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.
The day I visited her workshop, Bigham and her assistant, Karolina Valenzuela, above left, were working on pieces to go to Barbados and a ballet school in Arkansas. The Toronto Public Library is one of her best customers having ordered seven full-size puppet theatres, so far.
“When I set up the workshop I vowed I’d never do retail,” Bigham recalls, somewhat ruefully. But the financial realities of running a business soon found her branching out into puppet sales, at first one day per week, then two and now three: “I basically open the door whenever I’m here working,” she says.
Bigham changes up her window display frequently, often showcasing the work of an individual artist like Mergold, whose highly-realistic work, above, is currently on show. Inside the shop, a variety of new and vintage puppets are strung about in merry, colourful groupings.
Puppetry has been on the rise since Disney’s Lion King brought Julie Taymor’s marvellous creations to worldwide attention. More recently, the Canadian Opera Company featured a mix of shadow puppetry and rod puppets in the Robert Lepage-directed production of Stravinsky’s The Nightingale & Other Short Fables.
“Interest in puppetry is definitely growing,” says Bigham, who fields enquiries from all over the globe thanks to her web presence, rudimentary though it may be. Her resource page gives an idea of just how healthy this small corner of the entertainment market actually is.
Bigham is working full-speed right now in preparation for Toronto’s One of a Kind Show, after which she can catch her breath and get back to a more normal pace with workshops resuming in January. Sign up for her e-newsletter to keep abreast of puppet happenings in the city.
Photos by Christopher Jones
Social bookmarks
Scroll to the Form to leave a comment.
Currently there are no comments related to article "Puppetry’s Home on Dupont Street".