Hope is the Thing with Strings
The Festival of Animated Objects has long been a labour of love for its founder, Xstine Cook. Thing is, it’s also labour-intensive, so Pete Balkwill offered to help out. Only one of them knew what he was getting into.
The impulse when discussing the organization of a puppet festival, is to talk in terms of pulling strings or skillful manipulation. And because puppets are like a direct line to the id, why resist impulse? In the case of the biennial Festival of Animated Objects, Pete Balkwill and Xstine Cook have been pulling strings for a few years now. It was at the last festival, in 2015, that Cook, who founded the festival in 2002, came to her biennial epiphany. “I said, ‘I don’t think I can do this again,’” she recalls. “Apparently, I say that after every festival.” This time Balkwill took her seriously and offered to help. An Old Trout Puppet Workshop member who has taught at the Banff Centre and the University of Calgary, Balkwill had a vested interest in seeing the craft thrive in Calgary. He also had an ace up his sleeve. “I knew she wouldn’t be able to walk away,” Balkwill says. “This is her baby.”
For Balkwill, it was a good thing that his instincts about Cook proved correct. “The last thing I am capable of is organizing a puppet festival,” he says. “You have to pull together an army of people to do this—it’s insane. I had no idea.”
Cook, a mask and puppet artist herself, knew that Balkwill, although eager, was likely getting in over his head. In addition to volunteering for administrative tasks, he was part of the Old Trout’s remount of The Unlikely Birth
of Istvan, which opens the festival. Cook could see that “he really had no idea” what he was taking on. “When you’re running a festival, you need someone who is going to sit up all night fixing the website, sending out the contracts and arranging for passes,” she says. “And all that is going to happen while Pete is in rehearsal.”
The solution Balkwill and Cook hit upon was to serve as co-artistic directors. With the exception of some canine incompatibility—“my dog tried to eat his dog,” Cook says—the two have gotten along well. One of their first areas of agreement was that they needed some help. They hired a producer (Gwen Murray) to handle the details of pulling the festival together, and assembled a team to support her.
The results of all this work will be seen March 16-19, as the eighth Festival of Ani-
of putting together the live programming, and has assembled a lineup that showcases local talent like the Long Grass Studio and Workshop, as well as international performers like Wonderheads from Portland (see sidebar). Cook is curating the film and video side of the festival, which includes Handmade Puppet Dreams Vol. VII, a collection of shorts put together by Heather Henson, the daughter of Muppets creator Jim Henson, and Animovies, a series of stop-motion films from around the world.
The pair is also responsible for two exhibitions opening at the Leighton Art Centre on Saturday, March 11. Cook will unveil
F Off, the result of a residency at Sunalta School.ace Over the course of two months, Cook took the elementary students through the mask-making process, beginning with making plaster casts of their own faces. The resulting 310 creations—and 310 artist statements— represent a unique take on identity.
Balkwill is putting together Leighton Reliquary, a show that turns on a long-standing theory and a more recent realization. The latter concerns the centre itself, which Balkwill describes as “a tiny hidden jewel of artistic activity.” The former concerns his belief that creative energy resides in significant objects.
That is a necessary belief for a puppeteer whose bread and butter is bringing objects to life. It’s not surprising, then, that Balkwill became excited by the centre’s collection of artifacts, which include A.C. Leighton’s liquor cabinet. This gave rise to an impudent question—“Do you guys ever drink any of his juice?”—and a less fanciful proposal. He and Nick Johnson have collaborated on a comic book that juxtaposes the story of A.C. and Barbara Leighton with a fictional puppet-related discovery in the archives. The latter is augmented by a series of puppets placed in relation to the museum’s artifacts so as to tap into the creative energy of the place.
In a way, that is also the larger goal of the Festival of Animated Objects. Balkwill and Cook are committed to staying on through the 2019 festival, by which time they hope to be well-established on the local scene. They also plan to have a solid organization and a new artistic director in place. “The idea is to push it out of the nest,” Balkwill says. If all goes well, by then the festival will have taken on a life of its own.