New show from Old Trout Puppet Workshop asks the question ‘what is a puppet?’

Kit Benz in The End, the new show from the Old Trout Puppet Workshop.

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop’s new show was inspired by flea circuses.

The End, which is having a mini-run at cSPACE that runs through Saturday, was inspired partly by an existential question for the beloved Calgary puppet masters, who have been creating work for a quarter of a century now, in shows such as Famous Puppet Death Scenes, The Tooth Fairy, Hansel and Gretel (with the Vancouver and Calgary Operas), Ghost Opera, Jabberwocky, The Erotic Anguish of Don Juan, 12th Night (with Theatre Calgary) and other various films, TV shows and children’s books that have turned them into cultural treasures.

That question is, “what is a puppet?”

“Apparently, flea circuses used to have actual fleas with tiny little chains binding them to seesaws or trapezes or whatever,” said Old Trout Judd Palmer in an email to CTV News from Pilsen, Czechia, “but at a certain point performers of flea circuses realized that nobody could actually see the fleas, so they started pretending that the fleas were making the seesaws seesaw -- but really it was a short person under the table jiggling strings and wires to make the seesaw move as if there was a flea on it.”

“As intrepid explorers of the outer edges of the puppetry medium,” Palmer said, continuing, “this raises several mind-blowing questions — if a flea is made to move by little tiny wires, is it a puppet? Even though it’s alive?

“What if there’s no flea at all? Does a puppet need to physically exist? Or is it a state of mind?”

This week’s sold-out production is the first presentation of The End, which may be headed across the ocean in 2027.

“This is the very first presentation of the show,” said Palmer. “It’s a short run because we wanted to see how the show works in front of an audience as part of its longer term development.

“The next kick at it will be a longer run in a bigger space, maybe in Calgary,” Palmer added, “but the plan currently is to take it to the enormous theatre festival in Avignon next summer to get it in front of some European presenters as a follow-up to Famous Puppet Death Scenes that has been touring over there for years and years and years."

The End is a collaboration with sound designer Mike Rinaldi, who layers in an elaborate soundscape and performers Kit Benz and Ali DeRegt.

It’s the latest work from a prolific bunch of puppeteers whose work was already seen this season as part of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at Alberta Theatre Projects and the Banff Centre, Hansel and Gretel with the Calgary Opera and a puppet-driven holiday production of Frozen at the Globe Theatre in Regina.

What might be next for the Trouts?

“Our evolution is lateral rather than linear I’d say,” Palmer says. “We follow our inspirations into whatever peculiar places they take us, so sometimes we’re making big shows for big stages with mostly human beings or sometimes operas or sometimes flea circuses with no fleas in them — you never do know.”

For more about the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, go here.

For more about cSPACE, go here.