[The following article by Kevin Brooker appeared in Calgary's Swerve Magazine, "Fall Arts Issue," 2008.]

The Trouts were at it again this summer, as is their custom, woodshedding their asses off.

You know, woodshedding: Sequester the team in some unreachable backwater, then compel them to smash paradigms and repurpose stuff, to brain-dump and blue-sky and just generally think outside of the Punch-and-Judy box.

But this time it wasn't, like their inaugural retreat, a year spent on the remote and windy Palmer Ranch near Claresholm where, back in 1999, the Old Trout Puppet Workshop first coalesced into the theatrical force of nature by which they are now widely recognized.

This time the shed wasn't anywhere you could easily reach by pickup truck, nor was it made of wood. It was a sun-washed stone patio overlooking the magnificently Baroque colonial Mexican city of Guanajuato, where the current ensemble of Trouts creatively convened from March to June: performers and company co-founders Judd Palmer, Peter Balkwill and Pitu Kenderes, plus director Vanessa Porteous, technical guru Cimmeron Meyer and co-writer (and Palmer's Mexico-born, University of Victoria-trained girlfriend) Mercedes Bátiz-Benét.

Most of all, this wasn't some let's-see-what-happens experiment like OTPW's first, the enigmatically mute The Unlikely Birth of Istvan, whose world premiere occurred in a bunkhouse in front of an audience of cowboys and Hutterites. No, Don Juan: The Greatest Lover in the World is instead a hotly anticipated property set to debut next March as a highlight of the Alberta Theatre Projects season. Described, until further notice, as "a puppet oratorio for voice, cello and Foley," it will have not only a script and a deadline, but also music courtesy of George Fenwick, late of the Land's End Chamber Ensemble, and, presumably, a lot of intricately carved effigies, um, doing it.

For the mere existence of a surrealist, determinedly anachronistic puppet troupe in the city of Calgary, you can credit, not surprisingly, grand-maitre marionettist Ronnie Burkett. "I saw Ronnie perform early enough in life that I didn't realize that it was a strange thing that he was doing," recalls Judd Palmer, "which means I categorized it in my impressionable mind as something a person quite reasonably might expect to do for a living. It wasn't until many years later that I woke up in a cold sweat realizing that it is, in fact, a completely absurd and untenable way of trying to feed yourself."

It therefore helps to have a day job. Palmer's is suitably arcane; together with Balkwill, they make up half of the Calgary freak-grass band, Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, which toured the U.K. this summer. Swerve reached him, barely, deep in the Welsh countryside. Although they work in an endearingly collectivist fashion—all three founding members are considered co-artistic directors—the eloquent Palmer is often thrust in the role of spokestrout.

Palmer says the OPTW ethic largely emerged under the anarchic aegis of the Green Fools Theatre, another Calgary puppet institution which took in he and Kenderes in 1995. "They made us," he wistfully recalls, "into the confused and anxious people we are today." To the Fools, though, creative freedom has always been paramount. "They were being inspired, as I understand it, by the enthusiasms of Northern California and Europe, which attempted in those days to take theatre out of the fuddy-duddy and onto the streets or into the circus tent, or to use puppets, or what-have-you." Palmer, who studied philosophy at the U of Toronto's Trinity College, brought a writerly bent to the Fools, while Kenderes, trained at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, contributed a hefty dose of visual craft. Balkwill would eventually bring his own diverse influences; the former teen drummer for pioneer Calgary punk band, The Will, got his MFA in acting at the University of Washington.

You could already see what would become Old Trout hallmarks in some of the Green Fools productions of that era: the expressionist, heavily-surfaced painting and variable scale of puppetry in The Ice King, a tale of the ill-fated Franklin expedition; and an obscure, often indeterminate historical setting, as seen in The Death of Benvenuto Cellini, both of which bore Palmer's whimsical, Edward Goreyesque stamp.

Of their enduring aesthetic, Palmer has said, "Pretty much the more Eastern European, the better, which I suppose was an attempt to have a secret and obscure little world all to myself and my gang amongst the malls and cowboy hats. Of course, generally I didn't have the slightest idea what those guys were talking about, but that was, after all, the point."

Palmer places their subsequent work among what he refers to as stagecraft's tangential forms. "It's the pseudo-theatres which seem to be attracting more attention these days. Even as they feed like ghouls off of the established theatrical infrastructure, the plays that seem to be selling look less and less like a bunch of people standing around saying things that somebody else wrote."

There is considerable seductiveness to the mode. It was Benvenuto Cellini which, in 1996, captivated an 18-year-old Leslie Feist, who wound up volunteering for the Green Fools and working alongside the Trouts-in-training. That friendship would later lead her to commission the OPTW to help create her next video, for the song "Honey Honey," which was produced this spring and is soon to be released.

Palmer also credits One Yellow Rabbit to a large extent for encouraging the weird in Calgary. "We all thought that if we were avant-garde enough, then we'd be invited to their secret backstage orgies, where they all exchanged heads and body parts in a delirium fueled by unheard-of drugs. Of course, they never invited us. But nevertheless the idea was to be as bohemian as possible, which takes us back to obscure Eastern European writers, which takes us to the peculiar Eastern European fascination with puppets. Somehow it all ties together."

Don Juan will be OTPW's second collaboration with Alberta Theatre Projects. Their first came four seasons ago when ATP took a chance on Pinocchio for its annual Christmas offering. The company's longtime dramaturge, Vanessa Porteous, brought the parties together. "I'd seen all of their earlier work," she says, "but I remember in particular leaving their production of Beowulf and telling my friend, 'That's exactly the kind of theatre I want to be doing.' To me they're simply one of the most exciting and creative companies in the country."

