Ellensburg Puppetmasters

Brian Kusser, founder of the Blue Bear Puppet Lab, holds up one of the puppet heads at the lab’s Ellensburg workshop. Ellensburg Puppetmasters

BY JACK BELCHER

staff writer

Puppets will be walking around downtown Ellensburg this Halloween.

The puppets are individually handcrafted, and are large enough to be worn as a costume. The puppets are created by the local artists from the Blue Bear Puppet Lab, who work to provide the community with original characters and costumes.

“One of the rules for the work that we do here, is that every image that is made that will be brought out into the community is an original one,” said founder Brian Kusser. “When we have an entire world of corporations, where almost every image that you see is one that somebody is making money off of… so much of a person’s creativity is manufactured and sold to you, and we want to represent a creativity that is more homegrown, something you can only see in your hometown, and present the idea that creativity can exist outside of corporations.”

The puppet lab is located in Ellensburg, and there is a small warehouse full of new and old creations. These puppets are mostly made from papermache although there are some exceptions for robots and giant skeletons, and while many of the puppets are worn as costumes, there are some go beyond and can reach up to 17 feet tall.

The puppets have participated in Ellensburg events before, most notably

during the Buskers of the Burg, where they have been the main focus of the parade for the last decade. This year, the puppets will be a part of Halloween, making the night more entertaining for everybody.

“We are going to go out during the trick-or-treat event that they have for the kids, and we are just going to bring some of the scarier giant puppets out,” Kusser said.

The puppets can be quite scary either intentionally or not, but they are all designed and created with care. The artists don’t set out to scare people, but to make things fun and memorable, admittedly this has been done by handing small children human heads, while dressed as a 7-foot-tall wolf.

The artists who design, create and wear the puppets are unpaid volunteers, who participate just for the fun of it. They are unpaid and enjoy showing their creations to the community. “The interactions with the public are so much fun,” said Treasurer Gayle Force. “People don’t know who it is (under the costume), and they, especially in Ellensburg, try to guess. Being able to interact with people as not yourself, and then you get the reviews. People will talk about it, and you’ll hear about it from them.” Kusser said people will come up to him after a parade and tell him he should have seen the puppets at the parade. They will tell him about puppets he created that horrified or delighted them. The puppets change over time, with people working and evolving them over the years. Kusser said it’s not uncommon to leave for the night, only to come back and find a character has completely changed in the morning, because someone else has been working on it.

The materials are funded through sponsor and donors, and Kusser and Force consider themselves to be “professional dumpster divers,” with the permission of whoever owns the dumpster.

The only rules when it comes to building the puppets are it has to be original, no motor vehicles, no advertising and no printed words (most of the time). Otherwise the artists can do whatever they want. Some of their characters speak, others have props and some have multiple parts.