Lending a puppet’s hand December 9, 2009

Posted by Paul Busby in Uncategorized.
trackback

 

 

Donovan Zimmerman approaches what would normally appear to be a hopelessly tangled heap of metal and begins dancing it over a table in the old Saxapahaw community center.

“We’re doing a show called Love and Robots in February,” he said. “I thought this already looked pretty robotic. Maybe it could be robot guts.”

Behind him the vibrant masks of elemental spirits, African animals, sun goddesses and trees, all stare sleepily from the walls of the former 1950’s gym, quiet and somber as the rain outside pours steadily on what has now become a puppet studio.

Zimmerman, a puppet-maker as well as the man behind his masks, paces the worn wooden court and explains his creations. He breathes life into the entities with small movements of his hands, while he talks about the jumbled piles of work that have earned him a living for going on 12 years.

“Jan and I made this old man’s face for our Hungry Ghost performance last January,” Zimmerman said. “It’s based on the traditional Asian religious idea that people who are greedy in this life will return as insatiable ghosts in the after-life.”

Zimmerman and his puppeteering friend, Jan Burger, are co-founders of the Triangle area’s Paperhand Puppet Intervention, an activist-oriented company whose headquarters are located in the small river mill town of Saxapahaw.

The two started their first show together in 1998 for a festival that promoted environmental awareness about the Haw River, whose shore their new studio now rests on.

“The idea came about to make a puppet show for the Haw River Festival to support their ideas, which seemed like a good fit,” Zimmerman said. “It got a lot of great feedback so we just kept working together.”

Their projects have since taken them to protests in Seattle about the practices of the World Trade Organization, and also to the nation’s capital, where the company invigorated thought about the repercussions of oil drilling in Alaska.

These demonstrations are known as interventions to the Paperhand group and its followers, who believe that it’s easy for people to forget the natural world around them when they go about their day-to-day business.

“The idea of an intervention is sort of like making our art a wake-up call to live from the heart, rather than from these other human conditions that take over like greed,” Zimmerman explained.

As far as their own business goes, they maintain this consciousness by watching the materials they use. They carefully collect recycled products like cardboard, fabric scraps, and paper bags for the masks’ bodies, and utilize a cornstarch goop to bring them all together.

Zimmerman said that the majority of their income comes from doing gigs at festivals, fairs, or parades, in addition to receiving commissions from museums and businesses that want to use the company’s art.

“Jan and I aren’t rich you know, but we just make enough to keep going to the next project and having a decent life, eating organic food and driving around,” Zimmerman said. “I didn’t start doing this thinking, ‘Oh yeah we’re going to get rich!’”

But their biggest annual income comes from the six-weekend show they put on every summer at the Forest Theatre in Chapel Hill. The show runs from August through September, and their latest performance brought in a total of 12,000 people.

The show is a demanding time of year, requiring the efforts of up to 30 veteran Paperhand puppeteers and musicians. The diverse cast even includes three family members: local potter Sarah Howe, and her two children Alicia Best and Alan “Pickle Dude” Best, who was nicknamed after his affinity to eating pickles.

Alan got involved with the Paperhand group at its very beginning, when he was only 7 years old. Zimmerman was looking for a small performer for one of their first Haw River Festival shows, and Alan showed interest.

Afterward Alan continued to go to rehearsals with his mother, who was his ride. “I’m going to be driving back and forth so go ahead and throw a stick in my hand,” Howe told Zimmerman.

From there it was a family affair. After 10 years, Howe brings her experience to the stage, and still gets a rush from the performances.

“There’s something very freeing about being behind a mask, especially for me as a performer,” Howe said. “Put a mask on my head and I become something different, and I’m free from myself.”

Both Howe and Zimmerman stress the importance of collaboration in their performances. Music and sound effects are an integral part of each show, and the group uses its own band to amplify the visual art.

“The music is what stirs the emotion,” Zimmerman said. “The expressions and the body language of the mask wearer do that too, but sound effects and music are really a huge part of what we do.” 

In the backroom of the studio, an old piano, drums, and speakers lay amidst the bodies of more puppets, evidencing the true fusion that the group is managing to achieve.

But what might be the biggest engine behind this group’s success is their intimate bond with the community near Chapel Hill and Saxapahaw. Their parades are mostly “people-powered,” so that local fans can show up and get their hands on these larger than life puppets.

The group also has summer workdays where they invite everyone in the area to help paint, sew, and add paper-mâché to unfinished puppets. For Zimmerman and the Paperhand group, the strings of these puppets tie their community together.

“Really I’m in it just as much for that, to create an opportunity for creativity,” Zimmerman said. “I’m not doing this work to be like, ‘I made this. Look at me, look at me.’ It’s more just about wanting to provide this platform for people who work with us to shine.”

For a calendar of performances visit the Paperhand site.