A puppet party: The Hillsborough Handmade Parade and Market builds community

The biennial Hillsborough Handmade Parade started at an easy, rumbling tempo on Saturday. People lining the streets sat in various positions, some in lawn chairs, others with their bouncing knees bent over the curb of Churton Street, all waiting eagerly for a show that has become a part of Hillsborough for 15 years.

Some had colorful umbrellas to protect them from the bright, radiant June sun, others had giant mushroom hats on and many others showed up in T-shirts and jean shorts. From the everyday to the unique and at-times bizarre, Churton Street had become a place for every person to celebrate art.

The drum line approached the crowd, and the shapes of the figures sharpened into focus. From a 20-foot giant herring puppet to a dog head, to green goddesses and a giant dragon, the parade was in full swing.

The first Handmade Parade was held in 2008 after the Hillsborough Arts Council — an arts organization dedicated to creating various community arts events — led a series of community workshops in puppet making.

Among those original parade-makers was Paperhand Puppet Intervention. Envisioned in 1998 and realized in 2000, Jan Burger and Donovan Zimmerman founded the company which has provided puppets and performance in Chapel Hill for over two decades.

But from that first parade to Saturday’s celebration, the Hillsborough Handmade Parade has taken on a life of its own, Zimmerman said. From the multitude of people that show up, to the creative expression shown by puppeteers and community members alike, Zimmerman said that he has continued to be inspired by the parade.

Puppetry is the people’s art form, and the parade is not just about the procession itself, he said, but the people lining the streets, cheering the giant puppets — and their puppeteers — on, he said.

“It sparks joy and people and that sense of wonder, and that's why I keep doing it — and to see that reaction of people is always uplifting for me,” Zimmerman said.

Somewhere in the middle of the procession was a giant sun, its face lit by its namesake. Supporting its back was Sol Ramirez, the founder and owner of 1,2,3 Puppetry, a local puppet company.

In 2010, Ramirez was a 6-year-old kindergartener who was already interested in puppet-making. When his parents heard about the Hillsborough Handmade Parade, they encouraged Ramirez to participate, he said.

And participate he did. Together with a group of his friends, Ramirez started making his own puppets, and the name for his company was born. Ramirez laughs at it now, but at the time, he loved the name because it rhymed, he said.

Since then, Ramirez has created a multitude of puppets. Now a student at the University of Connecticut, studying puppetry, Ramirez frequently uses puppetry as a form of social justice. This past semester, Ramirez made a puppet of a Palestinian woman, and brought it to the encampments that were on his campus.

“Puppetry is a huge tool in giving a voice and a message out to a wide audience of people, a wide range of people,” he said. “So, that’s always been a goal of mine, to use this art form to convey a message.”

Puppetry is one of the oldest art forms, Ramirez said. From early humans casting shadows on cave walls, to the European practice of puppetry — which involved a cart and a handle, so that if law enforcement showed up, the puppeteers could quickly grab their puppet stand and make a run for it — puppetry has been a form of social justice.

Additionally, Ramirez said, Aztecs used puppetry as a way of poking light at their colonial Spanish oppressors, wearing white masks, which was a finding of some of his research on puppetry.

While puppetry is utilized by Ramirez as a form of activism, he said that the base definition of a puppet is giving life, purpose or movement to an inanimate object. 

This movement was on display during the parade’s march. Surrounding Ramirez and his family — and their giant sun puppet — was a swarm of color, from a puppet of an old man kissing one viewer’s hand and sitting on a street bench, posing for photos, to someone walking on stilts, their hair a bright silver.

Among the procession, Heather Tatreau, executive director of the Hillsborough Arts Council, was dressed in a peacock costume she made for Halloween, with tulle as a tail and feathers on her head. Tatreau used to teach dance and choreography at UNC, and any time she gets to wear tulle is a good day, she said.

“It's a community that does this, you can go out and dress like a bird and walk down the street, and that's okay,” she said. “And so, I think it tells people what the town is really all about and what we value — and we value the individuals.”

As the parade marched on, onlookers could view the banner at the back of the parade, which invited onlookers to join the march down Margaret Lane and toward River Park, where over 40 local artists displayed their original work as a part of the Handmade Market.

The market has not always been a part of the Handmade Parade and is more frequently included in the Hillsborough Solstice Lantern Walk, an annual event that takes place in December and brings in over 4,000 people, Tatreau said.

“The events that we host in Hillsborough, they're very community-oriented, around people coming together, they're very joyful,” she said. “That's something that I love about my job. I feel like I get to bring joy. How many people can say that about their jobs?”

Katie Hayes was one vendor at the market. Hayes is a printmaker and surface pattern designer with her own business, New South Pattern House, and a North Carolina native.

Hayes currently lives in Hillsborough. Her 10-acre yard is home to trails she built, and it’s the source of inspiration for her Southern landscape and wildlife designs, from native plants such as poplar trees and dogwoods, to herons and muskrats.

“Hillsborough’s by and large a community that values artists’ time, they value us for the contribution that we give to the community,” she said.

Bernadette Januska was another vendor at the event, and was selling her blue and gray pottery, inspired by Japanese tableware. Januska makes her own stamps and tools for her pottery, and such stamps are inspired by flowers she sees around Hillsborough, she said.

When visiting her home, someone once asked her why she only had cute cups and plates in her cabinets.

Januska’s response: “‘I don’t want to eat off ugly dishes!””

Januska makes her pottery by using high-contrast clays, or darker clays, then adding a white slip — a thin, watery clay — on top. Januska then paints over them, lets it dry, then etches designs into the clay before going back and painting over them with blue, she said. 

“A plate or a cup shouldn't be to something that is plain that you have in your pantry,” she said. “When you're eating off of something, or you're drinking out of it, you're holding it and you're becoming a part of it.”

Art as an embodiment might be a key facet of the entire parade: what started as an organized event became a march down Churton Street, culminating in a celebration at River Park, various puppets and their puppeteers dancing through the grass, other puppets strewn across the grass for people to interact with.

The line between art and artist, between performer and audience, had been crossed.

But this line is not the only line Zimmerman said he tries to cross with Paperhand.

“That's always the underscore seen, for me, is helping us all remember our connection with the natural world, and that there's a way that we can lean into that and hopefully shift the paradigm a little bit more towards a reverential and celebratory and connected place,” he said.

Through the summer, Zimmerman said people can get involved with puppeteering by joining Saturday workdays at Paperhand, as the company prepares for its next show, Earth and Sky, which will debut at The Forest Theatre on Aug. 9. Tickets are now live on their website.

“Everybody has the temptation, the possibility of just tuning things out more because sometimes just easier and less painful," he said. "But there's also a lot of joys that are possible by opening ourselves up to continuing to feel.”

@morganmbrenner

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