“The wonderful thing about puppetry is that it’s so varied,” says enthusiastic Melbourne-based puppeteer Jacob Willliams. “You work with children, you work with adults and you can go to remote communities and major cities around the world. There’s such variety and opportunity within the industry.”
"When people come to see an adult puppet show they’re often blown away and surprised."
Williams is speaking ahead of the Melbourne Festival of Puppetry, an event curated by his own performance company Lemony S in co-operation with La Mama Theatre. Promoting and celebrating the medium’s “live diversity”, the festival presents exciting daytime children’s programs and evening shows for adults. It’s not often puppetry is offered such a concentrated focus, something Williams hopes will bring people along. “We basically got together a whole bunch of puppet performance from local and interstate performers,” he says of the curation process. “The puppet community can sometimes be an entity within itself and not really reach a mainstream audience, so we’re hoping [the festival] can do that for some of the artists. I would encourage people to come down and see more than one or two shows, purely so they can see the kind of variety on offer through puppet theatre and the kind of talent we have here in Australia and Melbourne.”
One of the world’s oldest and most flexible forms of theatre, puppetry is, in the eyes of many, reserved exclusively for young children. While some may expect this preconception to be a burden, Williams feels it can actually be beneficial. “It’s interesting; we’ve made a lot of adult shows and I think that perception actually works for us. When people come to see an adult puppet show they’re often blown away and surprised; they don’t know what to expect. If people say [puppets are for kids] I say, ‘Hey, come to the show. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. [At the festival] there’s some really experimental shows which will challenge audiences — it’s not your standard narrative show with a script. Often it’ll be a non-vocal piece of theatre and more image-based, which can be a bit more challenging or surprising to an audience. And that’s one of the wonderful things about puppetry, being able to tell a story with not just words, but images.”
Though Williams never expected to find a career working with puppets, 15 years on, that’s what occupies most of his time. Since first straying into a small workshop in Hobart, he’s worked in all kinds of different environments, travelled the world and won a number of awards. “For me, and I think this is the case for many puppeteers, I kind of just fell into it. I was working as an actor and performer, and [one day I] went to a workshop. I just loved it. I never grew up playing with puppets wanting to be a puppeteer. At this point in time we’re seeing a really wide variety of what puppets can be, and I’m really looking forward to showcasing all of that in Melbourne.”
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