A giant puppet for your festival. An installation. A set or a prop for a
theater or dance piece. A custom arch for your wedding. My work is mostly
event based — celebration and performance. And I can make a cool weird
arty pergola for your back yard that your typical carpenter could not.
Lantern Fest, 2017
What I build
Mostly event based. Celebration and performance.
Festivals & paradesA giant puppet for your festival. Something that can be carried a mile, survive a crowd, and still read from forty feet away. Twenty-five years of Parade the Circle, and I run production on it now.
Theater & danceSets, props and puppets for the stage. Built to be handled every night by somebody who needs to be thinking about the music, not the mechanism.
Weddings & celebrationsA custom arch. An installation for the room. Something nobody at your wedding has seen before, because it did not exist until you asked for it.
Public art & installationMade for one place and nowhere else. A library branch, a lobby, a canal towpath after dark.
Workshops & residenciesYour group, any age, no experience needed. Five weeks later they carry the thing they made down the middle of the street.
Something strange for your houseA cool weird arty pergola for your back yard that your typical carpenter could not. Arbors, arches, furniture. Same shop as everything above it.
Every piece gets a plan before it gets a single staple.
Bessie
2026
For
Canalway Partners
Occasion
Towpath Trail Lantern Parade
Materials
recycled and upcycled
With
Eddie “Trash Fish” Olschansky
Status
paraded, after dark
A giant dandelion
2001
For
Parade the Circle, Cleveland Museum of Art
Role
assistant to Wendy Mahon
Span
my first week in Cleveland
Status
paraded, then dismantled
The White Cat
Les Délices
For
Les Délices, Cleveland
Role
puppet designer and builder
Method
bunraku-style and rod puppetry
Source
17th-century French
Status
performed
Most of what I have built no longer exists. That is not a complaint.
A parade piece is supposed to be seen once, by a street full of people,
and then come apart. The plan is often the only thing left, which is
why every piece on this site is listed the way it was built rather than
the way it was photographed.
One category on this site reads standing. That one is the
furniture.
I came here for one parade and stayed for the community around it.
A college friend put my name forward in 2001 and I came to Cleveland to
assist Wendy Mahon on Parade the Circle. I built a giant dandelion that
first week. I moved here for good in 2005, because of the people and
because of the work, and I have been part of that parade every year since.
I am now its production manager, which mostly means sitting down with a
group that has a drawing and no plan and working out how the thing will
actually stand up.
The rest of it grew out of the same tent. An opera company needed puppets.
A library branch wanted its neighborhood to make something together.
Canalway needed a creature that could go down the Towpath after dark and
be made entirely out of what other people threw away.
Dandelions, at dusk.
The instinct in all of it is the same one. Somebody is carrying a picture
nobody else can see yet. My job is to ask enough questions about the
specific situation the thing has to survive — a street, a stage, a
wind, a doorway, eighty performances — and then build it until the
rest of us can see it too.
WKYC named him the parade’s production manager, guiding groups’ concepts into something real.
