Meet the Puppet Designers of FIFTY BOXES OF EARTH
Andrew Young & Oanh Vu building puppets at Monkeybear Studio
For Oanh Vu and Andrew Young, it was an easy yes when Theater Mu approached them about designing and building puppets for Ankita Raturi’s Fifty Boxes of Earth. A creative response to Dracula that tackled xenophobia and centered queerness? Working with choreographer Ananya Chatterjea? They were in.
The duo has worked together on different projects since 2020—Minnesta Opera’s MNiatures—with a focus on shadow puppets, but the involvement of dancers caused them to approach Fifty Boxes of Earth with a different mindset.
"Oftentimes when you're a puppeteer, you're trying to be as invisible as possible, and you're trying to get the object to be the performer. You're moving the object, and that's the focus," Oanh says. "But with these puppets that we're making, it's like a combination of the dancer and the puppet's that is the focus."
building puppets at Monkeybear Studio
To start the brainstorming process, Oanh, Andrew, Ananya, and choreographic and rehearsal assistant Kealoha Ferreira had a devising workshop. After a shopping spree (including Ax-Man, in particular), the quartet got together and literally played with the material—seeing how it moved, seeing how the dancers would instinctually manipulate items, seeing how puppeteers would approach the same item. It was the first step in creating a larger-than-life garden for the show.
As one example, Andrew talks about the material used in a flower stem. "The Lycra has a lot of stretch and interesting kind of qualities to it, and the dancers wrap it around themselves and move it in an interesting way. They intertwine between the puppet and the dancer, which I think is really kind of cool."
Oanh and Andrew’s puppets must integrate in seamlessly with the choreography, which much integrate seamlessly into the script. Unlike musicals, there aren’t definitive starts or stops to a song where everything synchs up. Instead, they all, as Ankita says, must meld together.
“I talk about this play a lot like a braid,” she told American Theatre magazine. “The elements I am trying to braid are this dialogue drama element between the characters, this dance element representing the nature of the garden and the atmosphere, and then puppetry as what is growing, thriving, or dying in this atmosphere.”
See Oanh and Andrew’s puppets during Theater Mu’s world premiere of Fifty Boxes of Earth, which runs Mar 1-16, 2025, at Park Square Theatre (previews Feb 27 & 28)! Tickets are always Pay As You Are.