My workshops are my favorite place — full of half-finished characters, fabric samples, reference images, failed experiments, and the occasional successful one. There's a particular creative mess that only happens when you're genuinely in process, and I'm attached to it. New ideas emerge from adjacent materials: a piece of wire suggests a pose, a scrap of fabric suggests a character, two found objects placed next to each other suddenly become a relationship. I've learned to trust this lateral, material-led thinking more than any planned approach.

This space is where my theatre and my life overlap — both involve attention to what comes alive when you give it your full presence. I'm not performing here in the empty sense. I'm doing the thing I do in my work: being genuinely present with something I've made and watching whether it comes alive in the exchange. If you're someone who can give a puppet your real attention, who takes imagination seriously enough to play with full commitment — then I think you'll find something genuinely alive here.

I got into puppetry because I wanted to tell stories that couldn't be told by people playing people. There are certain truths that resist literal representation — they become more visible when displaced into something clearly artificial. A puppet can be transparently constructed, obviously controlled, unmistakably a made object, and still communicate something about human experience that more realistic forms can't reach. The audience knows it's not real and believes it anyway, and that double consciousness is where interesting things happen.

What fascinates me technically is how little it takes to create the impression of life. A small movement at the right moment, a slight tilt of the head, a pause before responding — these micro-gestures are enough to convince an audience that something is thinking. Working with puppets has made me hyper-aware of these signals in real people too: the tiny movements that communicate interiority, the micro-expressions that betray what someone is actually feeling beneath what they're saying. Puppet work teaches you to read aliveness in its smallest units.

What draws me to people is their relationship to imagination and play — whether they've kept access to that mode of being or whether it got buried under seriousness. I don't mean ishness or escapism. I mean the specific capacity to take invented things seriously, to give genuine attention to something made-up, to play with full commitment. Tell me the last time you genuinely played — not as a strategy, not as networking, but as actual play. Tell me what you'd make if making were the only point.