they're cool and we like discovering new materials etc that it's all in service of the story and I think that's where the robotics we're having some difficulty integrating that into the world of puppetry because how does that help us tell stories better than what we were doing with just human beings and materials and mechanisms so I think that's kind of the gist of the conversation in the last few minutes we have still time for some questions so yes So my question is how has working on the mechanics of the puppets influenced how you think about your own body's movement and I guess just the movement of things you use in daily life and vice-versa has have you become more aware of your body in ways that influence the puppet making process To the first part I've had to really increase my core because our particular rig has an obstruction so in order to access there's a lot of unnatural leaning that can't fully extend to get other muscles to help and there's always a good knot here that I now know how to stretch and work on so I definitely yeah some new muscles I've had to develop for that and for the first part yeah yeah I started to do it's incredible what's happening there especially if you work with marionettes if you find all these points where the energy is coming from from the balancing and everything that's so connected to our we should work maybe and I'm always excited I started to work with this martial arts martial arts fighting with all these movements that you have there and these exercises that's the same with the puppets there's the turning points where the energy going where's the energy stopping to follow the energy it's a horrible name the martial arts but there's something very beautiful although with these sticks yeah I try to do that and I'm always inspired and that's maybe how the puppets can go on that was a beautiful question and just as a reminder there are some puppet manipulation traditions in which the training consists of learning set forms just as you would in karate Bunraku or Sanlin Gurai is one of those we have another question yes there's someone there this is fascinating there's a theme I'm hearing emerge which I'd love to hear you talk about to do with mechanisms working in a way they're not supposed to or not intended I'm really appreciating what you said about new technologies that don't that are designed for lifestyle or particular function in the world but don't work in the hands of an artist right and so the artist wants to do in some ways I think is which is our job right is to break it to do it use it in a way it's not meant to for example and I would love that I'm now witnessed another person who goes into thrift stores for no good reason you know and and I it finds a weird object that just calls to you like this show is not written for you yet but you are telling me that you want to be in a puppet show so I need to buy you and keep you on my shelf for a while but what is it like a shoe stretcher or something you said but you're not going to use as a shoe stretcher or whatever that tool is you're going to use it for something else so I wonder if you could talk about this idea of breaking or misusing not abusing but collaborating with an object or technology in a way that it might be calling you to do that was not its intended purpose the hack as it were the hack that's the hack hacking hacking found technology yeah repurposing things the first thing that comes to mind show related that kind of thing would be reading a story that we wanted to adapt figuring out eventually that the form of it needed to be a clock and then saying like where can I find a cheap grandfather clock or something like that you know and then looking to see what exists and then finding the right one that's like oh I could hack this and turn it into images surfaces that we need like that kind of thing seems to be a great example of what you might be asking yeah yeah the hack yeah also there I mean that goes a little next what I thinking about is going to shops because for me it's quite horrible in Germany and Europe that all these shops are closing down and you buy that in the internet and Amazon and so you put in oh I need something red and green and it has to be like this so here you can buy it and tomorrow you have it so it changed for me at the moment also I called it and now I see all these internet performances where you see okay it's all from Google the set design and I ask myself if a which shop can I go to find to get inspired if it's not a flea market and you always get these flea market shows where are these places to go to in the future so I said I would like to make a show where you say I don't use no internet at all don't buy anything from the internet let's see what will come out of that this is also a shop but it works completely different and the research is so different but it's new, it's new I have no idea, I only see in Stuttgart a lot of places where every week I went there I get inspired by little that's an interesting I was talking to the people in the shop and they said perhaps this material they are gone after Corona they are all closed down I stand there and say what do I do now I can't go there anymore so it changed it's not erotic for me to buy it and next morning it lays in front of my door this electronic device it's not I don't get it it's another thing so I'm looking forward what will happen with these meeting points this is a collaborator it's like I've got a thing I haven't used it yet it's a buffer, it's a giant buffer you hold it and it's like a spinning buffer and I'm like this is great I can't believe I can just have one of these or like the little thing where people to practice golf in their house but it just releases one ball at a time like this is beautiful so yeah can I just find your question those are really good observations and we're leaning now into the material side of thing but because of our awareness of environmental disaster there's also more and more reflection on the materials that we use puppeteers have used a lot of really toxic materials in the past but there's also movement towards returning to natural materials so our research process shifted from things that we can find in a shop to things that we could find on a walk in the woods a few times I've played with toxic materials I've had a pretty bad experience I've made stuff I'm proud of that looked like but I don't know I prefer reuse materials I prefer natural materials stuff we have around cheeseworks I prefer cheese paper and cardboard I do use a lot of plastic both like reused plastic but like thermoplastics because they're so great you like shape lock and stuff like that you can buy beads of plastic that with hot water becomes malleable like almost putty and then you can shape it and it's great for prototyping and even longer but that's an internet thing I buy that on the internet I'm going to find like a natural spring of shape lock that sounds like a horrible spring the opposite of this question so just you were reflecting on the loss of this I'm not going to say shopping I'm going to say research so the experience of going into these shops and researching different objects and materials if we're losing that but we're gaining an awareness of ecological impact could that kind of research shift to like a walk in the woods and what you might find that you could make a puppet with so what I said with these shops there are more technical things either wire or something that's not the for me it's not really the puppet if I build a puppet then it's still very conventional wood and some plaster and something very cheap what I can use nothing better what I buy somewhere a little technique the basic one would be to carve it in wood still it's still the best the best material wood for me great so I think we have time for one last question okay come with it can we well can you meet Blair in the middle again you start thank you so much so I think a nice maybe finishing question I'll just sit down here is what can you say to speak to the durability of your puppets and the longevity of puppet theater thank you I'm responsible ours could go at any time ours are so I work in my basement I keep them in the basement and if I have them out and I'm working I will I have once in the middle of the night hearing my heater turn on had just a panic of like oh the pipes are going to blow they're going to soak everything and I'll lose the whole show and they're in tubs I keep them in tubs but you know you leave stuff out when you're working yeah it's they're very delicate they could rip tomorrow after the show I'm not good at making puppets the last I think once I've gotten the idea out usually you know and then put it in front of some people that's I got out of it what I want I want to move on to another thing so like occasionally a show like this where it's like oh we should do this some more we'll rebuild and like you know make improvements and try to make it last longer but a lot of times like the you know I make a thing that supports the expression at that moment and I get through that expression and I'm kind of move on also they are different so there are puppets who only live for one show so they are built in the show just before the show and they break for the show or they burn that's so they only have one life and and then once they get very old this one this that's my I find it amazing to get older with puppets they show you how we were thinking 20 years ago you still can go in that's that's incredible that's the own dialogue ah that's where I was what I was thinking about I had one I can maybe tell this with this dead getting older and give it to the next when this puppeteer Albrecht Rosa died his puppets were still hanging in his workshop and his assistant she was still living with these puppets and one day when I was visiting she was can you play the puppet please for me and I was watching these puppets my whole life so take it take it and I would like to see how it moves again because she was not playing it and it was spooky after one minute I had to give it away I can't do that because you are in the brain of another person who was constructing that so that was a very old old puppet from another from another puppeteer so they can get very old but some if they can can be played that's my question it's possible they go over generations they get played and played but for Albrecht's puppets they are in a way dead they are in the museum now so it's also there it's very different they get old okay so we're ending with death we did it so thank our panelists thank everyone for coming thank you so much I'll get sandwiches you get the pie