Exploring the hidden wonders of puppeteer Ingrid Hansen

by | Dec 8, 2022 | Alumni, Theatre

UVic Theatre grad Ingrid Hansen puppeteering Num Num Bird on Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

If you made a list of the most fun careers, “professional puppeteer” would surely be somewhere near the top. And for any fan of fuzzy fur and funky foam, it doesn’t get much bigger than Jim Henson and Sesame—which is exactly where one stellar alumna is making a name for herself—even though she rarely shows her face.

Ingrid Hansen (BFA ’09) has lead roles in the Jim Henson Company’s Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock and Sesame Workshop’s Helpsters, and is quickly becoming one of Canada’s top puppeteers. A self-described “theatre creator, puppeteer, voice actor and prison-theatre artist,” Hansen’s resume is filled with shows on leading networks, including Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Treehouse, Teletoon, Peacock, APTN and YouTube.

“You have to be a little bit insane to want to do this, but I absolutely love it,” Hansen says with a hearty laugh. “On Helpsters, for instance, I got to create an original character: I play a big, loveable, goofy orange monster named Heart, who’s the size of a refrigerator.” But this means more than just putting on a costume: in fact, it takes three people to bring Heart to life. (Hansen handles the voice, mouth and left arm.) “I have a great support team.… If I get too hot, they shove an electric leaf-blower down the collar and give me a shot of fresh air.”

The Kelowna-raised Hansen has three seasons of the Emmy-winning Helpsters behind her, performing alongside celebrity guests like Hollywood star Danny Trejo, Broadway legend Alan Cummings and Grammy-winning singer Norah Jones, as well as a team of top-tier LA comedy writers. “Working on that show is a dream! It’s so full of personality.”

Behind the scenes

Given the candy-coloured nature of most kids’ shows, it’s easy to think that a puppeteer simply has fun professionally—but, as with any specialized art form, there’s a lot more to it than that.

“Every day is pretty fun, but I have incredibly long hours and it’s technically, mentally and physically challenging,” says Hansen. “Puppeteers call ourselves ‘professional problem solvers’ because everything a puppet does is kind of a stunt: pup-pets don’t have opposable thumbs, can’t do basic things like pick up a pencil and they break all the time. We constantly have to find tricks and create solutions to make them look alive.”

Hansen is also thrilled with her four-month gig on the Calgary-filmed Fraggle Rock reboot—a show she loved as a child. “Any time it was on we all freaked out and ran to the TV,” she recalls. “I remember being fascinated by all the creatures—the humans, the Fraggles, the little green Doozers and the big monstrous Gorgs.”

Bringing the walkaround character Ma Gorg back to life meant Hansen had to both study the original character work and add her own distinctive flair, while wearing a rebuild of the original costume. “I was wearing a puppet that was older than I was… and it didn’t even smell.”

Hollywood legend Danny Trejo with Ingrid Hansen as the furry orange Heart on Helpsters (above) and having fun out of costume (below)

An art that’s both ancient & modern

Fraggle Rock is a great example of how puppetry—a performance tradition spanning cultures and continents that dates back at least 2,500 years—embodies more than just cute characters.

“Fraggle Rock was created by Jim Henson as an international children’s series with the goal of ending war,” she explains. “All these creatures are interconnected in ways they don’t always understand… it’s a really complex universe for a children’s show, where they dive into deep topics like division, exclusion and water shortages—but still with that over-arching theme of interconnectivity between all living things.”

Hansen is no stranger to big topics herself. She was co-artistic director (alongside fellow theatre grad Kathleen Greenfield) of the SNAFU Society of Unexpected Spectacles. Hansen also worked with Victoria’s acclaimed prison theatre company, William Head on Stage (WHoS), since 2008.

“I feel honoured to work out there,” she says. “The incarcerated artists are the most hard-working, ingenious people I have ever known: it really challenges them to work on a creative project that requires intense teamwork and trust. And it continually grounds me in the power of the performing arts as something relevant that can be life-changing on both sides of the curtain.”

