Puppets! Masks! Inglewood! Oh my! Festival celebrates its fifth year.

DETAILS

International Festival of Animated Objects opening Night Galabash with The Pigeonettes & the Five Step Program, Dead Horse, Shine Machine
Ironwood Stage & Grill
Wednesday, March 9 - Wednesday, March 9

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Some puppets — The Muppets, for instance — offer adults the chance to be kids again. Others, such as MuchMusic’s Ed the Sock, offer somewhat less innocent chuckles. And then there’s the eponymous host of Beatrix P. Noseworthy’s Peculiar Puppetronic Phenomena for Adults, a peep show whose appeal is summed up pretty well by creator Lee Cookson of Humble Wonder Theatre.

“I think it’s a great relief for adults, in a lot of ways, that don’t often get that opportunity to just go and laugh,” he says. “Or go and watch a completely ridiculous puppet show about a woman whose ass and head are mixed up, so she’s got an ass where her head is and her head where her ass is.”

Cookson’s show isn’t the only offering for older audiences at this year’s International Festival of Animated Objects. Presented by the Calgary Animated Objects Society, the biennial festival’s fifth edition will also feature the Dolly Wiggler Cabaret, an event headlined by Marsian, a drag performer from Los Angeles, and Punch and Judy in Afghanistan, a riff on the traditional British puppet show with Osama bin Laden in the role of Punch.

But there are family-friendly options as well, including a children’s version of the Beatrix P. Noseworthy shows, and The Book of Jonah, the Circo de Nada theatre troupe’s shadow puppetry adaptation of the Old Testament tale.

Lack of funding means this year’s festival will be shorter than the last one, running just five days instead of 10, but Xstine Cook, founder and artistic director of the festival, says having to select a smaller number of acts wasn’t unduly challenging.

“Every year the programming is definitely a challenge, this kind of balancing act between our budget and who’s available and who will fit in the venue that we have,” she says. “It’s kind of this slow puzzle that moves together and then suddenly it’s all together and the festival’s happening.”

Patrons of Beatrix P.’s will face a tight fit indeed. To see the two-minute productions she hosts — a different version each day — they’ll have to squeeze individually into a cellar in Inglewood, but that seems appropriate given the peep show format of the adult presentations, which Cookson says are “definitely on the dirty side.”

“What we’ve created is actually its own structure, it’s a small booth,” says Cookson. “You come up, you put in the coin, and you can watch the little show.”

Shadow puppetry, an art form even older than peep shows, appealed to Book of Jonah creator Nick Trotter as a narrative device for a very old text. Trotter first read the book a few years ago and began creating the shadow play last fall, drawn to it partly by the humour of, for instance, a giant fish vomiting Jonah out.

“There’s a fair bit of comedy in this very spiritual text,” he says.

However compelling the story, of course, shadow puppetry might seem a rather primitive medium. But while Trotter’s production is more sophisticated than those of yore — he employs four different lights and a recorded soundtrack — he believes it will entice people in the same way shadow puppetry always has.

“From what I’ve seen, there’s really this sense of magic that can come over an audience,” he says. “There’s something about the flicker of light and the use of two-dimensional objects to evoke three-dimensional space. Even though we know it’s just a piece of cardboard, it’s still amazing when we feel it come to life.”

This childlike wonder might seem worlds away from the atmosphere of Beatrix P.’s peep show. But Cookson aims to give audiences a similar feeling with Peculiar Puppetronic Phenomena, even if one show focuses on “the sexual lives of closet monsters.”

“I think there’s a great escapism that exists within puppetry that’s very different than in a regular play,” he says. “I hate to say it, but it’s somewhat akin to a Pixar movie at times. I think there’s something completely outlandish that you can achieve with a puppet or in animation that you can never achieve with real life.”