It would be risky. ATP's artistic director, Bob White, knew that going in. "But," he says, "it was one of those pitch sessions that I couldn't resist, where they proposed this darker version that would be more true to the original story." Indeed, he recalls, their Pinocchio was "a nasty little puppet" who dispatched the talking cricket with a hammer in the first act, just one of the reasons why several critics would refer to the play as anti-Disney. It certainly demanded much from White's yuletide audiences, who were more accustomed to fare like Anne of Green Gables or Who Has Seen the Wind? "Fortunately, though," says White, "the whacking of the cricket occurred early enough that the shock was allowed to wear off, and then the magic of the images took over and eventually captivated them. But whatever reservations the adults may have had, of course, the kids had none. They bought into the essential anarchy and violence right away."

There's obviously something about puppet-on-puppet violence that thrills audiences. In fact, it's the overrriding theme of the company's latest and most mature play to date, Famous Puppet Death Scenes, which for the past two years has toured to great acclaim across North America. Its clever conceit is that the sundry harpoonings and disembowelings are drawn from a series of utterly fictional puppet classics with priceless titles like "The Cruel Sea by Thorvik Skarbarg: Hour 14" and "The Beast of Muggditch Lane by August Stainbrook."

Well, if puppet violence sells, obviously puppet sex will too. When the idea of doing Don Juan as a mainstage play was broached, Bob White considered it "a no-brainer. Right now they're one of the country's greatest theatrical exports; why wouldn't we want to showcase their work? Frankly, I consider it an honour and a privilege that they want to partner with us."

Fortunately, thanks in large measure to Ronnie Burkett, Calgary audiences are already fairly well prepared for ribald puppet theatre. But even White acknowledges that this production could well take it to another level. "They were telling me about the Don Juan puppet, which I hear now exists, though I have not seen it yet, and apparently it is equipped with an erection, and I said"—White's voice rises as if he's just been goosed—"'Okay! Let's go!'"

There was much serendipity attached to the idea of going to Mexico to conceive a new life for an ancient character like Don Juan, whose incarnations across genres and centuries number in the hundreds. For one thing, earlier this year the Trouts lost their Ramsay workshop when new owners took over. Meanwhile, says Palmer, "We've always liked the idea of combining some kind of adventure with our attempts to make theatre, because it tends to make the experience more, well, experience-like. And we might as well spend our rent money where it is worth something—namely, Mexico. Plus I'm in love with a Mexican. So the idea developed that maybe we could use it as a home base, since we're a touring company anyway. This was an experiment in that direction."

Guanajuato was a natural choice, since its 18th century churches and homes provide a clear incitement for the pan-Latin, pan-historic scenery that will underpin the play's setting, which will be a sort of multi-cabinet puppet cathedral. Inevitably it will be both mythical and mystical—the place Vanessa Porteous describes as "Troutworld."

"For a puppet theatre, the way things look is as important as the story," she says. "And the characters are sculptures that help tell that story. In this case we were really inspired by the Baroque churches and the wooden carvings we saw everywhere in Mexico."

The Trouts lodged and worked in a picturebook 1930s casa on a soaring bluff above Guanajuato. (More serendipity: it is owned by a Calgary man who offered it to the Trouts when he heard of their studio loss on a CBC radio program.) They assembled daily at a round table beneath an arbour's shade, volleying concepts and occasionally retreating to a workshop around back to tinker with various designs. The theatre may be renowned as a place of oversized egos, but Porteous says there was only a cordial give and take. "You can't be afraid to offer a bad idea, because good ideas often grow out of the bad ones."

Whereas the medium of puppetry, by its physical nature, requires that its practitioners step back from their own identity, the Old Trouts take ego abandonment fairly seriously. "As a puppeteer," notes Porteous, "you have to be down to earth. It's a very humble, yet somehow noble occupation."

And, in the great tradition of One Yellow Rabbit, the company also flourishes because they both work together and party together. "We spent a fair bit of time at the world's greatest mescal bar, which was up the hill about a 20-minute walk," says Porteous. "Actually—small world—it's owned by a guy from Salmon Arm."

By March you will finally get your opportunity to watch puppet Don Juan get lucky, but there will be much more to it than that. You can count on several things in an OPTW show: it will harken to some timeless version of the past, and buried within countless layers of poetics, it will project an uplifting message. "I do think artists should be utopianists," says Palmer. "They should be representing some vision of how life could be organized so that we might be happy."

As for the wistful dwelling in bygone times, Palmer concedes their vision is often "Luddite, because we probably actually think that folks were happier when they still made their own music or furniture and so forth. We happen to be kind of fetishistic about anachronisms like carved wood and fussy old philosophical ideas. There's enormous beauty in doing things with your hands, and all that hoo-hah."

Puppets are also often connected with easy laughs. With the Old Trouts, you will undoubtedly get some of those, but there will always be a kind of delicious mournfulness at work. "On some primitive level," Palmer surmises, "I suppose it's the nature of being a puppet. It is, for example, slightly miraculous that they move at all, which highlights the possibility therefore of the cessation of their movement. If not mournfulness, exactly, then it's a fragile happiness—that for the moment they are alive, but will soon be dead.

"Much like us."

—Kevin Brooker, Swerve Magazine, Fall 2008