5 Things Calgary Puppeteer Juanita Dawn Loves

Absurdly and wonderfully, our city has long been fertile ground for puppet-making and performance, a home base to some of the world’s most talented puppeteers, including Ronnie Burkett and The Old Trout Puppet Workshop.

It wasn’t a stretch, then, for a young Calgarian interested in theatre, great with her hands and denied a shot at fine arts school, to fall in love with puppetry back in the ’90s when she saw her first adult puppet show at One Yellow Rabbit’s Big Secret Theatre.

“It was Ronnie Burkett’s Tinka’s New Dress [a bawdy satire set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia], and it knocked me over,” says Juanita Dawn, who immediately “went crazy for Burkett.” Dawn followed him to every subsequent performance and talk she could get herself to and, eventually, struck up a lasting friendship with the now Toronto-based puppeteer.

An artsy teenager in Kenora, Ont., Dawn had dutifully fulfilled her parents’ plan for her to attend nursing school. She arrived in Calgary in 1981 and worked in labour and delivery at the Holy Cross and Rockyview hospitals and, later, in reproductive health at the Kensington Clinic.

Consistently punctuating her marriage, her nursing career, early motherhood, a divorce and remarriage, grandchildren, and recent retirement, are dozens of puppet-making classes and workshops including a decade of annual intensives at the Banff Centre with the Trouts’ Pete Balkwill. Dawn has spent hundreds of hours slip-casting a universe of strange and beautiful characters in her Springbank studio (“Am I a bad mother for drying plaster moulds in the oven, rather than baking cookies?”). Her startlingly expressive, foot-tall people and critters come to life via their maker’s poignant playwriting and deft movements.

This spring, in epilogue to the annual Festival of Animated Objects (the fest’s founder, Xstine Cook, was first to put Dawn onstage in 2007), the puppeteer will present an elegy to the early 20th-century Canadian prairies called One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, co-written with Little Miss Higgins (Jolene Higgins) and Kyla Read, in collaboration with puppeteers Stephanie Elgersma and Jocelyn Mah. Expect laughs, heartbreak and time travel.

Tickets to One for Sorrow, Two for Joy are available through showpass.com.

Juanita Dawn’s High Five

Surrounded by irresistible people, puppets and pets, the artist finds inspiration and joy almost everywhere, particularly in these five things.

Academy of the Wooden Puppet

“I’ve just completed a four-year online course called Academy of the Wooden Puppet with the puppeteer Bernd Ogrodnik out of Iceland. This is a photo of me and my Buddy puppet, which was the first project in the course. I got to meet Bernd when I did a huge hike in Iceland with a group of friends.”

Banff Centre

“I am so grateful for and inspired by the community of people I’ve met and am supported by in the puppet world. The intensive workshops I took there with Pete Balkwill, and later helped facilitate, were the beginning of meeting puppeteers here and around the world.”

New Band Saw

“I love this thing. I bought it with money I earned making masks and puppets for Parks Canada recently. My studio is a purpose-built puppet workshop — I have absolutely every tool I need. My husband, Pat, shares the studio for his stoneware-glazing business. When Pat’s not doing that, he’s helping me write grants.”

Tilly the Dog

“I bought my four-acre property in Springbank in 1989. Interestingly, it’s only been since I retired, and we started walking Tilly every day, that I’ve really gotten to know my neighbours. Tilly has been my way into realizing that I’m surrounded by wonderful people here.”

Willow Mae

“Willow Mae is the main character in One for Sorrow. I wanted to create a woman with no romantic attachments; one who didn’t follow the rules of society. By not getting married, Willow Mae is able to keep her own property and live a very adventurous life. I made puppets of her in three stages of life — as a child, a young adult and as an old woman.”

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