Meet the Quaker Puppet Maker Trying to Save Arts Education in the Midwest

Christopher Lutter is the founder of Puppet Farm Arts, a pacifist collective that makes humongous puppets out of reclaimed trash for various theater productions, parades, and school workshops. Over the phone, he told me he “specializes in critters”—and when I went to visit him at his studio in Minneapolis, it was clear I had not been mislead.

Hanging from the walls were deer, wolves, bears, an elephant, and a yeti, and he's currently working on a giant puffin costume. We talked about his work and its political edge.

VICE: How did you get started making puppets?
Christopher Lutter: I was doing a lot of human service work—I was a caregiver, and did some library programs with kids. With storytelling, I found I always liked to have something in my hands, either an instrument, or a prop, or a puppet. Eventually in the summer time our small town's Chamber of Commerce started hiring me to come make parade figures for their big blueberry festivals. Then I built a 16-foot tall Johnny Appleseed puppet for the apple festival in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

And you use mostly recycled materials?
Yeah, mostly warehouse distribution waste stuff. I do a lot with reclaimed fence material, plastic bags, and have gobs of window screen. Window and door manufacturers come along and give me whole rolls of screen sometimes. They’ll say it’s a defective roll. I’m like, "Jesus, this is thousands of feet of screen." They’re like, "Yeah but we can’t use it." And I'm like "Great, I'll use it."

Cool. Is that George Bush hanging from your ceiling?
Yeah. That’s George Bush Jr. right there. When 2001 came along there was, of course, all this political turmoil with the attacks and the warmongers that took over the administration. I was like, "OK we gotta do something." So I built characters of Bush, [Vice President Dick] Cheney, and [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and started doing spontaneous performances at protests. We’d just show up with these characters and do masked clowning type stuff. Saying things like, "Please make way for the Bush administration. You gotta be tough if you’re gonna be stupid."

So you were about using puppetry to respond to the war in Iraq?
Yeah, a lot of the stuff I made when I first got into [puppetry] was really bent on opposition to American imperialism and intervention in the Middle East. Taking political stances—not for political candidates but for peace and justice—has been the underpinning of the whole organization from the very beginning. Confronting environmental, social, and political injustices. Confronting them. Not just saying like, "Oh that’s wrong." Rather, getting out in the streets point-blank and saying, "NO! You’re wrong! That’s not the way!" The pacifism is totally out in the open.

You're involved in many school workshops in the Midwest. How does this kind of attitude go over in the schools?
Sometimes I get in trouble with it when I do residencies in schools. I don’t lambast but I'll say things like, "I think war is wrong and I’m against it in any context. Period." I’m a pacifist and a Quaker. And I don't think it's right. You don’t solve problems through warfare—ever. I tell them that someday when they're my age they'll be sickened by the cycle they've watched their entire lives.

Violence will never, ever work. Take the situation in Israel for example: That’s not working!

You’re a Quaker?
I’m not official. There’s a whole process to become a member of the Quaker society—you have to go on this sort of vision quest kind of thing. But yeah, if I’m anything I’m a Quaker. I’m behind it all. It’s like the one Christian denomination that doesn’t treat the flesh and blood of Jesus with an inviolable bow down and worship him or you’ll burn in hell forever approach.

They don’t believe in hellfire, which I’ve never believed in. That type of thing is a fear-mongering, violent method of bringing people to your political/religious agenda and the Quakers totally get that. I sent my daughter to a Quaker Friends school because the moment you walk into the school, their wall doesn't say things like "success" but rather "peace, justice, community."

Do you think there’s a correlation between the decrease of arts education in schools and the kind of 'American imperialism'you were just talking about?
Absolutely. At the risk of waxing too Marxist or whatever, yeah—I do think things are controlled by kind of a corporate elitist economic tyranny that really trickles down into how we do education with kids. I even look at the math they’re teaching kids in school now and it’s really training them to be capitalists and consumers and to be able to calculate things like ledgers so they predict economic trends and stuff.

Where’s the geometry, you know? Can we teach the kids some geometry, so they can be architects and designers?

So what do you teach the kids?
Mostly materials education. Where materials come from. A lot of kids have no idea where plastic comes from. I mean, no idea. Like, honestly. I’m talking about fifth grade kids. "Where does plastic come from? Trees?" I’m drop-dead serious. I have to hold their hand, then finally hit upon the fact that it comes from oil. And that oil is the same stuff that goes into your car. And then I'll correlate that to something like the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

I try to get them to understand the idea that we’re trying to extend the use of materials and preserve… People are always like, "Oh I hate plastic." And it’s like, no you don’t. Your whole world—the edifice of your whole material culture—is built of plastic, including your cars, your clothes, your shoes—everything! You don’t hate plastic, you live by it. I love plastic bottles. I collect plastic bottles. I save things like that, rinse them out, and use them to create creatures and stuff.

Yeah, I see tons of creatures around your workshop here… Those eyes are fantastic on that deer.
Thanks, yeah, those are just giant Christmas ornaments. I made that deer along with a wolf and a bear for a Fourth of July parade here in the upper Midwest. I was like: How about instead of patriotism, let's celebrate the area and just make some country animals? There was a bit of a hang-up around like, what are the animals for? I don’t know.

People say, "What’s the bear for?" And I’m like: What are people for?!

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