SHOW OF HANDS Exhibition Opening + Puppet Performance by Emily Schubert at Visionaries + Voices

The Show of Hands exhibition opening and performance at the Northside Visionaries + Voices Studio is a free for all ages and abilities to attend! The exhibition will feature puppets, objects, film and ephemera from V+V and community artists, spanning the spectrum of traditions and highlighting experimental forms of puppetry.

Consider those playful moments of your past–when you animated a doll or action figure, or donned a mask to transform into someone (or something) else –recognize that, in those instances, you became a puppeteer. For thousands of years and in nearly every culture puppets have been a tool to animate and communicate the ideas, needs, and values of the people, often representing a voice of dissent. Puppetry allows for unique exploration of body and being, making the practice uniquely situated to examine and intervene in ableist structures. Experimental puppets become a vehicle of agency in a puppeteer’s hands.

At their core, puppets are fundamentally a storytelling tool. Because of the inherently public nature of puppetry, watching a performance weaves viewers together by their shared experience. Performance, or creating the illusion of life, relies on a contract between the puppeteer and the audience. The puppeteer creates the rules before the audience, transferring their physical and emotional energy into the puppet, and the audience agrees that the puppet is a site for their imagination, and that the puppet moves by its own will. This illusion allows us to believe the playful fantasy that consciousness can reside in anything.

As an experimental form, puppetry is adept and versatile. It is opportune to create worlds, bringing new ideas and stories to life. Puppetry preserves folklore and historical narratives, provides powerful social commentary, and allows us to examine, scrutinize, and appreciate our humanness. We continue to make puppets for their unique and endless possibilities for connection.