From left: Kira Hall, Aymee Garcia & Ingrid Hansen puppeteering Marjory the Trash Heap on Fraggle Rock

Other projects on the go

Having co-authored and performed in 21 live SNAFU shows—including the award-winning productions Little Orange Man, Kitt & Jane and Interstellar Elder—Hansen also managed to stay busy during COVID. “I’ve been very fortunate to be able to keep creating,” she says. “SNAFU did Epidermis Circus, which was a livestream for the National Arts Centre performance series as well as a live drive-in show in Victoria and Vancouver, created a podcast show with WHoS, performed in Victoria’s outdoor SKAMpede festival and developed a series of short films that will be released soon.”

She has also maintained her campus connection over the years, whether by showcasing a solo show at the Phoenix Theatre or working with alumni at WHoS and Theatre SKAM’s SKAMpede festival. Indeed, just the day before this inter-view, she gave a talk to current students in the Fine Arts 101 “Creative Being” class. (Her advice to these future creatives? “Don’t wait for somebody else to give you a job. Make what you want.”)

Finally, given the current renaissance of puppetry and animation, does she still have any dream gigs to check off? “If they make any more of the new Dark Crystal show, that would for sure be on my bucket list—they used every puppeteer in the UK to make it. But really, I’m working on my dream project now,” Hansen concludes with a bright chuckle.

“I’m so grateful—I feel like the luckiest little fart-face in the world. And I’m having a lot of fun doing it.”

This story originally ran in the spring 2022 issue of UVic’s Torch alumni magazine

Ingrid Hansen works her magic as Heart on Helpsters

Theatre alum Stacy Ross continues to make the news

by | Dec 8, 2022 | Alumni, Theatre

Stacy Ross did not grow up giving pretend interviews and dreaming of being a television anchor. In fact, the Metchosin-raised Ross had her heart set on a life in theatre.

“My first love was always theatre and musical theatre . . . I always thought my dream job would be a soap-opera actress. It was a little more stable, there was a regular pay cheque. I could be somebody nasty. I always thought it would be fun to be the villain on a soap opera.”

Ross attended Camosun’s Applied Communication Program and worked in television before the call of the theatre drew her back to Vancouver Island and UVic. Ross earned a theatre degree at UVic, then her career took an interesting turn in 2000. Her minivan was burglarized on the same night she auditioned for a coveted job as weekend sports anchor/reporter at CHEK News. She muses that may have won her some sympathy votes. In any case, she got the job, and Ross has been a well-known figure in local media ever since.

Island viewers might spot Ross or her CHEK colleagues at a HarbourCats baseball game or at the grocery store.

“People come up to me constantly when they see me doing regular things outside the newscast to say how important we are to them and how we’re part of their routine,” says Ross. “In a way, we’re part of their family—they turn us on at dinner time and catch up on what’s happening in the day. They need to have that in their lives.”

Community at the core

The value that the community—and the CHEK crew—places on reliable, local news became clear when the station was in danger of closing. CHEK first went on the air in 1956, but in 2009 its corporate owners, Canwest, put it on the chopping block. Community reaction was swift and decisive. A full-fledged “Save CHEK News” campaign ensued, with T-shirts printed and the power of social media and local celebrities put into high gear.

Ross remembers being “terrified.” She knew she would never leave Greater Victoria due to her family connections, so if the station closed, that was going to mean a career change.

“I can’t even explain the tension as we came up with a way to save the station,” says Ross. “Oh, my God, it was just awful going through those weeks, but you know, it paid off in the end.”

Each employee-owner was required to invest $15,000 of their own money—in a hurry.

“Of course, there’s no guarantee we’d succeed. Once we managed to come together in that incredible time of people literally running to the bank at the last moment to make their contributions so we could do this… it was incredibly stressful,” recalls Ross. The employees raised half a million dollars in 24 hours. CHEK became North America’s first employee-owned TV station.

