Lights dim in the Rhode Island School of Design’s Metcalf Auditorium as the chatter of the audience comes to a halt. On stage, two rod marionette puppets appear, passing a ball back and forth and laughing at each other when one drops the ball. Suddenly, a monster comes on stage. Initially, the puppets run away; but then they become curious and attempt to approach the creature. The monster — composed of a full-body costume — is wary of the puppets at first, too. But eventually, it warms up to them and the room goes fully dark.
This scene, titled “Recess,” was the first of five performances of “Puppet Cabaret” — the culmination of a Wintersession course on Puppetry. Taught by RISD’s first visiting puppeteer Andrew Murdock, the course was first offered in 2024 and supported by a donation from RISD parent Cheryl Henson, the daughter of world-renowned puppeteer Jim Henson — the creator of the Muppets.
Over the next few years, visiting puppeteers from around the world will be teaching courses at RISD, opening up a new medium of exploration for students.
According to Murdock, the course began with object manipulation, “which is just understanding how an object can be performed,” he told The Herald. The students then studied shadow puppetry, an artform where artists project images onto a wall using cut-out silhouettes. Finally, students focused on three dimensional forms of puppetry, concentrating on performance rather than construction. The course’s final project requires the class of fifteen students to utilize different forms of puppetry and storytelling.
“The Barber’s Clock” — the second performance of the night — began with the projection of a clock with a face onto a cloth screen. The audience is introduced to the old barber, who created this clock of wisdom, which always ticks. Many marionette puppet characters appear on stage, seeking out the knowledge of the clock — which only answers in riddles. As the performance concludes, the audience learns that only the barber has the power to stop the clock’s ticking.
“Dragon Quest,” the next performance, displays an example of directly manipulated table-top puppetry, where artists control figurines connected to sticks. The scene starts off with a farmer lounging on his property, when suddenly he’s eaten by a dragon. In the next scene, two knights argue about who is a better archer. The sound of a dragon’s roar interrupts the knights’ conversation and they decide they must slay the creature, beginning by tracking it into a cave. Discovering the dragon asleep, the knights attempt to kill it; but instead the dragon wakes up and attacks them. Thinking the dragon will kill them, the knights confess their love to each other. The knights eventually kill the dragon, and the farmer magically reappears.
“I love that I’ve been able to explore,” said Amal Montelibano, a first-year at RISD and a part of the “Dragon Quest” production. She added that the class helped hone her “ability to work with other people, improvise and make a connection to an inanimate object.”
Next, “A Wolf for a Rabbit” combines large-scale directly manipulated puppets with shadow and costume elements. The narrator of the scene, a crow, tells the story of a fox chasing a rabbit. The fox stalks the rabbit, but the rabbit strikes back. The crow tells the fox that a girl in red can help the fox gain revenge. Eventually, the girl and fox merge to become one creature, and set out to kill the rabbit. The performance concludes with the gruesome death of the rabbit.
The final performance — “Conception and Delivery; a Sex Ed. Course” — used a combination of hand and rod puppetry, as well as a costume puppet. The story follows a boy called Jimmy who asks his grandmother how children are made. Jimmy then fantasizes about life with a girl from school he has a crush on.
Marco Ammann-Bianciardi, a RISD third-year who was a part of “Recess,” always loved puppets but never performed due to stage fright.
“It was a big hurdle for me,” he said. Still, he took the course, as he has “been trying to get further and further out of (his) comfort zone.”
“Puppet Cabaret” was met with admiration from audience members. Erminio Pinque, a former RISD instructor of 33 years, has always been a fan of object theater, and said that “puppetry has this way of being like a moving gallery show — a show and tell of objects, where time and space just works differently.”
Murdock wanted to introduce a platform for puppetry because he felt like there was not a lot of theater during his time at RISD. To him, puppetry is like “great connective tissue that rarely exists by itself. It’s always bridging gaps between other mediums.”
Pinque shared this sentiment, stating that he was excited to see new and more diverse mediums being taught at RISD.
“I think that artists who graduate from this institution having experienced puppetry or witnessing it,” will be great for the world, he said.
Of puppetry, he added, “we need it in our daily lives.”
