‘Breathing life into an inanimate object’: Santa Cruz and the art and magic of puppetry

It’s the final day of class at what might be the most fun course on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. Camilla Henneman’s class on puppetry is over, and students gather inside the darkened theater space at the performing arts complex to watch their final projects, short films designed to show off their finished puppets. 

A few of the short films reach for poetry and/or poignance. But most are goofs, comic shorts of (mostly) hand puppets, some of which kinda/sorta resemble animals in the natural world, while others of which are so charmingly weird — finding that paradoxical state of being ugly and cute at the same time — that they could only come from the human imagination.

Early into the presentation, it strikes me that puppetry — what most of us consider a silly pastime for preschoolers — certainly must be one of the most underappreciated of all art forms. It combines visual inventiveness and craft/design skills with performance chops and theatricality. Like movies, drama, circus and many other forms of spectacle, puppetry combines visual arts and performing arts, which is, after all, the primary quest of the highest forms of entertainment.

“Puppetry is everything,” said veteran puppeteer Ricki Vincent. “It’s breathing life into an inanimate object. It could be a sock. It could be a stick. It’s Charlie Chaplin sticking forks into a pair of dinner rolls. It can be anything that catches the watcher’s imagination and makes them suspend their disbelief for a short while.” Vincent is quick to expand the limited notion that some people might have of puppetry. He said that people inside costumes — Big Bird, Chewbacca, etc. — qualify as full-body puppets. Puppetry includes anything from 3-D creations of digital software to lipstick drawn on knuckles to mimic a mouth. 

Vincent is the director of the nonprofit Puppetry Institute at the Capitola Mall. And he has nothing to do with Henneman’s class at UCSC. But taken together, the two act as poles of an artistic environment that takes puppetry seriously, as an art form, a teaching tool, a career and a means of transformative personal expression.

On one level, we are living in the world that Jim Henson made. Henson, of course, was the visionary behind the Muppets, “Sesame Street,” “Fraggle Rock” and the groundbreaking visual effects company Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which, taken together, have exerted an influence on popular entertainment that can’t be easily measured.

For seven years, Vincent’s Puppetry Institute — originally located inside the Octagon at the Museum of Art & History in downtown Santa Cruz — has been engaging students in the fine art of puppet-making and puppet performance, and that includes digital and computer animation. In the Institute’s two adjoining spaces at the Capitola Mall, students can tackle creative projects with a number of tools including 3-D printers to create resin or filament masks or costumes and the computer software to make the designs. Fine art, drawing, crafting, special effects, makeup — the Institute embraces it all as part of its mission. Mixed in with the machines and work tables is an array of finished puppets, including a large multicolored dragon that glows under black-light luminescence. 

 Vincent himself has been designing puppets and costumes for years, from his work on the TV show “Dante’s Place” to various puppet festivals and other performances. From his domain at the Capitola Mall, he’s become something of an evangelist in the transformative power of puppet-making.

“About 35% or so of my student body is on the neurodivergent spectrum,” he said in reference to students with differences in brain development. “And this is a form of acclimating themselves to build their confidence. My best success story is a girl who started here when she was 8. She was afraid of everything. She was nonverbal. And now she’s building full suits and costumes, and getting involved in theater, and she has a new confidence level.”

He’s also watched kids make the connections between the creative arts and the sciences through puppet design. “There’s a level of engineering in everything that’s here,” he said. “One of the big things that grabs the kids are the dragon shows that we do. And I would ask them, ‘What classes in school do you feel like you’ll never need?’ — these are second, third, fourth, fifth graders — and they will all scream out, ‘Math and science!’ and just anything that bores them.

“Then I explain to them, ‘You know, that dragon right there, there are 15 kinds of math inside of that thing. There’s science, and there’s chemistry. There’s even creative writing and English and because I wrote the play that you guys just watched. It’s all boring until you figure out what you’re going to do with it.”

Up on campus, Camilla Henneman is now teaching a course that she once took 20 years ago under UCSC theater arts professor emerita Kathy Foley, whose academic orientation was in Indonesian mask-making and puppetry. Henneman came to her position teaching at UCSC after a remarkable career in the entertainment industry in the realm of puppetry, animatronics and special effects. From her work creating animatronic apes in “Gorillas in the Mist,” the 1988 biopic of the naturalist Dian Fossey, she went on to help create the title creature in “Harry and the Hendersons” and even appear as a zombie in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. She worked in both Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company founded by “Star Wars” creator George Lucas.

Henneman’s puppetry class focuses primarily on the timeless, old-school aspect of puppet-making — mostly hand-and-rod puppets as well as some traditional forms like shadow puppetry and the moving-background style known as “crankies.” 

“Puppetry really falls into this huge umbrella,” she said. “It’s so much more than people expect it to be.”

Henneman’s focus is on inspiring and expanding the sense of creativity of the puppeteer, as opposed to focusing on the intricacy of the puppet itself. 

“It doesn’t become a puppet until it’s animated,” she said, “until the puppeteer actually brings it to life. Outside of that, it’s just an object, or a pretty doll. Jim Henson said that too. He didn’t have the kind of awe about puppets that a lot of people have. When he was done with them, he’d just toss them in the corner. To him, the puppet was the puppeteer and what they brought to the object.”

Henson is, in fact, the defining figure in the class. “We are learning about the legacy of Jim Henson and all he’s done for this art form, and how these Muppets can actually connect with other people with different cultures,” said Henneman’s teaching assistant Karen Lockwood. At the beginning of the quarter, Lockwood conducted a poll of her students to find out how much they knew about Henson. Only some were familiar with the name. Others had a vague sense of “Sesame Street,” but didn’t connect Henson’s work there with the Muppets. 

“They had a choice to make a simple puppet and do a fun performance,” said Lockwood, “or make a more elaborate puppet and just show us how it works. They had some choice there.”

Indeed, the puppets on display among the various short films ran the gamut, from a clearly identifiable bumble bee to an apelike creature with a kind of lion’s mane, to a scrawny, snaggle-toothed alien being with psychedelic hair.

The ultimate goal behind both Camilla Henneman’s college-level class on the Henson legacy and Ricki Vincent’s Puppet Institute is that each of their programs is a pathway to a career in the creative arts. 

“We have everything here you’d find in a modern effects shop with the exception of the things that smell really bad,” said Vincent (who added he doesn’t have the ventilation to have, for instance, vacuform machines that melt plastic into molds). Vincent not only teaches his skill set to his students, he hires resident artists as teachers as well. Classes last an hour or two, though Vincent works with “zone clock” method — meaning, when a student is really in stride in the creative aspects of a project, or “the zone,” he’ll allow them to continue beyond their allotted time.

But Vincent said he is after more than just possible career advancement for his students. He wants to provide them with an avenue to creativity that they can apply to all aspects of their lives. 

He’s currently raising money for an even grander puppetry project, a kind of interactive and immersive puppet environment he’s calling “Middleof,” a fantasy realm of an island arising from the Ocean of Nowhere (get it? “Middle of nowhere”?). He hopes the new installation will not only draw more young people into the Institute, but also that it brings about a fuller understanding in the wider public of the magic inherent in puppetry.

“I think of it as just making a difference,” said Vincent, 65, a former tattoo artist whose look makes you think he’d be at home as part of the Hogwarts faculty. “Our model for this place is that we’re making the world a cooler place one puppet at a time.”

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