Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

Peter Balkwill

Among the arts, puppetry and puppeteers are a breed unto their own. A unique kind of performing artist who is willing to forsake the spotlight and allow the focus of their efforts to rest not on themselves, but rather on an inanimate object that is begging life.

There is a quality among these performers that makes them kin; a familial interest to stay connected to that innate, childlike instinct to play, to imagine other worlds and engage within them.

Among this family is a pioneer of the craft who was profound in his vision, an artist who managed an esthetic that would become a brand name in puppetry: Jim Henson.

Professor Henson (professor is the moniker attributed to the Victorian puppet masters of Punch and Judy shows) is the creator of The Muppets, which were the foundational teachers of literacy amongst many of us. He is also the creator of a puppet within this style called the Fraggles; a breed unto their own. Fraggle Rock debuted in 1983 and was a co-production between multiple companies, including the Jim Henson Company and CBC Television. Much of the original series was filmed in Toronto over five seasons, creating a legacy of puppeteers for film and television in that region. Canada has since become a “go-to” destination for any kind of camera-related puppet activity.

So, in the fall of 2020, AppleTV+, in co-production with the Jim Henson Company (among others), started searching north of the 49^th parallel for a possible location to film Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, a reboot of the original series. It was a tricky task as the current COVID pandemic had created a shortage of sound stages in Toronto and Vancouver, which led the production team to start searching in other locations. They began looking at Calgary as a possible site and started with a simple inquiry of the city’s ability to house a major television puppetry program. They discovered a hidden gem outside of the established markets. Not only is Calgary situated with a state-of-the-art film centre, but the region also holds one of the most established puppet-theatre scenes in Western Canada, home to companies like the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Green Fools and Calgary Animated Objects Society. But there are two major differences between puppetry for theatre and manipulating for film and TV – the camera and the use of a monitor to find yourself within the world.

The producers needed to bring in some veterans, some tried-and-true puppeteers of the film industry. To lead the charge, they enlisted Frank Meschkuleit, a cast member from the original series, to act as puppetry co-captain and to puppeteer many major characters. Frank came to puppetry through physical theatre training and had done some incidental work on some Muppet projects before working on the original Fraggle Rock. He recalls part of his training preparing for the role of Junior Gorg for the original Fraggle Rock series included a roast chicken, a bottle of wine and a stack of old Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton VHS tapes: “Just do that.” he was told. “It was both the simplest and most complicated training I’d ever received as a performer.” There is truth to this in puppetry. Before production began, Frank arrived to train the Calgary puppeteers alongside another Fraggle veteran and executive producer of the current project, John Tartaglia. Together these two amazing artists helped to create an environment that would provide the foundation for a new family of Fraggle puppeteers to emerge.

Within this family was Jordan Lockhart, who came from Toronto to bring life to one of the main Fraggle Five: Wembley. Jordan cut his hind teeth training at the Sesame Workshop in New York City and was ready to help “preserve what made these characters special while carefully updating them for a 21^st century-audience.” He recalls working in Calgary with “easily the best crew I’ve ever worked with hands down!” He was also impressed with the local puppeteers and how “they all supported each other like a family and helped one another shine.” Adding to the energy, the project was host to 25 puppeteers all told, creating, as Frank remembers, “that feeling of wonder and delight again, where each wide shot has a dozen tiny stories told by the puppets in the background.”

Among this throng of hectic Henson activity was a local Calgary cohort of puppeteers, which included a wide breadth of experience within puppetry but also film and TV in all forms. Anna Cummer is no stranger to working within the world of the animated cosmos. Anna is the voice of Strawberry Shortcake in the Berry Bitty Adventures series. With an impressive training pedigree capped with a master’s degree from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in the U.K., Anna went right to work with the Fraggles true to the empowered Henson Company mandate – she began to “play”. As part of the background of Back to the Rock, all of the Fraggles are always trying to steal the scene; “we grabbed a bunch of props and costume pieces and just went to town riffing off each other. It was incredibly fun and added wonderful texture and interest to the scene as a whole. Incredibly effective.” It was easy enough to bring these creatures to life as Jim Henson was an inspired designer: “he knew how to build them: the Ferrari of puppets.”

Another puppeteer who stands as an incredible legacy to Jim Henson, and who came full circle into Fraggle Rock, is an Indigenous puppeteer named DerRic Starlight. He remembers growing up with the Muppets as a child on the Tsuut’ina Nation just west of Calgary: “On the reserve, the only clear signal we could get was CBC.” On the day Professor Henson passed – May 16, 1990 – DerRic decided to dedicate his life to puppetry. Since that day, he has manipulated on several projects with the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) but even more impressively he has created his own brand of “Nuppets,” a family of native puppets. He has toured and performed on every reserve in Canada, carrying across the country the spirit that so impacted him as a youngster. As a result of working on Fraggle, DerRic was selected from thousands of applicants to continue his training for three weeks with the Jim Henson Company in Los Angeles, “Working with these puppets is to be on the biggest, most important puppet stage in the world.”

If one believes in shifts in the matrix, then this is what happened to Calgary when the Fraggles came calling. It added gasoline to the fire of puppetry already happening in this region and put it all in front of an international, mega-audience. The impact of that “Rock” has spawned the newly formed Calgary Puppeteer Collective, which is currently creating and launching its own pilot of a new series called Windchasers (working title). All of this is an amazing continuum of one person’s idea to create worlds to reach people through the art of puppetry and now Calgary is ready to rival any market to be part of the production of world-class puppetry for film and television.

Peter Balkwill is a Calgary-based actor and producer known for Fraggle Rock, From Naughty to Nice and Blow Out. When not performing, Peter is an Assistant Professor of Acting and Drama in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. In theatre, he works as a founding Co-Artistic Director of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, the Education Director of the Canadian Academy of Mask and Puppetry and the Co-Artistic Director of the Festival of Animated Objects, also in Calgary. Peter has been an ACTRA member since 2006.