When "Walking With Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular" stomps into the Arena at Gwinnett Center this week, it will have more than life-sized dinosaurs in tow. Though this isn’t the show’s first time in the Atlanta area, it is the first time the Australian production has been manned by an American crew. And the first American puppeteer to be hired was Raymond Carr, who honed his skills in Atlanta at the Center for Puppetry Arts and is now head of the voodoo puppetry department for Walking With Dinosaurs.
Having been part of shows for both young and adult audiences, Carr is perhaps best known to Atlantans for his work with Ninja Puppet Productions (www.ninjapuppet.com), where he is the artistic director responsible for more mature shows at Eyedrum, Dad’s Garage Theatre and other venues. As he returns to Atlanta with "Walking With Dinosaurs," he takes a moment to discuss his work with puppets both big and small.
Puppetry isn’t something many people ever consider as a career option. How did you get into it? My whole extended family works in ministry and my parents did clowning when I was growing up. My brother and I would do puppetry while our parents were doing the clowning so we became a family performance troupe. At the height of our performances, we were performing about 200 times a year all over the country. I used to be a very shy person and puppetry gave me an outlet to be creative.
Then when I moved to Atlanta in high school, the Center for Puppetry Arts was right next door to us and I started volunteering there. Then I got a job there as a house manager and usher, then I did an internship and became a performer there and even directed some shows there.
What were some of the shows you were involved with there? I performed in a couple of different productions of “Winnie the Pooh.” I directed an original children’s series piece that was a gospel musical called “The Sunday Morning Puppet Show” and that was actually part of the National Black Arts Festival. Then I directed several adult pieces as part of their Xperimental Puppetry Theater.
How would you describe the work you do with your Ninja Puppet Productions? We do creative avant-garde, which is not traditional Muppet-style puppetry. For the past three years we’ve been performing at the Eyedrum with a large showcase of performances, music, video and things of that nature with my pieces as well as other local artists. We’ve also been performing at Dad’s Garage as part of the Puppet Slams and various other smaller things at places like Push Push Theater. We also have a short film and cinematic element to it and we’ve done about five short films of varying quality that have done the festival circuit, won some awards at DragonCon and things like that. We also do promos, commercial bits, develop pilots and things of that nature.
How does the "Dinosaurs" experience compare to your previous work? It’s actually rather intuitive because it is a one-of-a-kind production. The difference between a movie creature like for "Aliens" or "Jurassic Park" or something like that is you have a giant creature, but it would be just the head or the arms. These dinosaurs are fully functional and you can look at them from any angle and they look like the real thing. The style of puppetry is specifically Bunraku puppetry, which is the common phrase for three-person puppetry where someone controls the head and arm, someone controls the body and someone is on the feet. So it’s different, but it’s also very intuitive.
How does the current show compare to the one that was at Philips Arena a few years ago? There are some changes. We have a couple of new dinosaurs, not new species, but new models that are a little bit faster and can do a couple of new tricks. Like the T-Rex is a little more flexible and mobile and when it roars at the audience it actually has mist that comes out of its mouth, so it spits on the audience. But the storyline is essentially the same. It’s a documentary-style story with only one human in the show, who is a paleontologist who is observing these dinosaurs and points out interesting things about them.
How often do you get to work on your own ideas while touring with these dinosaurs? We’re on the road all the time and in a new city every week, but we get about eight weeks out of the year off. I’m the type of artist who likes to move forward and try different things. I love this job, but I also love Atlanta and doing my own things. I usually set up projects that I can do on the road with people I’ve been working with for years
There’s a short film I’ve been preparing for since January and every little break I’ve gotten I’ve gone back to Atlanta to do casting or some other element of pre-production. In July, I landed on Monday and started shooting the film for five days and did 70 hours with the crew and left the day before I had to go back on the road. But, yes, I keep myself busy with other projects as well.
