It was my privilege, this past Tuesday, to moderate a panel of puppeteers for Calgary’s Festival of Inanimate Objects. The subject of our discussion was—broadly—the nature of the political statement that the puppet artist makes—if any. 

I opened the conversation with a few broad rhetorical strokes, in which I reminded everyone of the tumultuous nature of the past year—the pandemic; the attack on the seat of US government by a mob egged on by the then president himself; the Black Lives Matter protests that seized our cities; the rise of the extremist right; our own soul-searching on the issue of systemic racism.

But if I expected some artistic version of the podcasts and the hand-wringing articles that we all hear and read—I was wrong. 

My panel was composed of widely diverse artists located in different cities and cultures—Vancouver, Calgary, Minneapolis and Toronto; and as each of them talked about what they do, their audience and their artistic missions, I learned something quite different and quite wonderful about puppetry. 

Just a quick introduction to the four panelists will demonstrate what I mean.

·       Chamindika Wanduragala is an American of Asian descent, the founder and artistic director of Monkeybear Harmolodic Workshop in Minneapolis. Monkeybear offers a puppet intensive for black, Indigenous and people of color, which is followed by a six month mentoring program—all free of charge. By creating access and fostering new art this way she is actively building diversity in an art form that (at least in North America) has been overwhelmingly white: concrete political action that goes far beyond rhetoric. And she is giving voice to those artists and the audiences they serve.

·       David Anderson, founder and co-artistic director of Clay and Paper Theatre in Toronto, has been performing with puppets in the public space for fifty-one years. Street performance takes huge courage. You’re completely vulnerable to the whims and moods of a transient audience—and you have to win its attention and hold it long enough to pass the hat: no easy feat. David has developed a company, and a long-established locus in and around Dufferin Grove Park, a culturally diverse part of Toronto. Over the years, he and his company have developed a creative relationship with that community. An outstanding example: at Hallowe’en every year, they mount The Night of Dread, when they canvas the community for the fear that matters most that year—and then create giant puppets and a performance that articulates that fear. As many as thirty thousand people attend—and participate. This is political action by another name.  

·       Chloe Ziner, co-founder and co-artistic director of Vancouver’s Mind of a Snail Puppet Company really blew me away. The work that she and her partner, Jessica Gabriel perform is original and strange and beautiful—a combination of visual art, shadow theatre, clowning, and music. Before the panel I assumed, having seen only one of their productions, that they were a bit esoteric, almost “art for art sake”—and how wrong I was. Their whole focus is giving voice to the voiceless, exploring and interpreting issues of environmental devastation, gender and identity, and giving voice to the people of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side during our opiate crisis. 

·       Peter Balkwill, co-founder and co-artistic director of one of Canada’s best known and beloved theatre troupes, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop (he is also an assistant Professor of at University of Calgary). This is the company whose inspired and crazy production, The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, first hit me with the puppetry bug ten years ago. The genius of puppetry is always insurrectionist; it mocks the pompous and reveals the folly of convention—and Old Trout’s brilliant theatre excels at that. But they also train a new generation of artists through their intensives and recently have left the confines of the physical theatre to co-create a lantern show that celebrates the bison, the foundational species so central to the life of First Nations people on the prairies, almost exterminated by American industry a century ago.

Throughout its long history, puppet theatre and puppet ritual (which predates the human variety) have spoken truths about our condition, our conflicts, our dreams and fears and loves that are too deep for words. That’s its power. That’s as true of the ritual creatures summoned by aboriginal shamans as the gabby and loveable creatures of Sesame Street; and it remains true of the magic created by the four artists on that panel. 

That’s why, by its nature, this art is intrinsically political, both in the statements it makes, and in its impact on the communities it serves. It doesn’t have to preach: it is.

That was the first big thing I learned from this panel. The second thing was far more troubling, and it came two days later in the course of a very different meeting—a Catholic one, where as part of the agenda, I was asked to explore a particular scriptural text. 

It’s not the details of the meeting that matter here: it’s the contrast between it and the panel. On the Tuesday, I was with a group of artists who had risked everything for their art. Life as a creative artist is not easy. Mostly—except for a handful of stars—it means financial insecurity and often poverty. And then there’s the uncertainty of being dependent on the whim of a changing audience for what constitutes the lifeblood of every artist: connection. 

The religious meeting was a complete contrast. We talked about laying down our lives. We talked about loving our neighbor as ourselves. We talk about living the freedom and joy of the Gospel. But we don’t actually do it. And while we scrupulously avoid judging or condemning other individuals, we lament the secular society around us, with its “heresy” of relativity and its lack of any need for God—or, at least, for organized religion, a very different thing.

So I found greater witness to the real life and mission of Christ in those secular artists, who courageously and faithfully give their lives for their art, and that art is prophetic in its courageous truth-telling. It is also a work of love. 

Has the Spirit abandoned the churches, leaving them to contemplate their own decay as they slip into increasing irrelevance and disuse? Not quite. Not quite. But I think that people like me, who have a foot in both the secular and the religious worlds, will increasingly find real life outside those structures.  Another of the truths that puppets tell.