Last August, a few days before the Republican National Convention, 75 puppet makers were arrested at a warehouse in west Philadelphia. They were charged with conspiracy and held on a bus without water or bathroom facilities for nine hours. Then they were put in jail, where most of them stayed for two weeks. To add insult to injury, police put the puppets they’d made–about 200 of them–into trash compactors.
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This time a warehouse wasn’t necessary–Heit did the work on her kitchen table. The finished puppets, wearing prison stripes, stand about one and a half inches tall and are manipulated using matchsticks glued to their backs. The set, a jailhouse, is made out of a matchbox, which also serves as storage for the puppets when they’re not in use.
Heit, who studied printmaking and animation at the School of the Art Institute, was one of the original members of Redmoon Theater, the company known for its larger-than-life-size puppets. Animation led her into puppetry, she says; both are about bringing things to life. “When you’ve created a movement for something that doesn’t really exist, you get hooked right away.”
A few years ago Heit and some fellow Redmooners started an offshoot company called Theater Dank as a forum for smaller-scale shows. Theater Dank organized the Chicago Puppetry Festival at Link’s Hall in 1999. For the festival’s second year, Heit–who’s currently working on her own film using puppets–put together a puppet film festival. This year that’s morphed into the Chicago International Puppet Film Festival, curated by Heit, which is running as part of Puppetropolis.
