After 6-year hiatus, Puppets Up! festival returns to the stage

In 2016, Joshua Holden, an award-winning American puppeteer, created a special show to perform at the Puppets Up! festival in Almonte, Ont.

He'd hoped to perform again, but the international festival that had been running since 2005 was discontinued after the 2016 edition due to a lack of funding and volunteers. 

However, Puppets Up! has returned this weekend — and Holden will be there once again.  

After performing across North America, Holden said he was happy to return to Almonte, a town about 50 kilometres west of downtown Ottawa. 

"It is so amazing. I forgot how much I love this town," said Holden, who works with the Jim Henson Company in New York and is one of the puppet-wranglers on the hit TV show Sesame Street.

"It's incredible to see [this] act of a community coming together for the sake of art and joy. And it is something that I've never experienced. I travel all around the world and there's nothing like this place."

The Puppets Up! festival was able to return thanks to a dedicated group of volunteers and organizers, according to Jane Torrance, the festival's volunteer executive director.

Torrance said she and veteran puppeteer Noreen Young posted a message on a local digital newspaper to see if anyone would want to help out. 

Residents in the wider municipality of Mississippi Mills, Ont., stepped up to the plate, she said.

"We had 72 people respond right away. So we knew that we had enough people [to] form the leadership team," she said. 

The list of volunteers would eventually swell to 200, and once there were enough people willing to volunteer, sponsorships followed.

Young, who is the artistic director of the festival, said Puppets Up! has meant a lot to both locals and the artistic community.

"People didn't realize what they had until it was gone. And they came to really value it and miss it and did sort of speak longingly of it," Young said.

"And so when we said we'd like to revive it, people were happy. And we found that it was easier to get sponsorship money and volunteers. The puppet troops that I contacted, all were delighted to come back."

The festival is hosting 13 troupes from all over Canada and the world, with acts from Iceland, Indonesia, the United States, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and B.C. all bringing their talents to Almonte this weekend.

There will be 62 shows in total, including a parade on both days. While visitors will need to buy tickets to enter the puppeteer tents, the street performances and the parades are free.

Children under the age of four will not need to purchase a ticket.

Holden said the core message of his show is about spreading joy in a time when the world around is falling apart. After a tough two years of COVID-19, he said art has become a tool to ease people's pain.

"Puppetry really allows an audience to open up in a very vulnerable way, and express themselves or feel or see their own feelings through this art form," he said.

"That is, for some reason, much easier to take in than watching a story played out by human beings."