Correction appended.
Cashore Marionettes is making its way to Athens Monday as part of the Performing Arts and Concert Series.
Joseph Cashore made his first marionette when he was about 10 years old.
“It wasn’t a very good marionette but every once in a while by accident, as I was playing with it, it would look like it was alive to me,” he said.
Cashore will present his works at Baker Theatre in Baker Center Monday at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Ohio University Performing Arts and Concert Series. The show is called Life in Motion, and tickets are $5 for students.
Cashore said he has created more than 150 marionettes in his lifetime but will use 14 or 15 of his best pieces to compile a show. His shows involve different themes, some of which he said are funny and tender and some of which are more serious.
The evening includes arrangements of different scenes to make the audience feel as if it’s a roller coaster of emotions with surprises, he said.
“When everybody in the room is feeling the same thing with the same intensity at the same time, it’s a great feeling,” Cashore said. “People will see a bit of themselves in some of these pieces. It’s a discovery.”
A majority of the marionettes in the show took at least six months or a year to make, he said. Some marionettes can take several years to make because he’s not constantly in the studio working on them.
With each marionette, Cashore said he considers what kinds of movement the character will need to make in order to convey the theme, which usually involves doing multiple sketches of the character.
“I’m going for a quality of movement that probably hasn’t been seen with other marionettes that you might have seen,” he said.
Cashore said he attempts to create pieces that he would want to see so the show may not be fitting for a very young audience and is not a “kiddy show.”
While the Performing Arts and Concert Series has not included any show like Cashore's in the past, the College of Fine Arts has put on shows with puppets, according to Andrew Holzaepfel, senior associate director of the Campus Involvement Center.
Holzaepfel said the performance will be a new art form for the audience to experience.
“It’s a beautiful art,” he said. “You lose yourself in the middle of it, particularly when you have a talented artist.”
Holzapefel said he wanted to do an outreach element with the show. Cashore will perform Tuesday morning for the school children from The Plains Elementary School.
Abbey Short, a sophomore studying nursing, said despite likely not having the time to attend the show, the marionette show would be interesting.
“I think it's kind of cool,” she said. “It would probably take a lot of work to do something like that.”
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Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Andrew Holzaepfel's name. The story has been updated to reflect the most accurate information.
