Even in a city known for its spectacles, the annual New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival (NOGPF) is, well, spectacular. Now in its 11th year, the festival will run from April 3 through 7 in a five-day celebration of pure puppet magic brought to you by “local, national and international artists selected for their diversity and ingenuity,” according to the NOGPF website. Featuring upwards of 300 individual puppets from 25 separate companies performing across seven venues, this year’s lineup is more thoughtful than ever.
During NOGPF, puppetmasters and multidisciplinary artists will descend upon beloved venues like Spellcaster Lodge, Marigny Opera House, AllWays Lounge, The Tigermen Den, and more to showcase their masterpieces. Composed of parades, puppet shows, street installations, comedy acts, theatrical productions, musical performances, and many more difficult-to-describe shenanigans, the festival takes place during daytime until late into the night.
“The world needs gentleness, integrity, and innocence,” festival founder Pandora Mudlark tells me over the phone from inside her theater, which bears her adopted surname. She’s actively working, her fingers cut up from wire and covered in glue from creating giant seagull wings. “I’m so proud of all the humans of different ages. More than anything, what I love to see is the exaltation and joy of those who are just getting started in this experience.”
NOGPF showcases many towering feats of engineering, but you’ll also find shadow puppetry, hand puppetry, marionette choreography, papier-mâché masks, handcrafted instruments, light shows, music, costumes, papercrafts, and more. There will be clownish puppeteers for kids to laugh at, unnerving marionettes whose stories will haunt your dreams, and delicate machinations that will leave you in awe.
Emily Schubert performs at the 9th annual New Orleans Giant Puppet Festival’s Puppet Slam at the AllWays Lounge in 2023.
Photo by Laura Borealis
Whether giant or teensy, performed in shadow or broad daylight, the ancient art of puppetry is versatile in expressing complexities of the human experience across eras and cultures, which makes it particularly timely. In a political moment that feels increasingly regressive, puppetry illuminates exactly how revolutionary we can be. By exploring everything from subversive themes to the interconnected roles we play in our daily lives, puppets invite us to look closer, to get lost in the details, and examine the mechanics of the world around us.
“What’s important about puppetry is that anyone can be who they choose to be, using puppets to say, ‘This is who I am,’” says Mudlark. “There is no judgment about the performer, because of the puppet. You can tell any story you want through the puppet. The puppeteer is unimportant in that exchange between story and audience. It’s very pure and innocent—it invites people to be as open-minded as children, as clear-eyed as young people are before the judgment forms in our minds… it puts everyone, regardless of age, in the position of a child. It’s a tremendously humane art form.”
A recurring theme of this year’s lineup is the labyrinth. For example, Rabbit Foot Puppets’ tabletop puppet show (described as “Alice [in] Wonderland meets Pan’s Labyrinth set to a French Rococo background”) that takes place in a 6×6 foot box. Or Seattle-based queer shadow puppetry/performance art duo (and recipients of a 2025 Jim Henson Foundation Workshop Grant) Shadow Girls Cult’s haunting multi-genre production Unraveling. Influenced by sci-fi, film noir, and surrealism, the show is performed through a series of cinematic shadow vignettes to weave together multiple distinct characters with overlapping stories in a tapestry of yearning. There are also more “traditional” puppet shows, like The Mudlark Puppeteers’ The Cabinet Key of Cassius Kabrit, Citizen Entomologist, told through marionette, rod-and-shadow puppetry, toy theater, and music, in which Creole faun Cassius (“Kabrit” is the Creole word for goat) must leave his comfortable, homebound life for a sudden adventure on “a journey of transformation and transcendence.”
“There’s a critical distance where you can watch a puppet suffer in ways that would be unacceptable for a human,” Mudlark explains. “They take on the burden of responsibility. The puppet endures and you know it will be OK. It’s understood to be a conduit for the joy and the suffering alike.”
“Multiple Carnival krewes have spawned from the classes we teach, and it will be neat to see them all march in the Saturday night [April 5] parade,” says Mudlark. For this year’s Giant Puppet day parade, 40 students ages 8 to 60 made 13 giant puppets together in a five-week-long workshop called “Dream it, Be it” (made possible by a grant from the New Orleans Arts Council as well as support from the National Puppet Slam Network). Led by the original Wild Tchoupitoulas Mardi Gras Indians, the day parade starts at Plessy Park at noon on Sunday, April 6. Then at 10 p.m. in the Twilight Room at AllWays Lounge, witness the Slam du Femme Fatale—a special event led by female-identifying people and trans puppeteers.
“As a Creole, queer, person of color, I feel like I could [not] be heard outside of the world of puppetry,” Mudlark shares. “I started making puppets when I was really little to tell stories I wanted to tell without people looking at ME. I’m able to talk about my family history, my personal understanding of identity. It affords a beautiful agency; it’s the puppet’s job to tell the story, and you can be whatever you want.”
For more info, check out neworleansgiantpuppetfest.com.
Top photo: String and Shadow Puppet Theater, based in Olympia, Washington “and (sometimes) New Orleans”
Courtesy stringandshadow.com.
