Magic, made by hand: inside the world-first exhibition revealing how Jim Henson’s puppets came to life

Amanda Slack-Smith was at the Jim Henson Archives in New York, mid-research trip, when someone brought Oscar the Grouch – the garbage-loving Sesame Street puppet millions of people have loved since 1969 – out to meet her. “I can see the puppeteer with Oscar,” she says. “But as soon as I looked at Oscar, I was in love.” The person operating the puppet disappeared from her attention entirely. Ask her about it now, and her voice still has no distance. “It’s indelible in my mind, meeting Oscar.”

Amanda is the curatorial manager of the Australian Cinémathèque programme at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) – and that moment, three years ago, is part of the reason Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company exists at all. The world-first exhibition of Jim Henson Company puppets, sets and archives opened at GOMA in September, built by Amanda in collaboration with Jim Henson Company archivist and historian Karen Falk, and executive vice president of branding Nicole Goldman. Between them, Amanda and Karen offer the most comprehensive collection of the Company’s work ever assembled, and the first time this much of it has left North America, built by many hands across two continents.

None of what happened with Oscar was a lapse in professionalism. “The point of a curator is not to distort the information,” Amanda says. “It’s to bring clarity to it.” Yet it’s hard to stay entirely composed while standing in front of Oscar the Grouch – which might be exactly the point. Puppetry, she says, is a kind of magical realism: everything around it can be completely ordinary. You’re not being tricked by a person behind a puppet; you’re simply being asked if you believe in what might be possible.

The exhibition moves through three official chapters. The first, ‘The Method, the Making and the Magic’, covers how the Company actually builds and performs its puppets – a thread stretching back to 1950s broadcast TV. The second, ‘The Puppets, the Puppeteers and the Performance’, is about the physical and professional complexity of bringing a character to life. The third, ‘The Daring, the Digital and New Directions’, traces where digital tools have taken puppetry, without ever fully leaving the puppeteer’s hand behind.

Built inside-out: when stage design is puppeteer-first

That trust extends past philosophy and into the artefacts and set pieces themselves. The exhibition brings a full suite of Sesame Street regulars to Brisbane – Bert and Ernie, The Count and Big Bird, whose scale, Amanda says, only really registers in person: “to actually come and see Big Bird and experience the size of that and the detail of the feather work” is a different thing entirely. Snuffleupagus needs two people to bring to life – one working the front half, head and eyes; a second working the back legs and tail. On screen, he’s one shuffling, gentle giant. In the workshop, he's a small team.

Puppeteering sets aren’t built like film sets, or theatre sets or anything else. They’re built around where the puppet needs to be, not where a camera or an audience would naturally look. What looks, on screen, like a burrow scaled for six-inch creatures is really a stage built for the comfort of a six-foot adult standing inside it – high enough that a performer can work with their hands above their head, watching a small monitor for their character’s feet.

Nicole, who’s spent years taking Company shows on the road – like Splash and Bubbles and Dinosaur Train – was the one who helped get the actual Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock production sets to Brisbane from the Calgary Film Centre in Canada.

“There’s a human hand at all aspects of their creation.”

Amanda Slack-Smith

The section of the show featuring sets from Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock’s title sequence – Doc’s workshop, the portal, the Great Hall waterfall, Boober’s cave – includes a corridor visitors can walk through that was never meant to be seen: the space behind the set, where puppeteers waited between shots. There’s graffiti on the walls back there, left by performers who got, as Amanda puts it, “stuck behind there for quite some time”. It’s the closest the exhibition comes to putting a visitor inside the boredom and physical strain that a beloved children’s show is actually made of – not the magic, but the waiting room next to it.

Nothing in the exhibition is separated into “made” and “performed” – Amanda deliberately keeps them together. “There’s a human hand at all aspects of their creation,” she says, “from the build to the performance.” It’s a distinction worth sitting with: most creative work gets judged on the finished object, but a puppet only succeeds if the making and the performing stay in conversation with each other the whole way through. Get the build wrong, and no amount of skilled performance saves it. Get the performance wrong, and the most exquisitely built puppet is just foam on a table.

When Amanda described the show a few weeks before it opened, none of it was installed yet. She still walked through it room by room anyway – the way someone describes a house they haven’t moved into, but already knows where every piece of furniture will go.

