A puppeteer signing on with the Jim Henson Company is akin to a cartoonist working for Pixar Animation Studios, or a beer league hockey player taking to the ice with the Vancouver Canucks.
In short, it’s the big time.
Victoria’s Ingrid Hansen, 35, knows the feeling well. She put her puppeteering talents to work on the newly-released Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, a reboot of Henson’s original 1983 series now airing on AppleTV+. “Working for the Jim Henson Company is a lifetime dream,” Hansen said.
“In the space of time between when I auditioned and when I got the email, there was a month where every night I went to bed, I would say to my partner, ‘Maybe tomorrow I will wake up with an email from Fraggle Rock.’ “
The email arrived last year, which prompted a temporary move to Calgary for Hansen, co-artistic director of Victoria’s SNAFU Dance Theatre Society. One of 25 puppeteers among the massive cast and crew, she marveled at the scope of Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, which she pegged at nearly double the size of other puppet-centric productions.
“Some shows have one or two puppeteers, and you might be wearing all the hats.”
The Kelowna-raised performer did a little bit of everything during the four-month shoot. The utility player was given a variety of jobs, from performing as Ma Gorg, and “wearing a big costume with a giant head the size of a yoga ball,” to embodying talking rocks and bushes on the show about a group of furry subterranean cave dwellers.
Hansen performed well under the pressure, having worked since 2019 on Helpsters, a Sesame Workshop program that also airs on Apple TV+. Now, having worked for the two biggies, where puppetry is concerned — Sesame Workshop is the company which produces Sesame Street — she’s becoming an experienced hand.
However, the 13 half-hour episodes of Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, which were produced in several languages, so that the show could air globally, have an elevated air to them, Hansen admits. And that could be intimidating on occasion.
The show will appeal to both children and 40-somethings who were young when the original aired nearly 40 years ago. Rock band Foo Fighters appear in one episode, while Patti LaBelle, Kenan Thompson (Saturday Night Live), Cynthia Erivo (Harriet), Daveed Diggs (Hamilton), and Ed Helms (The Office) lend their voices to key characters.
The production values were extremely high, which motivated each contributor, Hansen said. Some of the producers and main contributors were extremely seasoned professionals, so Hansen said everyone was treated well, and given room to find their own rhythm. That isn’t always the case on other shoots of this nature, she said.
“We had TV screens hidden everywhere throughout the set, so the puppeteers can see what we are doing while we're doing it. It is one of the only performing arts forms where you are directing your own performance as you go.”
