The Chicagoland Puppetry Guild is celebrating it’s 51st year, and welcomes new fans and artists, or puppetry wannabes at all levels of aspiration.

Our role is to “honor and promote puppetry arts’ which today covers the range from toy and object theater, bunraku styles, marionettes, rod puppets, marionettes, ten kinds of shadow puppetry, ethnic styles from many lands, and of course hand puppets with high squeaky voices out in the parking lot! Today’s puppeteers and builders are as likely to use the internet and YouTube to get their work out as perform to a live audience.

So much that is in Chicago theater, music videos, stop action work and mixed media is puppetry-inspired, but a long way from Sesame Street. Our group includes puppeteers who were on first name terms with Kukla, and those newly minting themselves at Columbia and SAIC or other degree programs. Not least we embrace the ‘total amateur’ and work to help along the right connections with teachers and performers willing to mentor and help. Some of us are high-end and getting paid nicely-for-it-thanks established artists and troupes, and others just waiting for the right break and ready to audition! Puppetry is no longer a fixed set of styles, though some work to keep those perfected for a new generation. It’s a wonderful time to be (or become) a puppeteer!…or come along and be a fan.