Stacy Ross gets a visit at the CHEK TV studios from a group of Theatre students 

Where’s the “on” switch?

Then the team had to figure out all the intricacies of producing the news. “Who knows how to run a TV station? There was so much to learn… We had no programming, we had no technical support. We were just kind of flying blind. It was far from a sure thing when we bought that station, and we went through a lot of tough times.”

At one point, staff took pay cuts to keep the station afloat. But they made it through, eventually buying the Kings Road property that houses the station, with CBC Radio as an anchor tenant. “We ended up buying the building and succeeding and we’re making money. It’s an incredible story, really.”

She says being independent means the team can be fluid and react quickly. She can have a conversation with her station manager, and they can get the board together in a half hour—that would never happen in a corporate-news environment. CHEK also has a mandate to serve the community. “Any time we have a chance to do good, we do it.”

Now, one of their biggest challenges is fighting fake news. “There’s this battle on for those of us who are responsible journalists to remind people there are far more irresponsible journalists out there.”

Covering the COVID pandemic has been “interesting.” She has never felt as threatened as a journalist as she did by the Freedom Convoy protesters. “The vehemence, the aggression. The naked anger directed at us was unbelievable,” she says. “I’ve never felt fear for being in my profession and felt fear for my family—and I did in this case. It was awful.”

Looking ahead

She’s in a prime position as the 5 p.m. news anchor, but future dreams include hosting a show about the local arts community. Ross says her own theatre training at UVic was instrumental to her career. “I think it was integral to me getting the job and being successful. Being in theatre taught me so much self-awareness, taught me all the mechanics about voice control, how to manage non-verbal communication, the physicality.”

She says while she’s not acting, her work is still a show. “What I do every day is a performance, for sure. It’s not fiction, I’m not pretending to be somebody else… I’m still presenting. It’s a performance, and my time at UVic taught me how to do that. “

But the performance is not always easy. In fact, some days, the news is devastating—and that comes with a cost. For example, Ross covered the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “It took a toll on me. As a mom, that was really, really difficult to manage.”

The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the recent horrific fatal bank robbery in Saanich were also extremely tough to cover. “I definitely have become a harder person, a less emotional person than I used to be, because you just have to be… You have to protect yourself.”

Some days, though, her job is pure fun, like the time she toured Bear Mountain with golf legend Jack Nicklaus and his son. Ross enjoys golfing, though she’s usually too busy to hit the course. When she does have free time, she spends it with her husband and their daughter, 14, and son, 22.

Ross also devoted some of her free hours to volunteering as a UVic Alumni Association (UVAA) board member from 2016 to 2021. Brian Cant, BA ’03, Cert ’08, MBA ’18, is past president of the UVAA. He says Ross is proactive, easy to work with and truly committed to the community.

“She champions CHEK in a way that makes you confident in the work they’re doing. She’s built a lot of trust with people,” says Cant, who serves as Vice President, Business Impact & Engagement at 4VI (formerly Tourism Vancouver Island). Cant says having robust community media is critically important. “You just don’t get a perspective that is needed if you don’t have local news.”

Ross advises her own children to be aware of what information they’re consuming online.

“When you’re online watching, make sure it’s responsible journalists—research the source,” she tells them. “A lot of it is just smoke and mirrors.”

—Jenny Manzer

This story originally ran in the fall 2022 issue of UVic’s Torch alumni magazine 

$1.4 million research fellowship for Dr Marcus Milwright

by | Dec 6, 2022 | Art History & Visual Studies, Award, Research

Dr Marcus Milwright, chair of the Department of Art History & Visual Studies, has been named a recipient of the British Academy’s 2022 Global Professorships.

This four-year research professorship — valued at £898,000 (about $1.48 million CDN) — will begin in February 2023 and will see Milwright working at the Department of History of Art at England’s University of York through to 2027.

