From amateur to professional, UC Davis faculty, alumni and local residents describe their exploration into the world of puppets
By HANNAH OSBORN — arts@theaggie.org
For the first time in 45 years, “The Muppet Show” will return to screens in a special television event to celebrate the acclaimed program’s 50th anniversary on Feb. 4. The show, as well as other Jim Henson projects such as the long-running Sesame Street, represent the staying power of puppetry in small screen media and its generational impact among not just American audiences, but on an international scale.
However, the art of puppetry is not restricted to television — in fact, it has a long history spanning across nearly all cultures and time periods. In Davis, this interest in the mimicry of life is expressed on multiple levels of experience, from professional productions to community-based clubs.
Throughout the years, the UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance has staged a number of performances implementing puppets. Scene Shop Supervisor Catherine Kunkel explained one instance of the use of puppets in university shows; in a spring 2024 staging of “She Kills Monsters” — a play built off of the world of Dungeons & Dragons — multiple puppets were utilized to portray a wide array of beasts.
“There were some questions as to how many props and puppets we’d be able to borrow from other theatres, so I created scale models of multiple puppets and created a wooden mock-up of a 3-foot-tall Kobold, which is a dragon-like creature seen in Dungeons & Dragons,” Kunkel said. “I padded out the wood armatures with foam and paper mâché, while strategic use of fishing line allowed the puppet to be controlled with one hand.”
In 2007, Artistic Director of Sacramento-based Puppet Art Theater Co. Art Grueneberger directed a fully-puppetified production of “Man of La Mancha.” Part of a thesis project for his UC Davis Master of Fine Arts degree in acting, Grueneberger used life-sized puppets to represent the characters within the show. Grueneberger discussed the audience reaction to the reveal.
“You’re in the show about 15-minutes before a puppet is ever revealed,” Grueneberger said. “When I do a kid show, a puppet comes up and the kids are going crazy, right? [In ‘Man of La Mancha’] it’s all adults in the audience, and I feel this collective ‘hmm.’”
Grueneberger then discussed the experience of watching an audience come to believe in a puppeteer’s presentation.
“At the end of that production they were on their feet,” Grueneberger said. “And if you can get [adults] to fall in love with puppets, if you can get them to begin to care about these inanimate objects — that to me is the biggest magic trick I’ve ever pulled off.”
Grueneberger also touched on the impact that puppetry as an artform possesses, providing an example from a production of “A Thousand Cranes,” where the main character is a young girl (depicted by a puppet) dying from cancer as a result of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
“There were three puppeteers operating the puppet, and when she was finally dead, all three of us stood up and walked away from her,” Grueneberger said. “When an actor dies on stage, the lights go down and you know that the actor gets up and walks off stage. But with a puppet, there was something about the puppeteer, the life force of the puppet walking away, that was so much juicier to me, and I was hooked.”
This enthusiasm for puppetry is shared by the Davis Puppetry Club, which primarily operates out of Third Space Art Collective. Launched in the summer of 2024, the club offers a place to workshop the creation of puppets and the production of several shows, such as a past Pride performance and a “Rocky Horror Puppet Show.”
Lou Taylor, a member of the club and a volunteer for the art collective, shared the reasons behind their interest in puppetry.
“Puppets can do so much by just wiggling around,” Taylor said. “Even puppets that don’t speak or don’t have facial features are able to create so much emotion and personality. I have always been a kind of a quiet person or someone that doesn’t share a lot of personal emotions
openly, which makes someone like me with a big love for theater drawn to puppets. You can be as hidden or as seen as you’d like.”
While a wide array of materials can be used to create puppets, club members expressed an emphasis on the use of recyclable materials, a sentiment echoed by Third Space Art Collective’s free art supply pantry. The club aims to be a point of accessibility into the arts, and welcomes anyone who wants to express their creativity; a viewpoint shared by Davis Puppetry Club Founder August Page.
“Anyone can be a part of puppetry, because puppetry can be anything,” Page said. “Like to sing? Singing puppet. Like to draw? Work on sets. Like to write? Write scripts.”
If you’re looking forward to the return of “The Muppet Show,” you don’t have to wait until Feb. 4 to experience puppetry. Grueneberger’s Puppet Art Theater Co. tours all over California, performing hundreds of shows a year. Additionally, UC Davis Theatre and Dance continues to debut new productions, finding various ways to tell stories with life-like props.
The Davis Puppetry Club will also be doing a short performance at Third Space Art Collective with UC Davis’ Sapphic Club during the next 2nd Friday ArtAbout on Feb. 13. For anyone interested in exploring the world of puppetry, the Davis Puppetry Club meets every second and fourth Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Third Space Art Collective.
Written by: Hannah Osborn— arts@theaggie.org
