Blair Thomas is a lifelong puppeteer and founder and artistic director of the International Puppet Theater Festival. In 2009, Thomas was ordinated as a dharma teacher by the Maitreya Buddhist Seminary and currently serves as an adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas was recently honored with the title of “Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government for advancing the art of puppetry.

In this interview, the Maroon sat down with Thomas to talk about puppets, bunraku, and the seventh Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, which ran from January 15 to January 26, 2025.

The following interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Chicago Maroon: Hi Blair, thanks for speaking with me. What is a puppet?

Blair Thomas: A puppet is any performing object. It could be an anthropomorphized human animal or a spirit. But it could also just be an everyday object as well.

CM: What do you think puppets teach us?

BT: Puppets are surrogates in the performance. They function as metaphors for ideas—maybe historical characters, maybe fictional characters. They’re surrogates for our experience, so a puppet functions as a mirror on the stage, where the puppet isn’t feeling anything. But the puppet is going through an experience. We see that scenario playing out when we look at [the puppet] and we think, “Oh, the puppet is sad.”

Well, the puppet is not sad at all. It’s just a material sculpture. But we are able to project our understanding of sadness on the puppet in the context of the play, and then we feel that emotion. So, in that way, they function as a mirror for our own perceptions.

CM: As a dharma teacher, how do you relate puppetry to your Buddhist practice?

BT: Buddhism, as an entry point, teaches mindfulness and awareness, and the notion of detaching—that you’re detaching from your experience but you’re mindful of the experience at the same time—is the beginning point of any practice.

I use that in terms of how I work with puppetry and how I work with theater-making or festival-making. I look to bring shows to the festival that can afford audiences to have that experience. A great example is the ice marionette show Anywhere, where there’s a lot of reflective time in the piece because there’s so little being spoken and so little happening, yet there’s so much present in the space.

The audience is put into a place of being present to the experience. That’s very much like what Buddhism is. There’s a great moment in the Life & Times of Michael K, where similarly there’s a crisis point where the character has to face something that he can’t actually hear, like he doesn’t understand what was just said to him. And we see the puppet be the surrogate for that experience. It absorbs the incomprehension of what was just said to him. And then it pauses, and then we see it go into the body of the puppet. And we start to understand, through what the puppet is experiencing nonverbally and with very little movement, the realization of what is being communicated to him.

That’s a very heightened moment, of course, but what ends up happening is the audience is getting to experience the character’s experiences. That creates and demands of us an awareness that’s very much connected to entry-level Buddhism.

CM: I saw Plexus Polaire’s Dracula two nights ago, where you introduced the show right before. The show played a lot with agency by switching between puppets and actors.

BT: For sure. The questions of agency in that show are so skillfully presented because that company is interested in blurring the line between the puppet and the puppeteer. They do deceive theatrically, but you eventually start to see how the body of the puppet can absorb so much that the human body can’t absorb.

They communicate things that an actor in a film can’t. In Dracula, the puppet of Lucy absorbs the power of Dracula, and she becomes powerful herself. Her body is contorted and throwing itself around, and they’re trying to keep her down on the bed. The same scene plays out in the new Nosferatu film, where the foe is trying to keep the Lucy character down on the bed.

There’s an actor who’s portraying that same thing, and that particular actor does an excellent job of it, for sure. But the puppet [performs that scene] on yet another level because the puppet’s body can distort right in front of you in a skillful way. I think that’s ecstatic. That’s where the materiality of the puppet extends beyond what humans are capable of.

CM: I noticed that Plexus and a couple of shows employ Bunraku. I know that you have some experience with the genre. Could you speak to it?

BT: Bunraku is the lingua franca of contemporary puppetry, if I would be so bold to say. There are other kinds of puppet theater, but the proliferation of that practice across cultures and countries is ubiquitous.

It’s an adaptation. We use the word “Bunraku” outside of Japan. In Japan, Ningyō jōruri is the name of the form, but it’s practiced at the National Bunraku Theatre. It’s a very precise form that has these exact things that need to be done to qualify, and contemporary Bunraku does not do that. It takes the central notion of three-person direct hand manipulation, which is three people having their hands directly on the doll. And then in the case of Plexus, they’re doing human-size Bunraku. That’s a whole other level of it.

The Cabinet of Curiosity was doing a smaller, doll-size Bunraku, and the Life & Times of Michael K was also Bunraku.

CM: Do you have a theory for how Bunraku came about as a lingua franca for contemporary puppet theater?

BT: There’s a desire for a kind of authenticity or veracity or a certain level of realism, without actually having full realism. Since the Bunraku doll is a complete human figure and there’s so many ways it can be moved that replicates human movement, it can deceive us. The marionette is a full-figure puppet that never deceives us because it’s so evident how it’s being operated. The disbelief is never fully there.

I think that, particularly at the end of the 20th century, there just became this need for veracity and showing something that has a realness to it. So it [Bunraku] came coupled with the emergence of the contemporary puppetry movement in the late ’70s.