“It’s an honour to receive this position,” says Milwright. One of only eight professors selected for this prestigious international professorship — and the only scholar in Canada to be chosen — his research project is titled, Making Meaning: Craft Practices and the Process of Change in Islamic Art.

“It’s based on the idea that we understand objects when we understand the processes of making them, and the people responsible for doing that — how they develop their skills, the environments they work in,” he explains. “It’s not simply a question of how something gets made: it’s through the process of making we understand the meanings those objects have in their societies.”

Studying Islamic art and archaeology

Milwright has already spent more than 20 years studying Islamic art and archaeology, and traditional craft practices in the Middle East. The author of seven books on the subject, his most recent publication is Made for the Eye of One Who Sees: Canadian Contributions to the Study of Islamic Art and Archaeology (McGill/Queens University Press & Royal Ontario Museum), co-edited with fellow AHVS professor Eva Baboula.

You can find out more about his work on the AHVS Gateway to Art website, as well as his own Crafts of Syria and Crafts of Iraq research websites.

For Making Meaning, he’ll still be working with archaeology, excavated artifacts and museum objects but he will also broaden the focus to include textual and photographic sources.

“It’s about how we can extract aspects of the lives of people who are often not well documented,” he says. “It’s the elites of society who tend to write — and be written about — so this is a way of finding out more about the lives of people who actually created the objects and made those societies work.”

More than just producing research, however, Milwright sees this Global Professorship as an opportunity to share his findings in different ways through articles, books, websites, podcasts and public engagement — as well as more open-source methods of information dissemination.

“There’s an urgent need to try and record craft practices across the Islamic world — as well as across the world itself,” he says. “As we see crafts dying out, we see how war, instability and displacement often lead to a severing of craft traditions that have been handed down over generations in families. I want to collect as much of that information as possible and then share it so other people can use it.”

 
Connection with the past
 

Originally trained as a painter, Milwright has always been interested in the relationship between an object and its making. But it was on an early archaeological excavation in Jordan that his relationship with the past first came alive.

“I remember one of the objects we found was a little cup used for drinking tea or coffee,” he recalls. “It was just a disc of clay which had been turned up at the edges then fired in an open bonfire, but you could see the finger marks in it. That was my first connection with someone I’d never know anything else about . . . a human being making decisions, using their expertise to make a cup. Even if we can never give people their names, we can still start to reconstruct their lives by knowing how they made things.”

All too often, our knowledge of the past is based on objects and structures — coins, ceramics, mosaics, temples — celebrating the rich and powerful. But, as Milwright reminds us, “even the great objects made for kings, sultans and emperors were dependent on the craft sector to make things.”

“Even when these people seem infinitely powerful, there are logistical concerns which come down to the aspect of crafts and resources,” he says. “It’s these things I keep coming back to, because they have an impact on meaning: if you don’t take practical concerns into consideration, you can be persuaded by the rhetoric of rulers that they have infinite power — but they really don’t.”

Making Meaning

Milwright’s four-year research focus is best explained through an excerpt from his Global Professorship proposal:

“Despite growing attention to the contexts of Islamic art, the intentions of patrons and the reception of artworks have dominated the interpretation of change from the seventh to the early twentieth centuries. This model has underestimated the role of materiality in production networks and individual products,” he writes.

Making Meaning: Craft Practices and the Process of Change in Islamic Art “acknowledges that meaning was shaped in decisive ways through the action of external political, economic and cultural challenges on groups of craftspeople, their knowledge and practices. The guiding hypothesis will be that the choices made through manufacturing processes are crucial to the generation of style (technical and visual) and meaning.”

Milwright will concentrate on the “context of making” through four thematic case studies, which will “address the diversity of media covered under the label of Islamic art and examine meaningfully the connections across craft traditions, craftspeople and materials while re-considering where the art stands between its patrons, makers and consumers.”

