April 10 - 19, 2026

Led by Co-Artistic Directors Oanh Vu and Sofia Padilla

PUPPET LAB is a 2-week festival of radical, genre-expanding, boundary–pushing puppet work, the culmination of a 6-month development residency for emerging puppetry artists.

I do a lot of performing and adapting the work of others, but it's not very often I get to take on my own ideas. PUPPET LAB will allow me a chance to develop an idea I've been sitting on for years.

Whale Whale Whale: What Have We Here? is the story of a nature documentary host who is on the lookout for the very rare Elusive Fish when he gets distracted by three very suspicious, shifty-eyed whales. Just what are they up to over there?  Maximizing on audience participation, helpers will be randomly selected to dig through trash, shift through mail, piece together clues and decode secret messages, all with help from the audience, as we follow the whales to figure out what secrets they are hiding!

I am a multi-media artist working across live performance, cartooning, animation, and design. My practice is most influenced by finding intersections and overlap between mediums, whether that be bringing my cartoons onstage with me when I’m performing improvised theater, animating a cartoon version of myself, or mixing photo/video elements with overdrawn digital art.

My PUPPET LAB project will blend puppetry, improvisation, and storytelling to create DOLLY WHO?, an invitation to imagination land, where every resident is either a monster, a loose concept of a creature, or a Dolly just trying to get by in a very real world that’s always and ever-changing. The performance will be designed as “episodes”, where Dolly and cast will learn a lesson or nugget of wisdom, such as how to share, how to file taxes, or how to find joy when the world is, for all intents and purposes, on fire.

I tend to think of myself as an illustrator in recovery: raised to sketch and paint and ink before my head spun off and rolled into Minneapolis, where my spirit was reawakened by chickens made from cardboard. My art became messier, freer, and more emotional in an active three-dimensional space.

For PUPPET LAB, I'll create a show about a young child who flees home through his bedroom window and hops aboard a train in the night, chasing the resting place of his dead ferret. He crosses paths with another man (an ailing freight hobo) who agrees to chaperone the boy to his destination: an afterlife in the form of a traveling fair. In this bizarre and mythical canvas the child and the man are made to confront abandonment, addiction, grief, and finally release…

My Puppet Lab project will feature an archivist who is recording memories of survivors of a transformed universe, and a living city trying to understand the lives of people surviving within itself. I want to use automata, crankie, phenakistoscope, zoetrope – and other early animation paper cut devices if possible. Additionally, I plan to use the silhouettes of actors in masks.

I would use shadow puppetry to build the world around them, blurring the lines of “animation” and shadow puppetry. I’ve worked in animation and I’ve worked in shadow puppetry, but this show would be my first exploration of the combination of those worlds in a live performance.