The World on a String

Just a couple of weeks after hordes of country music zealots invaded Nashville for the CMA Fest, Music City will become a mecca of a different sort as an expected 3,000 visitors from around the world make the pilgrimage to the International Puppet Festival at the Downtown Public Library and in Church Street Park.

“My hope for the festival is to show people new things,” says Brian Hull, writer and director with the Downtown Library’s puppetry program, Wishing Chair Productions. “There is only good attached to this kind of creative exchange of cultures.”

The festival’s roots date back to a 2004 library visit from the Magdeburg (Germany) Puppet Theatre. (Since 2003, Magdeburg has been involved in a cultural exchange with Music City through the Sister Cities of Nashville program.) Inspired by the troupe, Hull paid a visit to Magdeburg in 2005. Following an intuition, Hull also dropped in on puppet theaters in France and Italy.

“That’s when the notion first occurred to me,” says Hull. “Why don’t we have our own festival, and see who we could get to come?”

To the uninitiated, Nashville might seem an unlikely site for such an ambitious gathering of world puppetry. But Nashville and the Downtown Library have a deep history with the art form, thanks mainly to the efforts of one man.

“Tom Tichenor was the real thing,” Hull says. “Among puppeteers he is revered.”

In 1938, at the age of 15, Tichenor—a native Nashvillian—inaugurated the library’s marionette tradition with a children’s performance of Puss in Boots. Tichenor’s career in puppetry spanned 50 years, and included nationally televised children’s programs, working with Walt Disney, and a show-stopping puppetry performance in the hit Broadway musical Carnival! Following his death in 1992, Tichenor’s legacy lives on through the library’s collection of nearly 250 Tichenor marionettes and the Wishing Chair programming.

“Wishing Chair is a tribute to Tichenor, as well as an ongoing program with new puppets, new shows and a lot of outreach,” says Hull. “We perform our shows for over 5,000 kids and family members a month.”

Tichenor’s influence continues to be felt today, even among the biggest names in puppetry.

“He established puppetry in this area,” says puppeteer Philip Huber. “And because of that, the library has one of the finest programs in the country.”

Although you may not recognize Huber’s name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen his work. His puppets, not to mention his unique performance style, have been seen by millions of viewers in the cult film Being John Malkovich. Huber’s work is one of the film’s highlights, and one sequence, in which a John Cusack marionette look-alike does a somersault and a back handspring, is often mistaken for digital trickery.

“The film was so strange,” remembers Huber. “I thought it would go immediately to arthouses, and then disappear. The success of the film caught me totally off guard.”

Visitors to the festival will have the opportunity to see Huber in action, and may also attend “Behind The Strings,” a multimedia presentation in which he’ll offer a behind-the-scenes peek at his work, discussing everything from marionette construction to his personal performance philosophy.

After years of living in California, Huber recently relocated to Cookeville, Tenn. Although he won’t have a long commute to his performances, other troupes are converging on Nashville from a world away.

The Magdeburg Theatre will be returning to Nashville to attend the festival they helped to inspire. “Puppetry in Germany has a very long tradition,” says Jana Schneider, the group’s production manager. “You can find documents about puppetry from the Middle Ages. There was always puppetry in Germany.”

Like all the European troupes, the Magdeburg group is quick to point out that they don’t think of puppetry as a just-for-kids enterprise. Their Italian counterparts are quick to agree.

“In Italy, puppets today are defined as ‘for children,’ ” explains Manuel Reimann, director of the Puppet Theatre of San Carlino in Rome, Italy. “This is a public opinion Theatre San Carlino is fighting against, and with success. We are convinced that puppet theater is a particular form of theater. Puppets are and will be a form of artistic expression that will never die.”

One of the highlights of the festival will be the San Carlino troupe’s interpretation of the Mozart opera The Abduction of the Seraglio, featuring musical accompaniment by Orchestra Nashville. The Festival will also include performances by additional troupes from the United States, China and the avant-garde stylings of the Velo Theatre of France. Nashville’s own Wishing Chair Productions will surely delight kids of all ages with their own unique take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an appropriate vehicle for an art form that seeks to blur the line between the real and fantastic.