By Paulina Czupryna 

Medill Reports 

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a puppet is “a small-scale figure (as of a person or animal) usually with a cloth body and hollow head that fits over and is moved by the hand.” 

Puppeteers might disagree. They can debate the definition for hours — a “common joke,” said Elaine Petkovsek, a veteran attendee of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, as she exited the parking garage beneath the Museum of Contemporary Art to watch “The House by the Lake” earlier this year. Since the festival debuted in 2015, attendance has reached record highs a decade later.

As puppetry participation continues to flourish, so do opportunities to practice the innovative art form. Chicago, home to the U.S.’ largest puppet festival, the 10-year-old International Puppet Theatre Festival, is increasingly regarded as a puppet capital, said Matthew Cohen, a puppet professor at the University of Connecticut. 

His expertise, although broad, specializes in an arm of the diverse artform focused on puppetry in Indonesia, including its historic shadow art known as wayang. Cohen also specializes in global traditions of puppet theater with years of training in art hubs such as London and the Netherlands. 

A scholar with decades of expertise, Cohen said, “Chicago has momentum.”  

The Chicago festival, held Jan. 15-26, showcases performances at multiple venues, including the DuSable Black History Museum and the Studebaker Theater, home of the NPR show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.” As the number of puppet shows, shops and classes grows, so do diverse opportunities to practice the innovative art form. 

Historically, a puppet can take many forms, each revealing a new and unexpected message. For some plotlines, they tell a simple story. In other shows, puppets hold deeper meanings that expand an audience member’s direction of thought. 

For Blair Thomas, artistic director and founder of the International Puppet Theatre Festival, a puppet is a “surrogate figure of a human, animal or spirit.”  A puppeteer since he was 12, Thomas said he loves the creativity and “sophistication” in shows like this year’s “The Life of Michael K.”  

Thomas received awards for excellence in the art of puppetry from the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA-USA), whose mission links global puppeteers together. He was also awarded the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and nominated for the Jeff Awards, which grant recognition to theater excellence.

Holding an annual festival welcomes thousands of attendees, inviting dynamic storytellers to share their work overseas. This year, creators from Israel, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, France, Italy, China and Germany brought their work to Illinois stages. 

“Each year the festival sells more tickets,” Thomas said. Introducing the festival to about 14,000 attendees in 2015, the show reached a record high in 2024 with more than 19,800 audience members. This included volunteer sign-up spots that filled up “super fast,” Thomas said. 

Nearly doubling its opportunities, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival now holds more than 120 annual puppetry events. 

Along with the city’s global recognition, groups such as PuppetQueers, the Chicago Puppet Guild, the Chicago Puppet Studio and the Puppet Lab contribute to a puppeteer’s opportune city scene. Pop-up events such as the Puppet Hub Cafe, where visitors can dine among life-size puppets, along with student internships and scholarships, allow enthusiasts to collaborate with puppeteers worldwide. Free neighborhood tours, or family-friendly events in locations outside the city, work to “create opportunities of community enjoyment while expanding the base of puppet enthusiasts,” according to the festival’s website.

Although the exact number of puppet scholars is impossible to count, “puppetry education is growing,” said Cohen. Today, the art holds “huge possibilities for online opportunities” and virtual workshops, puppet studios and one-on-one Zoom classes with global practitioners. The city has many of Cohen’s students who, according to him, have “gone to Chicago because of its opportunities.”  

Scholars can pursue a puppetry bachelor of fine arts, a minor in puppetry and a graduate master of fine arts certificate at the University of Connecticut. Puppet education is also available at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University, which have offered classes such as “Digital Puppet Animation” focused on puppetry and object performance. 

The popularity of puppetry fluctuates in the U.S. “It’s kinda a spiral,” said Jessica Thebus, a theater artist, director and professor at Northwestern University.

Thebus is an associate artist with Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and has attended multiple theater festivals, including Chicago’s International Puppet Theater Festival. She also teaches a “toy theater class,” which explores miniature puppetry in production, and said puppetry’s growth “pulses” throughout the years. 

“I think (the art) creates the atmosphere of inspiration and imagination, where then a lot of artists, who may not have learned that direction before, can really think about the activation of objects,” Thebus said. You can make puppets out of ice or metal, “but you really can kind of drag cardboard out of the alley and make something pretty amazing.”

Additionally, Thebus holds an end-of-year showcase, displaying work done in her class, consisting mainly of graduate and MFA students. “(The festival) is a huge gift to the city,” she said. “You start to see the impact on an artistic community of being exposed to that kind of variety of work.” 

Originally, the festival took place every two years. With the spike in participation, it transitioned to an annual schedule during the last two weeks of January.

“I’ve already started planning next year’s festivals last summer,” Thomas said. 

…

“Look, they have a man working the elevators,” a young boy said to his parents while waiting in line for Plexus Polaire’s showing of “Dracula: Lucy’s Dream” at the Studebaker Theater. Located in the Fine Arts Building, the historic artists’ haven still uses hand-operated elevators. It’s also where Chicago Little Theatre founder Ellen Van Volkenburg coined the phrase “puppeteer” and where the festival houses its main office. 

Near the historic elevators, volunteers lined up to assist the 60 or so attendees waiting outside the theater’s entrance. Another 70 were inside the awning. 

As the show’s call time approached, Sandy Gerding, the festival’s executive director, asked the audience if they remembered a “smoking puppet” from the 2024 festival that welcomed giggles, chatter and awe from the crowd. Following the show, with almost all floor seats occupied, the audience’s applause ran for more than a minute. 

Christen Krasch, a festival volunteer, saw seven shows at the 2025 festival. Krasch specializes in clowning, puppetry and comedy. For Krasch, the magic of the craft is how an artist takes “an ordinary object and transforms it into something else.” It’s also a gift because it is “something you can do so independently.”

Claudia Orenstein, puppet scholar and founder of the 2024 International Puppet Journal at the City University of New York. The unique ability to animate the inanimate invites audiences to “watch differently” and engage with a deeply imaginative form of storytelling, she said.

In puppetry, everything on stage — even the materials themselves — holds the potential to spring to life. “Seeing materials as expressive” lies at the core of such performances, said Orenstein. 

Major festivals, including the New York Henson International Festival for Puppet Theater, which ran from 1992 to 2000, provide space for mass exposure. Orenstein’s introduction to puppetry began with the Henson festivals. Today, she actively attends other celebrations, including the Chicago’s fest. These public performances are ways of “bringing new people in and allowing people to grow and share their work,” she said.  

Orenstein spoke on the national influence of New York’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, where puppets are not just for children, but also for art enthusiasts, dialogue experts, authors and artists; puppetry is an innovative practice, filled with endless opportunities. “Puppeteers have created a lot of the infrastructure for themselves,” she said.

Some puppetry uses minimal dialogue. For example, “Dracula: Lucy’s Dream” had no script. Rather, the puppeteers communicated “in other ways,” Orenstein said — with emotion, a movement team of creative artists.

Puppets give a show “layers of interest” and let artists “design their own character.” Whether it was a silent but powerful visual representation of a political protest, or if the figure captured a “visceral moment” for audiences on stage, Orenstein said puppetry “takes you on a powerful journey.”

 

Paulina Czupryna is a magazine graduate student concentrating in data at Medill.