Made for live performance, not to last forever

Materials, Karen says, get chosen entirely for performance, not longevity. “They’re more interested in: ‘will this foam crinkle at the eye?’” than whether it lasts 30 years. A huge amount of what the Company made simply hasn’t survived – open a box that’s 50 years old, sometimes only 20, and the contents can have crumbled to dust.

And yet almost nothing gets thrown out on purpose. “Jim never threw anything away,” Karen said. Some puppets get restored for performance again. Others, headed for museums, get rebuilt in firmer, archival foam – frozen in place for good, unable to ever perform again.

Labyrinth is the starkest case of what doesn’t survive. So much of what appeared on screen simply doesn’t exist anymore. This time, the centrepiece is a section built around David Bowie’s actual costume from Magic Dance, on loan from the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Karen is candid: there’s more Dark Crystal in this show than Labyrinth, because there are dozens of puppets from the recent Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance series available to display.

The rag bag aesthetic

Ask most people who founded the Muppets, and you’ll get one name. The paperwork says otherwise – Jane held 40 per cent of the company from the start, working alongside Jim as a performer, a trainer of incoming puppeteers and a maker of puppets in her own right.

Karen recalls Jane saying that their whole approach came out of a rag bag – and she meant it literally: arms made from the fingers of old gloves, one puppeteer’s sleeve cut from a pair of jeans. There was no material budget to speak of, so the aesthetic got built out of whatever was already in the house, patched together into something more collage than costume. But it wasn’t purely a matter of making do. “Some of it was expediency,” Karen says – the nearest fabric to hand, cut and used. “But some of it was a style choice as well.” They liked how it looked. It’s a working method that shows up again and again in the Company’s history: solving a design problem with whatever’s on hand, and then deciding that’s how it was meant to be done all along.

Jane became less visible after they had their third child, but she never disappeared. When Jim died, it was Jane – not a board or a studio – who founded the group tasked with protecting his work. She hired Karen to work with them and the company. The archive now safeguarding Jim’s legacy exists because Jane built the structure to protect it.

“I do home sewing, you know, skirts or whatever, but I’m not really very skilled.”

Karen Falk

A career path that didn’t come with a rulebook

In the 1980s and early 1990s, before she worked at the Company, Karen was working at Christie’s, the auction house, a few blocks from the Muppet workshop in New York. The only connection she noticed at the time was practical: people from the Company were often at the same deli, wearing jackets with Kermit the Frog on the back. She’d loved The Muppet Show as a teenager, but it never occurred to her that there was a job there for someone like her. “I do home sewing, you know, skirts or whatever,” she said, “but I’m not really very skilled.”

She applied for an opening in the exhibits department anyway. She was told the position had already been filled. Months later, out of nowhere, she got a call from Jane’s office – but it wasn’t about the job she’d applied for. They wanted someone to help build the Company’s archive. Having studied history and worked with collections, she was excited to take the meeting. More than 30 years later, she’s the one who decides what gets preserved, restored or let go.

Karen didn’t train as an archivist. Her degree is in museum curatorship – a distinction she’s careful to make, since her focus was never simply preserving the collection, but constantly finding new ways for it to exist in the world: building exhibitions, books and talks out of material that would otherwise just sit in a box.

Getting into puppeteering: an introduction

Performers at the Company are not technically employees, Karen says. Puppeteers are hired the way actors are – job to job, show to show – and there’s no formal ladder to climb. “Somebody will see you,” she says, “and then you might get invited in to do one day of work.”

Getting noticed. That’s still, more or less, how it works. The company’s current job listings ask for little more than a short video of your work with puppets – no puppetry degree, no prior credits required. Puppeteers of America, the national puppetry organisation, holds festivals Jim himself used to scout at, and still does.

Training helps – it’s just not required. The University of Connecticut runs the only puppetry degree program in the US, partly funded by the Jim Henson and Jane Henson Foundations. The Foundations also fund artist residencies at the University of Maryland – the same puppetry class where Jim and Jane first met.

Worth knowing. Puppeteers are SAG-AFTRA members, hired as performers. Puppet wranglers – the separate, on-set role that builds, repairs and dresses puppets – are largely freelance and non-unionised; some have spoken publicly in recent years about wanting better conditions. Karen wasn’t asked about this and didn’t comment on it – the door in is real, but what’s waiting on the other side of it can vary a lot depending on which room you end up in.