Jeghetto’s Workshop founder Tarish Pipkins was already a muralist, sculptor, musician and spoken word artist when he got turned onto puppetry. He was excited by the marionettes in the movie “Being John Malkovich,” which featured John Cusack as a busking puppeteer, retelling the scandalous medieval story of Abelard and Heloise in street performances.
Pipkins strung together his own marionettes out of found materials, and in the 15 years since has become a master puppeteer, winning grants from the Jim Henson Foundation and now serving on its board. He previously visited New Orleans with his presentation on how he makes fantastically articulated animal and dinosaur marionettes.
For this year’s New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival, he returns from his home in North Carolina to present “Spinokio” (stylized as “5P1N0K10”), in which he takes the classic tale of Pinocchio and updates it as an Afrofuturist story. Instead of a wooden puppet, the rapping Spinokio is a robot dreaming of becoming a real boy in a dystopian world of AI and technology. Pipkins’ two sons perform in the show, and it incorporates marionettes and video projections.
That’s one of 30 shows in the 10th annual New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival, running at a dozen venues across the city April 4-7. There also are workshops, late-night puppet slams and both day and nighttime giant puppet parades. Visiting and local companies run the gamut in puppetry styles and shows for different audiences, from gleeful family-friendly presentations to content for mature audiences.
“We have more shows and venues than ever before,” festival founder Pandora Gastelum says. “It’s something about turning 10. You hit double digits, and you blow up.”
“5P1N0K10” will be presented at the Contemporary Arts Center, which is a festival venue for the first time. Also at CAC is the innovative shadow puppetry company Night Shade, which presents “Exquisite Corpse,” about a resurrected dead punk and a necromancer.
The Los Angeles company Rasputin’s Marionettes previously brought “Sugarbitch Goulash” to New Orleans. Based on the true story of the Black Widow Murderers, it features two older women who meet at a fitness center and start a sordid partnership. Rasputin returns with the next chapter of his story about Helen and Olga, presented at Happyland Theater.
Local artist and musician Panacea Theriac, aka Miss Pussycat, has presented her puppets in shows, videos and at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the CAC, as well as museums outside New Orleans. She’ll present a kinetic puppet workshop at the Spellcaster Lodge.
The Spellcaster also is the venue for the renowned puppeteering duo of Peter and Debbie Lutzky Allen’s Parasol Puppets. The duo will present their version of a classic Punch and Judy show, with one puppeteer controlling both clownish characters, and the other performer leading the audience through the show. It is suitable for all ages.
Harmonic Drift is based in Indonesian and Balinese shadow puppetry. Their show “Wayang Earth?!” features mythical creatures in a fantastic world, with Katie Harrell operating more than 20 shadow puppets and Dan Bales providing music on everything from a Balinese gamelan to improvised instruments. The all-ages show is at the New Orleans Healing Center.
Keep up with the latest events at calendar.gambitweekly.com.
Seattle’s Shadow Girls Cult has a cinematic style. Their “Unraveling: A Cinematic Shadow & Live Animation Show” is a series of vignettes drawing on visual styles of film noir, sci-fi and surrealism. The show is at the New Orleans Healing Center.
Gastelum’s Mudlark Puppeteers are premiering part of a new show about New Orleans’ Mother Catherine Seals, who created the Temple of Innocent Blood in the 9th Ward in the 1920s. She was a healer and spiritualist and took in the homeless, especially unwed mothers and their children.
“Because of Jim Crow, a lot of charitable institutions that took care of orphans had become segregated, even the religious ones,” Gastelum says. “You had all of these children of color who had nowhere to turn. Mother Catherine raised a generation of those kids.”
Jim Crow may also help explain why little is known of Seals. Some of her sermons only survived because they were recorded by author Zora Neale Hurston when she visited the temple in the 1920s.
The show is a musical exploration of Seals’ life and beliefs. It will be presented at The Temple, currently part of the home of John Cameron Mitchell. The full piece will premiere next year in a site-specific performance near where Seals’ church and center once stood.
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The festival features two parades. The nighttime parade has grown in recent years as giant puppets have become more popular in the city. Groups like the Krewe of Monsters are past participants in workshops with Gastelum and the festival, she says.
This year, there is a parade at 10 p.m. Saturday and a new, more kid-friendly daytime parade at 1 p.m. Sunday. Both parades start on Press Street at Plessy Park. The festival also has a cardboard workshop for those who want to build a giant puppet to join the parades.
The festival has more family-friendly content than usual because the Southwest Region of the Puppeteers of America is holding its conference at the festival. Many members of the Houston-based group focus on family-friendly shows.
The festival lineup also includes the performers Midnight Radio Show, Mr. Leo’s Wonder Bus, Jacqueline Wade, Poose the Puppet, Toybox Theatre, Cook y Doh, Velvet Effigy, Harry Mayronne, Flutterbug, abandoned ships, Cila Puccadella, BreakFAST Puppets, Esmerelda the Puppet, Nate Puppets and more.
For a schedule and tickets, visit neworleansgiantpuppetfest.com.
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