April Recap Written by the Coolest Member of Freak Nature Puppets

Do Not Forward to Other Members of Freak Nature Puppets

May 17, 2024

Hi all, my name is Aubrie Hvolboll and I’m the coolest member* of Freak Nature Puppets. I have a background in photography and unschooling (I was unschooled and now mentor homeschoolers — ask me about it if you want to hear me explain how awesome it is for 6 hours) and I helped start this group a little over a year ago when we made a giant puppet for a concert in San Francisco.

Lots happened for Freak Nature in April!

~ Our first Work in Progress show for our residency at the Elysian Theater

~ A performance on an avocado farm with our experimental music friends placeHolder

~ Our monthly appearance for Uncle Ron on his Tomorrow! Show

~ Two workshops at elementary schools for the kiddos

~ Improv classes just for us :)

~ Our revamp of the Elysian Bathrooms, phase 1

~ and lots of writing… ✍️

(The 6 leaders of Freak Nature at our first work in progress show for our residency)

On April 1st, we celebrated the one-month mark of our residency with the Elysian Theater. The residency is an opportunity for us to develop a brand new hour-long show over the course of monthly Work-in-Progress shows, where we receive audience feedback.

As always in Freak Nature world, a lot happens very quickly. We get together at least twice a week to rehearse and build our puppets (usually more since half of us live together). During times of high intensity right before performances, we end up meeting most days of the week.

(Here’s a sick and feeble flu-ridden Deedee giving input from a mattress we had in the corner of our studio for a while).

At the start of the residency, our wonderful mentor (and creative director of the Elysian Theater) Jacquelyn Landgraf gave us a very helpful note: while we are charismatic, cute, charming, brilliant, and perfect in every way, most members of Freak Nature have no stage performance experience, and it shows. She was right: we’re scrappy visual artists who somehow, through a mix of luck and wrong place/wrong time, have ended up doing avant-garde performance art comedy in LA comedy clubs for semi-confused audiences.

If we were going to put on a truly great new show, we’d need to focus on ourselves as stage performers. And after a lot of debate, we decided that that meant – just for one show(!!!) – no puppets.

(Matthew Sater’s body contorting in ways never before seen as he pretends to fall out of a white-water raft in our latest show. The surprise on our faces was only 50% acting.)

We challenged ourselves not to make any puppets before our April 24 WIP show and instead to work on the story of the show and its characters. We spent many of our meetings this month practicing improv. This helped me feel more confident as a performer and helped us with our ensemble’s cohesion. We discovered that we can actually be good improvisers when we spend some time learning the rules.

We cheated on our own rule for our first WIP show, and built a few puppets anyways. Mostly it was Bobby, but he can bust out a puppet in a day or two no problem, so it didn’t disturb our original plan. Here at Freak Nature, we use the term “puppets” loosely. We refer to most things we put on our bodies as puppets, many things that could be considered costumes or performing objects; we kinda lump them all under the puppets umbrella.

(Here’s Siena pretending to be a mosquito-type creature called a “Zippy” and biting a giant puppet face in the middle of the night.)

Because a lot of us are visual artists first, we will make something cool-looking and then figure out how to bring it to life onstage as performers. “Puppets” bridge the gap between our performers and our visual artists, even though we all do everything in the group. Which is funny! Because none of us have any experience as puppeteers, except for… well, the year and a half that we’ve been doing this…

(A “waterfall” puppet falling in love with its unlikely bride, a human named Jamie, aka Mori)

One of the primary storytelling devices we used in our first Work-in-Progress show was this tiny model stage of the Elysian Theater, which we referred to as “The Playpen.” We used tiny model puppets to convey how full-sized puppets could look when we actually build them. In our next iteration of the WIP show, we will focus even more on form and experimentation.

I was proud of our first WIP show. I thought, maybe a week before, that we honestly had nothing good to show. It all felt so disconnected. But! With some support, we really turned it around. We pulled a handful of loosely connected scenes together into a show titled Freak Nature Presents: Freak Nature. It’s our exploration of Freak Nature, a national park style setting, and the people and animals who inhabit the place. More deets to come as we flesh out the story (for our next performance on June 10!). That’s what I’ve got for now! Over and out.

Here are also some pics of the avocado farm show I mentioned earlier to give you guys a little puppet action: