Presentations, displays and workshops:
Despite how much puppetry my mother and I have done together, unfortunately I don't have many photos with both of us together with the puppets. This one was taken in Quebec around 2000 at a fair in which several theatre companies and artists presented displays of their work for the public. I brought Audrey II from the production of "Little Shop of Horrors" that I was involved with in 1999, as well as my Pterodactyl puppet. I like the fact that the Canadian flags are behind us in this picture. It's very patriotic!
Our puppets have also been displayed in many, many exhibits in a variety of locations, including:
- Various branches of the Ottawa Public Library
- Several international puppetry festivals
- National and regional museums such as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Nepean Museum, and the Joseph Schneider Haus Museum in Kitchener, Waterloo.
Beginning in the late 1990's or early 2000's my mother Peggy and I began to offer puppet workshops. I had done several puppet workshops on my own since the late 1980's so we knew that they were of interest to people. After some time, we put together a series of craft puppet workshops and listed them on our new website, as well as in flyers that we handed out. The characters shown above are from our Big Mouth puppet workshop. I designed the basic puppet shape and then we both made different characters as examples to use at the workshops. My mother made the two shown above on the left and I made the purple guy on the right. Below are some Egyptian puppets. I made the King Tut and my mother made Cleopatra. We continued doing puppet workshops on occasion through to 2012. Over the years, hundreds of kids have participated in our puppet workshops!
This is a rod puppet from our "Scrunchy Heads" workshop, created by my mother Peggy. It's made with newspapers scrunched up to form the head, hence the title. Below are some "Puffoons" rod puppets that my mother made for another workshop using wooden spoons.
Puppetry organizations and museum work:
In 1997 I co-founded the Ottawa Puppetry Club along with a small group of local puppeteers. The OPC was a not-for-profit organization operated by volunteers with a mandate to host puppetry workshops and teach members about how to make and perform puppets. The OPC operated from 1997 until 2011, and for the majority of those years an annual variety show was presented.
Several guest puppeteers did workshops for the group such as Noreen Young, Bob Stutt, David Powell of Puppetmongers Theatre, John Nolan of Rag and Bone Theatre, and David Smith of David Smith Marionettes, among several others. In addition, the OPC gathered a small collection of puppets and puppetry books, and did puppet displays at local libraries and community centers.
Along with serving as President on a few occasions, I was the group's second newsletter editor. Some of the changes that I made involved formatting the newsletter to become a booklet and creating the OPC logo, shown above. At this point I coined the OPC's slogan "Where imagination and creativity come to life". This was in addition to writing several articles about puppetry. More information about the group's history can be found on the OPC Blog.
In 1998 or 1999 I learned that puppeteer John Conway was living right here in Ottawa. Mr. Conway is a pioneer of Canadian television and performed his puppet characters, Uncle Chichimus and Hollyhock, for the very first broadcast of the CBC's English network in 1952. This led to researching Mr. Conway's career and producing a 45 minute video documentary, titled John Conway and Uncle Chichimus, which I completed in March of 2003 when I was 29. Earlier that month Mr. Conway had passed away at the age of 80.
The above photo of John Conway was found at this link: http://www.penelopeironstone.com/CS101broadcastingandnation.htm
While working on the John Conway documentary I spent a lot of time doing research at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now called the Canadian Museum of History, CMH) and got to know some of the staff there. They were super friendly and helpful, and at one point I was even given a tour "behind the scenes" of the museum where they designed and built elements needed for exhibits, and where they have huge artifact storage areas. The museum has a very extensive puppetry collection made up of several collections from different donors. The largest of these was from the Ontario Puppetry Association (OPA), donated in 1994. I had become more and more interested in learning about the history of puppetry. Therefore, I began to research the possibility of establishing a local puppetry museum....
In August 2004 I became a student in the three year Applied Museum Studies program at Algonquin College, graduating in April 2007. The course included a Museum Management class and one of my assignments was to chose a topic for a fictional local museum and draft an annual operational budget. Of course I chose a puppetry museum! The above drawing was made as part of the assignment. It was fun to visualize what a potential puppetry museum might look like! :)
After I graduated in 2007 (above) I was very fortunate to get a job at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (as it was called then) working as Researcher and Puppetry Consultant with Constance Nebel, the Curator of the museum's puppetry collection. The timing of my graduation was quite opportune as the museum was creating a new online exhibit titled The Art of Puppetry, featuring their entire puppetry collection. Eventually, I was given my own access card to the artifact storage room where the puppet collection was kept. Needless to say, working on this project was definitely a dream job!
After the project was completed I was retained to work on additional online exhibits which had been undertaken through the Canadian Culture Online (CCO) initiative along with The Art of Puppetry exhibit. Unfortunately however, as CCO had been established under the Liberal government, Stephen Harper's Conservative government opted to play politics with Canada's heritage and put an end to CCO funding. As such in 2010 my entire department was dismissed! The Canadian Museum of Civilization's name has since been changed to the Canadian Museum of History.
While working on the online exhibit I learned that the museum's puppetry collection contains several distinct collections from various donors, the most extensive of which is the Ontario Puppetry Association (OPA) collection that was donated in 1994. It was such an immense pleasure to work with the OPA collection, which includes both artifacts and archival materials, as I had been a member of the OPA back in the late 1980s and early 1990s during my teens. Back then the OPA operated a small puppetry museum, simply called The Puppet Centre, located in Willowdale, Ontario, in the Toronto area. My parents and I had visited the center on a few occasions, and met the museum's Director, Ken McKay, who had previously authored the book "Puppetry in Canada".
At the age of fifteen in 1988, I met puppeteer Bob Stutt (Today's Special, Fraggle Rock, Under the Umbrella Tree, Jim Henson Hour, Sesame Park) when I attended his puppetry manipulation workshop at the Puppet Centre (shown above). My puppets Rob the Slob (center) and Mr. Noodlehead (far left) came along for the trip. After the workshop, Bob Stutt kindly invited me to visit the CBC studio in Ottawa where the TV show Under the Umbrella Tree was recorded, and where I met puppeteers Noreen Young and Stephen Brathwaite. As it turned out, the studio was not far from my house, so I would often ride my bike there for a visit in order to watch as the show was recorded.
As mentioned above, I first joined the Ontario Puppetry Association (OPA) in 1989 when I was 15 and absolutely adored the OPA's Puppet Centre. I have very fond memories of my visits there.
It had been my understanding that the OPA disbanded in the mid 1990's, when the Puppet Centre closed and their puppet collection and archives were transferred to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History), however in 2003 I learned that the organization was still active so I happily renewed my membership. It wasn't long before I volunteered my time as the new editor for the OPA newsletter, OPAL, and published two issues a year for five years until 2008. Above is the 50th Anniversary issue that I produced for the OPA in 2006, which I'm extremely proud of.
During my time as editor I wrote several articles for the newsletter about both the history of puppetry and the history of the OPA organization. This involved doing research in the archives at the Canadian Museum of History as well as networking with puppeteers to confirm information. At the time, I had believed that promoting the OPA and volunteering my time there was a worthy initiative, however I soon learned how completely mistaken I was about the modern incarnation of the OPA.
Unfortunately, from 2005 onward being involved with the OPA became increasingly difficult and frustrating to say the least. I was disheartened to learn about all of the unethical nonsense that went on behind the scenes of this supposed professional organization, and was treated quite disrespectfully when I spoke out against it rather than to keep quite and go along with it. As a result of all the buffoonery, I stepped down from the board in 2009 and cancelled my membership. Based on my experience during that time, I have absolutely nothing good to say about the OPA in the least. In essence, I found volunteering on the board of the OPA to be a colossal disappointment, and as a passionate puppeteer it broke my heart.
Going forward, any statement that the OPA makes about it's so called value or effectiveness as a provincial organization for Ontario puppeteers is completely hypocritical, as in reality the only people who benefit from the OPA's ongoing existence are the four or five people who govern it.
Frankly, there's more information on this blog about the history of puppetry in Ontario than there is on the OPA website! It's been that way since 2003.
Puppets Up! International Festival
Since the inaugural Puppets Up Festival in 2005 I've been active as a volunteer, helping Noreen Young on various occasions at "Arts in the Park" and other events to promote the festival. I've also lent my puppets for displaying in the windows around Almonte during the festival or for related puppet exhibits.
On a few occasions I've worn the festival mascot, Nick, at promotional events, and I often participate in the parade as I'm doing in the above photo, which was taken during the 2013 Puppets Up parade. I didn't make this snake puppet though, I'm just helping to carry it in the parade. It was actually quite heavy!