That’s not just in the United States—it was a worldwide thing. You can trace it back a little bit earlier than that. The marionette had been prominent, but then it got superseded. Why is that the case? I think it also has to do with the three elements of Bunraku—the puppet being operated by the visible puppeteer, the narration being told by the narrator, and the live music.

The exposed artifice of the Bunraku has become something that all puppeteers are doing. Not all of them, of course—there’s still concealed puppeteer practice—but the times have embraced this notion that we see how it’s being done while we’re seeing the magic of it being done at the same time. There’s no hidden performance in that way.

So we see the musician over there [and] we see the speaker. The live performer and the puppet share the stage together. That is an unprecedented practice in puppetry in all forms, in all cultures—the notion of the actor and the puppet being together. Literally, the puppeteer can put their hand on the puppet and move the puppet forward.

In Some Prefer Nettles, a Japanese novel from the 1920s, there’s a great description where it talks about the superiority of Bunraku because the puppeteer can move the puppet from its center. We call it the solar plexus. Whereas a rod or a string muffles the movement just a little bit [and] mediates it more, the Bunraku could be really direct and more assertive. The times have called for that, and it makes for a more dynamic performance.

CM: One of your roles is co-director of Chicago Puppet Studio. Could you walk me through what goes into physically designing and building puppets?

BT: The Chicago Puppet Studio is our design and fabrication wing. It’s really just us practically responding to people’s requests to have puppets in an opera, or a dance, or a musical, or a theater production, or a film. The most satisfying and fruitful elements are when we are approached by a project at the beginning, and we can talk about how the people who are making the work would like the puppet to function so that we can then provide the solution for that in puppetry. [It’s] often just lots of conversation about ideas.

Then my team—Tom Lee in particular, who’s my co-director—we come up with different ideas. What are the theatrical solutions using puppetry? The arsenal of tricks is always within the context: where is it, how many people are on stage, how many people are available, are they going to be skilled puppeteers or not, what is the set like, what is the narrative moment of the play, that kind of thing. It’s just a matter of a fair amount of discussion.

Then, we make a prototype of something to see how it works. We present, then there’s the green light, then there’s the fabrication, then there’s the rehearsal to make it come alive.

CM: How do you help bridge the gap in communication when it comes to theater productions that don’t know much about puppetry?

BT: We usually present a lot of examples in images because most people haven’t seen this stuff. Even people working professionally in the field and at all these major venues aren’t exposed to it. It’s also good for them to see sequences with movement so they understand how it moves. Usually, we have a little bit of an idea. It’s just a matter of “Is it going to be rigged in this sort of way?” and “If we make it out of that material, it’s going to be able to do this,” and “It’s got to come apart because it’s big and it needs to fit through the size of a door or we have to ship it and it’s going to go in this box.” These are the kinds of limitations we have to follow to ensure the success of the idea.

CM: I want to return to the festival. How did the idea for the International Puppet Theater Festival first come about?

BT: 10 years ago, we had our first festival. It was just recognizing all the presenters that I knew in Chicago who had presented puppetry at their venues. We all got together and presented at the same time. I made a brochure, and we called it a puppet festival. Doing so, I recognized that there was an audience in Chicago that would go and see the work. People responded. We were like, “That’s a great idea.”

CM: A decade in, how has the festival evolved in your mind?

BT: I have always found that puppetry is very reliable. People who haven’t experienced it, when they see it, are usually pretty engaged by it. It’s really a bigger question of structures in the cultural scene that support the development of the art form in a way that would put it on the level of sophistication with other arts that are well supported in town.

We don’t have a lot of tradition of [puppetry] in the United States. We’re the largest festival that happens in the U.S., which is really kind of crazy. We’re a country of 300 million people, but you can go to a country of 10 million like the Czech Republic and the amount of puppetry that’s going on is mind-blowing. That’s for a variety of different reasons, but we’re in a cultural wasteland in that way. What do we need to do to start whetting the appetite of the audiences? It’s supply and demand. If they want good, excellent puppetry, then it’ll start to get produced more, right? There’s plenty of young puppeteers who want to make work, but there’s a gap between the desire to make the work and where you can show the work once you’ve made it.

My goal is just to make the festival and make it have credibility that raises the bar for what the form could be and what audiences should expect. Hopefully, that will start to influence different levels. In Chicago, there’s a lot of younger puppeteers. Much more than when I was younger, for sure. There’s also a lot of people who are working in culture who, all of a sudden, are seeing an art form they didn’t know anything about.

And that’s another way that’s going to advance [the medium], because the standard just gets raised, and [so do] expectations of what the form can do.

CM: How do you see the future of puppetry? Say, the year 2050—what do puppets look like?

BT: To me, it feels very hopeful and bright. There’s a lot of sustained interest in the form that it has the capacity to absorb so much more.

It can be light and playful, and it can hold very serious and powerful stories as well. It’s also a welcome counter to our otherwise heavily mediated culture through how advanced digital technology has become. It’s really analog-based, the form of puppetry, and the experience of being in the room and witnessing it has an authenticity to it that is unavoidable.

So, it’s very powerful for people who show up and see it. That will help it find its home as we become even more mediated and advanced by our technological experiences otherwise.