Nance Parker has spent more than 40 years as a puppeteer. So she’s obviously happy that Portland is hosting innovative puppet performers from around the world this month.

But she might be even more excited about what will happen in Portland’s lively puppet scene – well-known to puppeteers around the country – after the featured performers at Puppets in Portland pack up their masks and marionettes and leave town on Sept. 22.

“The cool thing for me will be to see when the festival is over and you start watching the younger puppeteers trying out the stuff they saw,” said Parker, who’s been director of Portland’s Shoestring Theater since 1982. “So it’s really inspirational for artists who work in puppetry here or want to, to see these artists come here. Especially those from outside the United States, where puppetry is much better funded and has a much bigger audience. So what they bring will be exciting and new.”

The second-ever Puppets in Portland is slated to kick off Friday and run through Sept. 22 at venues all over the city. The schedule includes more than two dozen performances and workshops featuring artists from all over the country and the world. The shows will push the limits of what most of us think of as puppetry and will include film, shadows, actors, masks and marionettes, among other things.

Mayo Street Arts has been a center of puppet activity since opening as an arts venue more than a dozen years ago, hosting workshops, puppeteers from around the world, and puppet slams. Along with theaters and venues that have been promoting puppetry for years, including Shoestring Theater and Figures of Speech Theatre Freeport, Mayo Street Arts has helped draw attention to Portland’s scene.

Ian Bannon, executive director of Mayo Street Arts, which is organizing the Puppets in Portland festival. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

“Mayo Street Arts has done a wonderful job cultivating and empowering local artists to explore puppetry. We love their mission, their people and the vibrant scene they have fostered,” said Sarah Olmsted Thomas of Alex & Olmsted, a Baltimore-based puppet theater and filmmaking company.

This will be the second Puppets in Portland festival, which Mayo Street Arts launched as a biennial event in 2022. One of the hopes of festival organizers is to attract puppeteers from around the world, including some who might not otherwise add Maine to their American tours, said Ian Bannon, executive director of Mayo Street Arts and a longtime puppeteer.

The festival’s timing coincides with the Puppets in the Green Mountains festival, happening in and around Brattleboro, Vermont from Sept. 7-15, adding incentive for some performers to come to New England. Several groups or performers will be at both the Vermont and Maine festivals.

“It’s such a good idea to have the two festivals close together; it makes so much sense for us to be able to come to both of them,” said Deborah Hunt of Maskhunt Motions, an experimental object theater group based in Puerto Rico.

Hunt will perform a piece called “Road of Useless Splendor” with her daughter, Guie Beeu Guerrerro Hunt, on Sept. 21 and 22 at Mayo Street Arts. The two performers dress as cloth-masked clowns – with pointy-nosed masks – who use a giant, pop-up book set, populated by strange characters and objects, to tell stories.

“It’s a show about transformation and compassion and curiosity,” said Hunt.

While in Portland, Hunt will also host private workshops with residents of The Cedars retirement community, who will be asked to bring small objects “they feel a fondness for.” The objects will be used to create a performance piece that could include songs or narration to tell a story.

Alex & Olmsted, featuring Sarah Olmsted Thomas and Alex Vernon, will perform “Marooned! A Space Comedy” Sept. 20 and 21 at the John Ford Auditorium at Portland High School. The story of an astronaut traveling 87,000 light years into space is told through live performers, shadow puppetry, rod puppets, toy puppets and marionettes. The astronaut is a live performer; puppet characters include a robot, space aliens and “other mysterious figures,” Thomas said.

The Baltimore-based Alex & Olmsted puppet theater will perform “Marooned! A Space Comedy” during Puppets in Portland. Photo courtesy of Alex and Olmsted

Some of the other international performers and groups scheduled for the festival include Puzzle Theatre, a group from Montreal that combines objects, puppets and actors; and Xavier Bobes, a Catalan actor and scenic manipulator from Barcelona. Night Shade, a Portland, Oregon-based collective that creates live cinematic shadow experiences, and Cripes Puppets, a marionette theater from Northfield, Massachusetts, will also be at the festival.

The varied performance venues around the city include Mayo Street Arts, Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine, Congress Square Park, Glickman Family Library at the University of Southern Maine, John Ford Auditorium at Portland High School and Maine College of Art & Design.

While some performances are $20 for general admission, Mayo Street Arts has a pay-what-you-can policy for the festival.

Several of the performances, workshops or discussions will be free, including an opening night party at Mayo Street Arts on Friday at 8 p.m. Other free events include updated “Punch and Judy”-style shows by Modern Times Theater of East Hardwick, Vermont, in Congress Square Park at 2 and 4 p.m. Saturday, and a parade of Shoestring Theater’s giant puppets, through the Kennedy Park neighborhood to Mayo Street Arts, starting at 4 p.m. Sept. 15.

Shoestring is well-known for leading parades in Maine, including at former Old Port Festival and the Resurgam Festival, on the Portland Harbor.

Puppetry at its core is the animation of an inanimate object, Bannon said, and people who come to the festival can expect to see a lot of innovative ways of doing that, other than with hand puppets or marionettes. Night Shade, for instance, will put on a show called “Order of the Wolf,” which tells horror stories by using images from a pop-up book projected across a large shadow screen.

Josie Colt of Portland is among the younger generation of Portland puppeteers looking forward to seeing the variety and imagination of performers coming to the festival. Colt, 31, first came to Portland a few years ago while touring with Vermont-based Bread & Puppet Theatre. The lively scene here and the city’s ocean locale convinced her to move here.

Performers with Shoestring Theater make their way up Hancock Street during the parade at the start of The Resurgam Music and Arts Festival in 2023. Contributed photo

Colt is also an artist and teacher who has become fascinated with shadow puppets and has worked with Shoestring Theater. She’s created performances using paper cutouts and overhead projectors. She had worked on computer-animated art but said she grew tired of that and wanted something more hands-on.

“I think there’s a couple things going on with puppetry right now, and one is a return to analog art,” said Colt. “I know I actually want to be present with the objects, making them move and not sitting at a computer. It’s basically real-time animation, and it just feels like, with imagination, so much is possible.”

Eliot Nye, 27, of Portland grew up near the Shoestring Theater’s building in Portland’s West End, so he has been around puppetry his whole life. He thinks Portland’s vibrant puppet and arts scenes are due, at least in part, to a lack of the “gate-keeping” found in larger cities’ scenes.

“It’s smaller, so it’s easier for people to get involved here,” said Nye. “In a big city, there’s so much going on, so many competing things. Here, if you can create something, you can find a place to perform and people will see it.”