For Lynn Jennings ’65, pulling strings is simply a way of life.
By Cynthia Jenson-Elliott
From the looks of her, the woman must be in her mid-80s—and no AARP model for elderly wellness, either. Her shoulders are hunched and her walk is more of a shuffle, clumsy black shoes trudging toward a rickety rocking chair. Her snowwhite hair, fluffy and fine as feathers, stands out as if she has been shocked (it has clearly not been styled in a long time), and her black eyes pinch in concentration as she painstakingly reaches for the rocker and grasps it with gnarled hands. Slowly, she turns, shifts her weight, and lowers herself into the chair. She settles back, mopping her brow in relief.
Lynn Jennings ’65 steps back and stands up straight. “Great!” she says, clapping her hands as five adult student puppeteers release the handles of Jennings’s elderly tabletop puppet and mop their own brows. “How was that?” she asks.
The students chime in—“Hard!” “Slow!” “Painstaking.” They have each been responsible for moving a separate body part of the 10-inch-tall puppet—an arm, a leg, the head—working in harmony while Jennings guided their movements. It is cooperation of the most intimate sort, five people hovering in Twister-like poses over the puppet, while moving in microscopic increments as one.
Jennings knows the drill well. A professional puppeteer for more than 35 years, she has worked with every type of puppet imaginable. And as board president and executive director of the San Diego Guild of Puppetry/Puppetry Center of San Diego, she has not only brought puppets to life herself, she has spread the seeds of puppetry into arts and education communities around the world. But to see Jennings in action, it is evident where the greatest benefit has fallen: Jennings is as alive as her puppets—and that is a compliment. She is as alert, open, and curious as a child.
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Jennings began her puppetry career—or “addiction,” as she calls it—when she was little more than a kindergartner. She had not seen many puppet shows—only Kukla, Fran, and Ollie on television—when her fourth-grade Girl Scout troop decided to put on a puppet show about great American heroes. Jennings chose Huckleberry Finn and created his puppet head of papiermâché pasted over a light bulb. Huck was a hit. The show was a hit. Jennings was hooked.
At Middlebury, she became part of a band of itinerant puppeteers, Sigma Kappa sorority sisters who roamed the countryside, performing first at a local nursing home, and later for special events.
Over the years, Jennings honed her puppetry skills. She learned to build puppets from master craftsmen, studied the art of storytelling, developed scripts, and traveled frequently to attend festivals and workshops—all in the pursuit of an esoteric art form that entails breathing life into inanimate objects.
Of course, giving inanimate objects the breath of life is the name of the game for puppeteers, Jennings recently told a group of students at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches occasional workshops.
“Puppetry is about convincing an audience that a man-made object is alive,” Jennings says. “A puppet can be a spoon, a vacuum cleaner—anything. If a puppet is alive to its puppeteer, it will come to life for the audience.”
This transformation lies at the heart of Jennings’s art, and she is helping train a new
generation of puppeteers to appreciate and enact their own transformations.
At Jennings’s home studio, four puppeteers preparing for a workshop practice transforming such mundane objects as bleach bottles and knotted scarves into whimsical, living characters.
A blue, bespectacled, bleach-bottle man, brow shrouded in a brown wig, comes to life with the help of three puppeteers—one holding the head and neck by the bleach-bottle handle, and one on each hand, with an arm draped through the sleeve of a shirt attached to the bottle. Jennings acts as director, encouraging the puppeteers to explore their medium.
“Can you put your hands in the air?” she asks. The three-man puppet complies, waving his hands in the air and shaking his head.
“Can you look at your watch?” The blue head peers down at his wrists—both bear watches.
“Can you think?” The hands scratch the wigged head and curl under the blue chin.
The transformation is far from complete, but the blue-bottle man has taken on a life that will become richer with practice.
Transforming lives through enrichment is one of Jennings’s unspoken themes—and the lives she transforms can include those of puppeteers, audiences, and even communities.
Witness her work at Freese Elementary Arts Magnet School in Southeast San Diego. Freese is an underperforming school in a multi-racial, low-income neighborhood not far from the Mexican border. Jennings and the Guild of Puppetry have collaborated with teachers at Freese to introduce puppetry into the classroom in a way that incorporates the standard curriculum (such as writing and social studies) and gives even non-English speakers a way to connect the arts with their own experience.
“Kids who won’t participate in any other thing will participate in puppetry,” Jennings says. “When I first started going to Freese, I was a little intimidated by some of the kids.
There were some really big sixth graders,” says Jennings, who stands nearly six feet tall herself. “But every one of those big, tough kids would do the tenderest things with the puppets. It’s magical.”
Mary Pat Hutt, the arts magnet resource director at Freese, has watched Jennings work for the last 15 years.
“No matter what we propose,” Hutt says, “Lynn always says, ‘We’ll make it work.’” And Jennings’s projects at Freese have worked magic on a grand scale.
In a temporary bungalow dedicated to puppetry, the students have created puppets of titanic proportions. Life-sized lions made out of refrigerator boxes lounge against a wall next to six-foot African masks made of plastic plumbing pipes, metal, and cloth.
Maribou-plumed ostriches the size of Big Bird, with high-stepping legs of corrugated tubing, rest their beaks near pictures of boys “wearing” the puppets, guiding their undulating necks. Photos of Jennings’s most comprehensive project at Freese, a giant puppet parade and festival cover black display boards. The dull brown bungalow has been transformed, like the children and the community itself, through the creative energy of Jennings’s work.
Jennings recently received a grant from the prestigious Henson Foundation and is developing a puppet show for adults titled “Goldilocks, the Nursing Home Version.” For more information, visit www.sandiegoguildofpuppetry.org.
Cynthia Jenson-Elliott is a freelance writer based in San Diego.