I’m working on a couple of puppetry projects currently, and will continue to post things here on my personal tumblr referencing them, but thought I’d discuss them here in case anybody wanted to follow those tumblrs as well.

The first is my troupe Death By Puppets (of which me and my dodgy puppet construction and performance is only a small part: with Maria also doing puppeteering and keeping us moving forward; TreeLobsters writing fantastic scripts for us; Mark doing all our video and editing; Surly Amy being our west coast puppeteer, and a few others that I don’t have links for).  We’ve had one full shoot that’s still in editing, and are prepping for a second in the coming weeks, with a pile of scripts still to choose from.

My other puppetry project is, as I have mentioned previously, my variant on the “X A Week” concept that Jonathan Coulton and Len Peralta inspired with their Thing (song) and Geek (art/trading card) A Week projects: Puppet A Week.  I’m wrapping up week one today, and start week two tomorrow. The Puppet A Week is a more personal project, but also falls under the overall Death By Puppets realm as much of the reason for building a puppet a week is so we have a cast of characters to use in our videos and such.  Some of the other reasons are that I enjoy building puppets and want to stretch myself so that I’m growing as a puppet maker, and hopefully as a performer as well.

One of the reasons I think Puppetry works for me is that it scratches multiple itches for me: the “making things” itch, the storytelling itch, and the performance itch. I still miss the days in high-school and college of acting  (and even some of the times in church, when that was a thing I did).  I enjoy making stuff, be that model airplanes, or puppets, or woodworking, or baking, or whatever. I like the experience of starting with a pile of materials or ingredients and ending up with something cool in the end. Though it’s largely lying fallow right now, I’ve had Wordtrip as part of my life for almost ten years now (is it 8 or 9?), and that has all stemmed from my love story telling and the written/spoken word. I love language and, though I’m never very good at it myself, I love a story well told and appreciate the power of that.