Milwright with some of the important Middle Eastern artifacts held in UVic’s Special Collections

Giving Tuesday supports Student Impact Fund

by | Nov 28, 2022 | Alumni, Award, Events

Tuesday, November 29 is Giving Tuesday—the world’s largest generosity movement! Today, Fine Arts is asking our creative community to help us raise funds for the Fine Arts Community Impact Award—and we’re fortunate enough to have a generous donor offering to match all donations up to $1,000!

“In the arts, we put a lot of ourselves into our work because we love it,” says 2022 recipient & current Music student Isolde Roberts-Welby (seen here with additional 2022 recipient Tori Jones and Dean Allana Lindgren). “This award means that I can spend less time at work and more time pursuing opportunities and projects that are deeply fulfilling.”

Donate here to our Student Community Impact Award! 

Thanks to our Fine Arts Community Impact Award, over the past two years we have given out 5 awards of $1,000 each to 5 different Fine Arts undergraduate students honouring their contributions to community organizations like Open Space, Pacific Opera Victoria, VOS Musical Theatre, Victoria Children’s Choir and Sidney’s ArtSea Community Arts Council.

“My goal as an artist has always been to use my passion for creativity to enhance the community, and being recognized for my efforts felt incredible,” says 2021 recipient Alison Roberts. “As a student, it ensured that I could continue volunteering my time for projects and productions that brought me joy and fulfillment instead of worrying about finances. I am very grateful to everyone who made this award possible!”

With your support, we can continue to financially assist the community efforts of our students: in 2021, Giving Tuesday saw Fine Arts raise $5,167 in support of Faculty of Fine Arts Indigenous Student Award.

In addition to donating, here are three other ways to support our students on Giving Tuesday:

UVic Philanthropoly 

To celebrate Giving Tuesday, the UVic Alumni Association is inviting UVic alumni and friends to play an online game of Philanthropoly, like monopoly but with a giving twist. Each player will unlock $10 to the Giving Tuesday fund of your choice and have the chance to win in 1 of 5 UVic prize packages!

Purchase a coffee

Between 8am & Noon at participating UVic Food Services outlets, proceeds ($1 from drip and $2 from specialty) will support our Giving Tuesday priority fund.

Hot chocolate by donation

Find the Bubble Bus on campus from Noon-4pm and get an afternoon treat by donation!

Dean’s Lecture: Merrie Klazek

by | Nov 23, 2022 | Faculty, Research, School of Music

Deans’ Lecture Series

Research is continually reshaping the way we live and think. In this continuing series of online talks hosted by UVic’s Division of Continuing Studies, you’ll hear from distinguished faculty members and learn about their research interests.

Merrie Klazek on “Trumpet Around the Sun”

“Music is at once a personal experience and a universal experience,” notes School of Music trumpet professor Merrie Klazek. “In this talk, I will share the journey of my recent recording project which highlights my experience as a professional trumpet player in settings of music from around the globe, in collaboration with over 24 artists specializing in different styles. I will touch on my roles as performer, presenter, producer and educator throughout my career, to illustrate my belief that music plays an integral role as a true connector in human societies.”

Canadian trumpeter Merrie Klazek is a versatile and respected artist in the world of performance and education. Fluent in orchestral, chamber, solo, traditional, world and popular music, Merrie joined the School of Music faculty full-time in 2016, after two decades as one of two Canadian women to hold a full-time orchestral principal trumpet position.

Her musical travels have taken her around the globe, and her solo recording projects “Songs to the Moon” and “Dance Around the Sun” have gained international recognition with features on television, radio and streaming platforms. Merrie is an endorsing artist for Wedge Mouthpieces and Conn-Selmer Bach trumpets.

 

More in the series

Other recent talks in the ongoing Dean’s Lecture Series include Art History & Visual Studies professor Melia Belli Bose, School of Music professors Virginia Acuña and Joseph Salem, and Visual Arts professor Daniel Laskarin.