A puppereer travels far and wide with her ancient craft.

by Joanne O'Sullivan   .   photo by Anthony Bellemare

Many of Susan VandeWeghe’s best friends are puppets. More precisely, they’re “trick marionettes,” jointed puppets with body parts that are moved by strings. Because each part can move independently, the puppeteer can imitate life-like motions. So much of the puppet’s character is revealed through movement that VandeWeghe, a full-time puppeteer for the past 18 years, didn’t even add scripts to her performances until recently. All her shows were based on puppets moving to music.

Her marionettes are circus performers—trapeze artists, tightrope walkers and jugglers—who imitate the choreographed motions of their human counterparts. “Dancers try to hit the ‘grace point’ in the music, and with marionettes you try to do the same,” she says.

Growing up the oldest of eight kids, VandeWeghe spent a lot of time entertaining her younger siblings. Sewing doll clothes and making up stories—VandeWeghe never considered these talents useful in her adult life until leaving her 20-year career in the hotel industry. While contemplating her next job move, she started helping out a friend, Chicago puppeteer David Herzog. Sculpting marionettes by hand and creating stories for them, it didn’t take long for her to realize: “This is what I was born to do,” says the puppeteer, who moved to Cedar Mountain, North Carolina, in 1999 and set up her own performance company, Mountain Marionettes.

VandeWeghe’s interest in music led to the development of two newer shows that do include scripts: a jazz-history show called Jazzy Strings featuring a sassy marionette called the Red-Headed Diva, and a 50s-inspired act called At The Hop, showcasing purple people eaters and atomic-age Martians. She travels around the Southeast and occasionally around the country for performances, about 150 of them last year. While she often takes her shows to senior centers (where the Red-Headed Diva flirts with older gentlemen), she finds they’re a hit with school-age audiences who’ve never heard the music before. “There’s nothing as fun as seeing a bunch of older boys filtering into an auditorium, moving to Glenn Miller’s In The Mood,” she says. Those same boys, whose first reaction is often, “Oh, yuck, puppets,” often quickly warm up to them, she says. “They love the puppets that break apart.” VandeWeghe finds that fourth grade tends to be the cutoff point between kids who are open to puppetry and those who are skeptical. For seniors, her performances are a reintroduction to an art form they loved as kids.

Marionettes are among the oldest form of puppets in the world. VandeWeghe uses a marionette performance style called cabaret, developed at night clubs in the 1940s. She wears black and works against a drape with lights focused on the puppets but doesn’t conceal herself. “When I’m out there, I disappear,” she says. It wasn’t until recently that she started developing voices for her marionettes, such as Aunt Nelly, the star in her new show Stories from Aunt Nelly’s Mountain Home, which she’ll be performing at Asheville’s Diana Wortham Theater in March. Narrator Aunt Nelly sits on her porch in a rocking chair while spinning Southern Appalachian tales and introducing characters such as her brother the fiddler and the falling-apart farmer. For VandeWeghe, starting with plaster of paris and neoprene rubber to create a character with a personality of its own is creative bliss. “I love my job,” she says. “I’m doing new things all the time.”

Catch Aunt Nelly’s Mountain Home on March 27 at the Diana Wortham Theater. For more information, call 828-257-4530 or go to dwtheatre.com. Read more about VandeWeghe’s puppets at www.mountainmarionettes.com.