Maggie and Fletcher have a dark, goofy, slightly improvisational style of puppetry. They like to make live action cartoons that play with well known tropes and conventions. Their PuppetLab residency will be used to develop a choose your own adventure puppet show. Harkening back to the 80s text based choose your own adventure video games, Maggie and Fletcher hope to make a show where (almost) anything can happen, bringing the unbridled and unhinged energy of “kid improv” to their work, while maintaining an aesthetic and humor that resonates with adults.

More and more, I recognize that my spirituality is simply a sense of wonder. I seek to explore questions together and to share marvel in the mundane. My shows ask questions and invite audiences to experience wonder together. I am currently fascinated by collections, toy trains, and simple machines, particularly how they influence our understanding of commercial abstraction and international relations. In this, I work from visual inspiration to create kinetic objects which illustrate broad ideas, typically using shadow puppets and repurposed materials. This is a new exploration in that it is my first time creating solo work for adults, and my first time truly addressing identity within my own work.

Being from a visual artist background, I have definitely felt comfortable in two dimensional shadow puppetry. As a Puppet Labarrist, I want to broaden my skills and performance abilities by expanding into three dimensional puppetry and designs. This will be a great learning opportunity for creating/performing a longer piece. I find that my best ideas for a piece are found with the simple act of doodling. Sometimes doodling figures, playing with letterforms or drawing monsters. That is where the concepts for puppets are laid out, sketched in pencil and refined. Then everything comes together through making.

I envision this new puppetry work as a queer fantasy – a sort of unofficial sequel to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. As a queer person, I was powerfully drawn to mermaids from a very early age. As a young child, I was fascinated by these hybrid mythological creatures who were half-fish, half-human, and combined a delicate beauty with an animal otherness. Puppetry is essential to my idea because my piece explores the stories of childhood outsiders; so often, children project their own wishes, desires, dreams, and fears onto other inanimate objects – thus making them animate, and full of life.