Puppets Up! — Its Place in Canadian Puppet Theatre History
by James B. Ashby
As Noreen Young, the guiding light behind the upcoming second annual Puppets Up! International Puppet Festival (August 12–13), once told me, the residents of Almonte are highly “sensitized to puppetry,” so the town is a logical choice for hosting a puppetry festival. Of this there is little doubt. I visited Almonte for the first time last summer for the first incarnation of the festival, and for a student researching Canadian puppetry, it seemed to be the Promised Land. Puppets created by Young herself and several other Ontarian puppet artists, such as Kanja Chen of Chensational Puppets (based in Toronto), filled the shop windows, while even more puppets sang and heckled visitors — but always in good humour — from the balconies overlooking the streets. And all this before I even saw a single performance!
While Almonte is certainly a puppet-friendly town, one should not assume that the English-Canadian puppetry festival was born there last year. Perhaps you have heard tantalizing rumours concerning puppetry festivals hosted by our neighbour to the east, Québec, or our friends to the south, the Americans. Many of these rumours are true, of course, but Ontario has its own history of puppetry conferences and festivals. The earliest reference to a large-scale puppetry event dates to 1939, when Hamilton seems to have been the Almonte of the 1930s, and Rosalynde F. Osborne was its Noreen Young.
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