In the early 2000s, when puppeteer and filmmaker Raymond Carr was starting out as a Center for Puppetry Arts volunteer, one of his duties was to walk through the museum after hours to shut everything down. As he strolled through the building among the shadowy figures, their painted faces frozen and staring, he’d turn off the lights, marveling at how creepy and cool everything looked in the dark. He also felt a ripple of excitement and hope, knowing that puppetry was the career he wanted to pursue — if only he could figure out how to get there.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and on Saturday, the Center for Puppetry Arts will host a showcase and exhibit of Carr’s work during A Night of Ninja Puppet Movies. The event includes a screening of several of the offbeat, imaginative and often-surreal short films he’s helmed with his company, Ninja Puppet Productions, followed by a talkback.
Center for Puppetry Arts Exhibitions Director Kelsey Fritz said it’s the institution’s first film screening in a couple of years due to Covid safety concerns. The pop-up style of the Carr exhibit, too, emerged out of the pandemic, when it was easier to get audiences safely into the gallery space than to put on full shows.
The vision for the Ninja Puppet showcase was “trying to give (Carr) the space to do what he wanted to do and provide support as much as we can,” she said. “Usually for installations like this, we’d be making pedestals and mounts (for displays), but he really ran with it.”
For a slice of what Carr’s life looks like now: He recently returned home to Atlanta from the Adult Swim Festival Block Party in Philadelphia, where he was the puppeteer of a potato puppet onstage during a performance by rapper Tierra Whack. From there, he flew to Los Angeles to participate in the the Jim Henson Company’s Puppet Up! — Uncensored, an adult improv comedy show where he’s now a regular.
His first gig with Muppet headquarters was in late 2015, but it still feels awe-inspiring to walk onto Henson’s historic lot built by Charlie Chaplin in 1917. “You’ll see everyone from Paul McCartney to Justin Bieber walking around,” Carr said. “I don’t take it for granted and remind myself that it’s never old hat.”
When Carr speaks, the breadth of his knowledge on puppetry spills out casually, with historical and technical factoids tumbling over one another — the different styles, the pioneers, the current state of the art form.
He received an early introduction to well-attended puppet shows, albeit uniquely. “I was homeschooled by church clowns,” Carr will inform, entirely matter of fact. And yes, that’s just what it sounds like.
Before age 10, Carr and his brother, Jon, now a fixture of Atlanta’s improv scene (and former Dad’s Garage artistic director), joined their parents — both dressed as clowns — onstage for Biblically themed vaudeville-style shows at megachurches and conferences across Southern California. They performed to crowds well into the thousands. Swallowing his stage fright, Little Raymond would crouch with Jon behind the homemade puppet stage, waiting for the chance to pop up as a Dalmatian character who barked his feelings.
Carr got his first taste of the highs and lows of mainstream show business many years later, when he landed his first big break after interning at the Center for Puppetry Arts. It was an apprentice gig on the Nick Jr. children’s show LazyTown, which shot on location in Iceland and debuted in 2004.
“I always joke that there is the myth of making it. I’m sure plenty of people think of me that way, but it’s not the case,” he said. For LazyTown, Carr dropped out of college and relocated to the land of Björk to operate “auxiliary characters, butterflies, or just help move the puppet or the puppeteer on the cart.” Things were looking great as he quickly moved up to assistant puppeteer and began to perform some of the main characters, too.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be here forever,”’ Carr said. But then he didn’t get invited back for Season 2 because his hands were too big to do “live hands” with the kid-sized puppets. “They hired someone with smaller hands,” he said — something for which one can’t exactly plan.
Demoralized, Carr returned home to “kind of reinvent myself,” he said. He reenrolled at Georgia State University to finish his degree. And luckily, he also found PushPush Theatre and its Dailies project, with a cohort of then-up-and-coming filmmakers, including David Bruckner of The Ritual and The Night House fame. Through Carr’s work with this scrappy, hungry enclave of auteurs, he switched his focus to film and began incorporating puppetry into inventive, experimental cinematic concoctions.
In a few years, Carr landed his next big adventure with the touring show Walking with Dinosaurs, a spectacular event that featured 18 life-sized dinosaurs. From 2008 to 2010, he performed in arenas in most major North American cities. At that time, he began considering whether to leave Atlanta, but decided to stay put because of the community he had built here.
“There is a version of my life that would have moved back to L.A. and had whatever levels of success, but I would not have had the relationships that I still have today,” he said. “In addition to that, Atlanta provides freedom for lateral movement. If you want to make a dance piece or show, you can do that without maxing out your credit cards or taking out a second mortgage on your house.”
One of Carr’s favorite projects at the puppetry center is the long-running avant-garde smorgasbord XPT: Xperimental Puppetry Theater. He’s participated at least a dozen times but still vividly recalls his first XPT in the late 1990s, shortly after his family had moved to Atlanta from Southern California for Carr’s senior year of high school.
For that first outing, he turned a gonzo short story his best friend had written when they were kids, called “Baby Says Eat Me,” into a show. The twisted tale involves an adorable infant who gets jealous of food because people love it more than him, so he goes around asking people to eat him and even tries to cook himself with spices and seasoning.
Continuing in that same weird, wacky spirit, Saturday’s exhibit will include treasures from Carr’s collection, including a 12-foot-tall spaceman, an animatronic animal and more. The films showcased include Joyriders, where “three rowdy teens from the inner-city stumble upon a dying alien who fuses their minds together,” according to the puppetry center; and Wild Is the Wind, featuring “a series of conversations between a beautiful but deadly woman and her grotesque inhuman best friend.”
The show is dedicated to Carr’s longtime mentor and 20-plus year Center for Puppetry Arts veteran Bobby Box, who died in 2020. Carr said the evening also offers a chance to feature and credit the work of many fellow artists he’s collaborated with over the years.
Carr has learned a few lessons during those collaborations, or arrived at understandings on his own, along the way to creating ninja-worthy work.
“I try not to spend too much time ruminating on any individual thing because then it will never get done,” he allowed. “Don’t spend years trying to do something. Just do it, and then it’s going to live in the world, and it’ll suck or it’ll be fine.”
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Alexis Hauk is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She has written and edited for numerous newspapers, alt-weeklies, trade publications and national magazines including Time, the Atlantic, Mental Floss, Uproxx and Washingtonian
