Paperhand Puppet Intervention begins 24th annual show in Forest Theatre

On a sweltering August evening in Chapel Hill, the sun cascaded through the trees of Battle Park as community members walked down the stone steps of the Forest Theatre. Families shared stories and food with one another while children ran in the surrounding woods. 

When musicians sitting below the stage began pounding on drums and strumming the harp, the audience's chatter halted. The Paperhand Puppet Intervention’s 24th annual show, Earth and Sky, had begun. 

Paperhand, which was created by Donovan Zimmerman and Jan Burgerover two decades ago, builds puppets year round for its bold and frenzied summer shows, which run every Friday through Sunday at 6:30pm at the Forest Theater until September 29. This year was no different.

Where the stage had been empty a moment before, it was now filled with color and movement. Puppets of all shapes and forms flitted and swayed down the house stairs and through the audience to join the “Great Gathering for All Beings” — a place where the puppets of birds and beasts would come to discuss how they might better help one another thrive in the world. 

“We, Donovan and I, wanted to create a story about what would happen if all the beings that we live with all came together for a meeting and shared what was going on for them, especially in relationship to the human world,” Burger said. “We wanted to bring many of the different groups together to get a chance to speak, to give voice to those who don't usually have voice.” 

He said the summer shows are more of an improv exercise than a traditional show with a pre-made script.

Rather, the show comes together organically over the course of the summer. Burger said puppets, set pieces and music slowly come together as Paperhand’s puppeteers work to create things that inspire them.

For Burger and Zimmerman, this year’s show was inspired in part by the work of Joanna Macy, an activist who developed a workshop practice called the “Council of All Beings,” where participants impersonate a being, or animal. Burger said that Paperhand did a smaller version of this workshop, using the workshop itself as inspiration for the final product. 

After various puppet-creatures filled the stage — including wolves, owls, flamingos and a giant bear — a single bat entered the stage. The bat told the audience its fears about not belonging to either group, being both a bird and a beast. Neither group could figure out how to handle the bat, complicating the binary between earth and sky. 

Burger said the exploration of beings that do not easily fit into human-made categories throughout the show was inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life,” a book about the ecological importance of lichens.

Among the other creatures, lichen puppets shifted across the stage. Lichen is both a fungus and a type of plant; it is two organisms living together as one in what is called a composite organism, and it plays a huge part in the show. 

The bat, lichen and a few humanoid characters known as the "Wild Ones," represent the complexity of animal, plant and human life. Burger said that the Wild Ones represent how, in many ways, these distinct categories might not be as important as the collective. For example, he said that humans are made up of diverse microbiomes. 

“We ourselves are symphonic, well-orchestrated collaborations, and we just find that deeply fascinating," Zimmerman said. "It inspires miraculous wonder, to think about life working that way — organisms rising together to create something larger than themselves." 

When the owl puppet swooped across the stage, the orchestra pit followed; when the bear stood up, towering over the audience, the instruments clanged, and the audience whooped. Bird puppets flitted across the stage as real birds chirped through the dense canopy. When the bat puppet came on stage, soon a bat was flying above the audience’s heads. Audience members watched in awe. 

This collaboration between puppeteers, the orchestra, the narrator, the audience and the wildlife around the theater is something Paperhand intern Tuesday Utz believes is critical to the show as a whole, they said. 

Utz animated one of the Wild One puppets after being approached by Burger, picking up on what they referred to as their benevolent chaos. Utz designed their mask after being called to it in a dream they had. 

The boundary between the puppet and the puppeteer is not so vast, they said — rather, the puppeteers inform the puppets they create and animate, and likewise take on the energy of the puppet. Because of this, Utz said that breathwork is really important for Paperhand's puppeteers. Without supporting their puppets' breath, the puppets, in a sense, are flat, no longer living with the puppeteer. 

“I'm only really breathing as well as my neighbor next to me,” they said. “And when we take these uniting breaths before the show, it grounds us in our bodies. It grounds us in our connection to each other.”

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