Puppets take over Swarthmore

Dozens of pint-sized guests descended on Swarthmore on Saturday afternoon as a weeklong festival of the Puppeteers of America concluded with puppeteers and their miniature companions blanketing street corners and shops, delighting many.

"It's all so cool that it's integrated through the whole town," said Wendy Voet, who lives in the borough. "It's puppets everywhere."

Voet and her family were at the corner of Dartmouth and Park Avenues in the early afternoon, watching Peter Hart, a puppeteer from Atlanta. Hart's stable of family-friendly puppets included Ma, a unicycle-riding bunny, and Top Hat Bones, a dancing orange skeleton.

Down the street, in front of the Swarthmore Co-Op grocery store, Bernie Beauchamp of Reno, Nev., swayed with a variety of marionettes - a busty blonde, a Pee-Wee Herman lookalike - as tunes played in the background. At one point, Beauchamp pulled out a miniature piano (a piece of wood with keys painted on top), and one of his marionettes played along to a Ray Charles song.

At 2 p.m., a cavalcade of puppeteers waltzed through town and onto the Swarthmore College campus as dozens watched and cheered. Performers included those donning hand puppets and several giant "parade puppets," which reached about 10 feet high and looked as though they had just arrived from a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade.

"That was neat, seeing how the puppetry was done," John Davies, 48, of Wallingford, said. He attended with his children, Maggie, 8, and Jack, 3.

The event, officially known as the National Puppet Festival, is a biannual event and the national festival for the Puppeteers of America. It began in Swarthmore on Monday, and drew more than 500 registered participants from all over the country; in Saturday's parade, there were performers from Atlanta, Toronto, and Chicago.

This year's festival, according to public relations coordinator Rosaria Mineo, was the first time since 1995 that the event took place in the Philadelphia region.

It was also the most extensive effort to bring the skills and performances of the attending puppeteers into the community, according to festival director Robert Smythe. He said the results were "absolutely phenomenal." In addition to dozens of workshops for festival participants, there were nearly 30 public performances during the week, and all had crowds at or near capacity, he said.

"There's just stuff going on all over the place," he said.

For Hart, the Atlanta puppeteer, the appeal of performing with puppets is the chance to connect with the audience, like when he takes the puppets into the crowd and the spectators seem to forget that there's a man behind the movements.

"When the children reach for the animal without inhibition, it's that 'makes your heart melt' kind of thing," he said.

Many of the puppeteers were quick to point out their craft was not just for kids.

Bernice Silver, who at age 99 was the festival's most experienced participant, performed in front of many festival attendees on Tuesday night; she said puppetry can appeal to spectators of all ages.

"It's one of the oldest professions in the world," she said. "It covers many, many artistic professions."

Joshua Holden, 30, from Queens, N.Y., said after a performance Saturday that puppetry can be a much more intense activity than it may appear.

"Everything I learned about acting . . . it's all transferred into an inanimate object," he said.