I have also been a featured performer at the 2006 festival and have done street performing at the festival on several occasions. For many years I was a vendor in the artisan market at Puppets Up, selling my hand-made puppets. In 2024 I will be doing some street performing.
I've included more detailed information about the Puppets Up! International Festival on this page.
Max Ottawa Giant Parade Puppets
Max Ottawa is a gay men's heath organization that I did many art workshops for, beginning in 2017. In 2018 my workshops became one of Max Ottawa's ongoing programs which I facilitated for two years until the pandemic shut down. I'm no longer associated with Max Ottawa, but I'm still very proud of the work that I did over the three years that I was involved there.
In addition to the workshops I made three giant puppets for Max Ottawa with help from their awesome volunteers! The first two puppets were built in July and Aug 2018 for the Pride Parade held on Sunday, August 26, 2018. The third puppet was built in 2019 for that year's Pride Parade, it was a long parade dragon style puppet but instead we made it a unicorn.
The pink puppet on the left is named Eric, after Eric Levitt, the super, terrific, awesome, coordinator of this puppet project for Max Ottawa, while the blue guy is Max! The cool dude in the bottom left corner is Lucien, one of the many volunteers who helped to build and paint the four puppet hands, and paint the blue head and neck.
The volunteers also sculpted and painted some emoji shapes (a peach, an eggplant and some water drops). I sculpted the heads and made the bodies of the puppets. Lucien also helped to operate the blue puppet's right hand during the parade, while another volunteer, David, was on the left hand. The Pink puppet was operated by volunteers Steve, Joel, and Nathan as well as Eric.
I also have to mention Matt Harding, Community Coordinator for Max Ottawa, who played a big role in making this project happen, and he even helped to make the puppets too. Everyone did an amazing job! This was a fun project and I'm very greatful that Max Ottawa gave me this opportunity to build some giant puppets for them. :)
Here is the Unicorn parade puppet that we built the following year in 2019.
It's 20 feet long and requires five puppeteers!!!
-Mikey :)
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Most Recent Update: Feb 2017
Legal stuff:
Please contact me through my website at www.artellepuppets.ca
The contents of this blog page are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1976, 2016 as detailed below. Use of any material from this blog page for any purpose requires advance permission from the copyright holder, Mike Artelle. Contact information can be found at: www.artellepuppets.ca
Puppet Characters
Guns N' Puppets, Axle Grease, Virgule, Lewis Brown, Morris Laborious, Rob the Slob, Mr. Noodlehead, Mousie Mousie, Hornz the Cow, puppet designs, character names, likenesses, and puppets are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1987, 1996
Various Puppets
Pterodactyl puppet, Frog puppet, Big Mouth workshop puppet, puppet designs, likenesses, and puppets are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1987, 2014
Cartoon and Superhero Character Drawings
Poingo Pig, Spike, Cockroach, Captain Roger Ray Beam, Hornz the Cow, Mikey cartoon character, character designs, character names, likenesses, and art are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1987, 1999
Original Puppet Shows and Stories
The Christmas Wish, The Phantoms Christmas, The Case of the Snowman Toppler, The Chocolate Chip Cookie Boy, Guns N Puppets, Biker Dudes and Dragon Riders, stories, characters and scripts are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1987, 2016
Various Projects
John Conway and Uncle Chichimus documentary video and script © Mike Artelle, 2003
Toy puppets and dolls, designs and patterns TM and © Mike Artelle, 1987, 2015
Artelle Puppets and Pythor Comics names, logos and website contents TM and © Mike Artelle, 2011, 2015
Additional Information
Muppets, The Muppet Show, Jim Henson, Witchiepoo, H.R Pufnstuf, Sid and Marty Krofft, DC Comics, Nightwing, Hawkman, Johan Conway photograph, Uncle Chichimus, Hollyhock, Art of Puppetry online exhibit main page, character designs, character names, and their likenesses are TM and © their respective owners. Ownership of these elements is in no way being implied by Mike Artelle. In these cases only the original artwork or photograph being presented is © Mike Artelle, 1990, 1999
All remaining puppets, dolls, text, stories, photographs, and art presented on this blog page are TM and © Mike Artelle, 1976, 2016
