Puppetry’s Home on Dupont Street
In her quest to build a business selling portable and doorway puppet theatres, Joanne Bigham has almost accidentally created a hub for puppetry arts in Toronto. Open Door Designs, her storefront workshop on a hard-scrabble stretch of Dupont Street, is regularly jammed with parents and children drawn by performances by a rotating cast of puppeteers like Alexander Mergold, Hugh Phillips, Kelly Kirkham and Naomi Kates. Open Door also hosts puppet-making workshops for adults and children, like Mergold’s November 1 & 8 marionette making classes.
A visual artist and sculptor by training, Bigham stresses that she is not a puppeteer. She built her first puppet theatre in 2000 for a friend who had no idea where to find such a thing. In fact, there’s really no one else in Canada specializing in puppet theatres, which is why Bigham is so busy building stages to ship across town, across the country and around the world.
