Puppets are well known from “The Muppets” and “Sesame Street” as goofy characters that entertain the masses and teach our children how to count. However, take a turn off Sesame Street and talented puppeteers are cutting lose and telling mature, experimental and downright raunchy stories with their craft.
These adventurous puppeteers showed up at the Spork in Hand Puppet Slam this past weekend at the Nickelodeon Theater as part of the Indie Grits Festival. Over the course of the show, Rumpelstiltskin complained about Gov. Nikki Haley and his unjust imprisonment, a host of number characters skewered the No Child Left Behind initiative and a cake monster gave birth.
It was a crazy show, and according to puppeteer Beau Brown, that’s par for the course.
“There’s no such thing as an average Puppet Slam,” he said.
Brown oversees the Atlanta Puppet Slam, “The Puckin Fuppet Show,” and produces the National Puppet Slam. He also emerged on stage wearing only a diaper after struggling through the mouth of a puppet, a testament to the freedom of the format.
“When you don’t have to tell stories with humans in them, it really frees you up to tell whatever story you want,” he said. “Y’know, I can come out of another character, like be birthed out of them, and then technically play two characters in the same show … so it sort of frees you to do things you couldn’t do with just actors on the stage.”
Puppeteers Gregg Van Laningham and Qate Bean teamed up for a relationship play featuring Laningham as Art the Robot and Bean as his girlfriend. Laningham got into puppeteering as a creative outlet at engineering graduate school and Bean started to work in puppetry as a natural development of her acting preferences, and their Art shows work as a fusion of these perspectives.
“He’s all sciencey and I’m all actory and so it’s wonderful when we get to combine what we do,” Bean said.
The performance was real and true to life despite one half of the relationship being a puppet, something the pair thinks is important.
“Our joke is it’s cheaper than therapy,” Laningham said. “It’s sort of a combination of relationship aspects that have come up in our respective relationships and being able to take some stuff and thoughts and feelings I have and sort of repurpose them and express them in a different way helps to give me a different perspective … I use humor as a defense mechanism, so it all comes together pretty organically.”
Bean feels that there is an advantage to using puppets, rather than a human actor.
“The great thing about Art is that even though it’s an absurd idea for a relationship, he is what he is, and the reason why these scenes would just be … it’s almost harder for people to buy it if it were two human actors,” Bean said. “It’s so much easier for people to relate when there’s someone that’s almost completely inhuman.”
Puppeteer Brandi Hoofnagle performed a show that directly criticized No Child Left Behind, and she sees the format as well suited to tackling serious issues, as with her show on Alzheimers, among other subjects.
“I feel like puppets allow you to have a conversation where sometimes … it turns into an argument, but puppets bridge that gap of uncomfortable topics,” Hoofnagle said. “Anytime I do the show I always have educators come up and talk to me and tell me their stories.”
Though the choice of puppets may seem odd to some, the medium allows for some bold new forms of storytelling.
“It’s a chance to experiment with an idea that might not be able to support a longer form of a show, kind of in the same way that a short story could be a little bit more experimental than a novel,” Laningham said.
“It’s like cartoons in real life — you can kind of get away with whatever you want, you can make it happen — but with a direct connection to the audience that you can’t have in animation,” Brown explained.
Both human and nonhuman, cartoonish yet oddly realistic, puppets have a special effect that other mediums can’t quite match, as proved by the experimental insanity of the Puppet Slam.
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