Snuff Puppets: Melbourne’s Punk Puppeteers

If you’ve lived in Melbourne at any point since 1992, you will likely have seen Snuff Puppets.

Maybe you saw their ghoulish lifesize skeletons guzzling oil at the 2019 global climate strikes, or the viral video of their 26-metre-tall human puppet, Everybody, who gave birth to a blinking baby puppet in the CBD in 2016.

For 31 years these towering handmade creatures have roamed the streets of about 30 countries, performed hundreds of stage and festival shows, and turned thousands of heads at protests and rallies. They’re hard to miss.

Today, three decades of larger-than-life creatures live in the theatre company’s supernatural zoo at Footscray’s 100-year-old Drill Hall warehouse, under the care of co-artistic directors Andy Freer (also the founder) and Nick Wilson.

Upon entering I was met by a 15-metre-long, half-inflated baby-pink lump.

“Just setting up our big cochlea,” Freer said, peering out from under a fabric fold.

It’s an anatomically correct spiral cavity, found in the inner ear. Audiences enter through the velcroed airlock doors and amble the twisting tunnels before taking a seat on a shell-like sloping floor. The cavern is fitted with invisible speakers that play interviews with trans and gender-diverse Australians.

Cochlea is just one large-scale installation currently at Snuff HQ.

The shelves are stuffed, and the ceiling beams are strung, with skeletons, animals and god-knows-what-other imagined beasts. Giant human heads and skulls line the shelves; there’s a giant crayfish in the rafters; and behind one black curtain is a 22-metre-long red-bellied black snake skeleton that’s powered by both “a pretty hacked” mobility scooter and walking frames multiple puppeteers strap into.

“She doesn’t have her skin on at the moment,” Freer said, pointing to a ball of scale-patterned fabric in the corner.

Freer grew up in a “curious” household in Canberra with an artistic mother, a scientist father and a personal interest in experimental theatre.

“I was inspired by doing things in a way that was challenging or pushing the boundaries of what audiences might expect,” he said.

As a part of various theatre troupes in and beyond high school, he created sets, costumes and performed “in quarries, burnt-out houses and shopping malls, or whatever – putting theatre out into the world”.

In Snuff Puppets’ early days, in Melbourne, the small collective toured Australia’s art festivals with bizarre and nightmarish shows that gradually spilled into public places. Freer describes them as spontaneous, unscripted and only existing in the moment.

The puppets never spoke – and still don’t today – but always had something to say about the world.

Wilson came across Snuff Puppets while heavily involved in student activism in the early 2000s. He was making lo-fi musical machines – think olive-oil-can cellos – in his spare time.

“When I saw Snuff Puppets, there was something about that energy, that rebellion but … the use of creativity and joyful, big celebration [that] could still say something powerful, but in a different way that’s not necessarily trying to tear something down all the time,” Wilson said.

“You can use that energy to build something up and make something also creative and inspiring to people.”

Everything Snuff Puppets does is “a little bit political”, Wilson said.

“Because you’re dealing with symbols and it’s all oversized and ridiculous and silly and fun, it means you can get away with a lot more than I can as myself.

“Puppets, because they’re at an arm’s length with reality, they’re able to show you things in a silly and more playful way, and that’s what keeps me interested in it all these years later.”

Despite technological advances and changing trends towards hyperrealism – such as Disney’s CGI remakes of hand-drawn classics – Snuff’s iconic look remains.

“We’ve stuck to one style of creating a skin – there’s a giant puppet with a skin, a head and a whole body and the puppeteer inside – and we’ve done that one thing in different ways for 30 years,” Freer said.

“There are a lot of puppets out there that are very high-tech and complicated but we just don’t use that at all, we just keep perfecting our style of hand-crafted, hand-made.”

Freer said one element of their craft they’ve improved is “hiding the human”. Whether it’s a car-sized eyeball staring at you in a plaza or freakishly large seagulls nibbling on people’s heads in parks, what you see is what you perceive.

“It is the suspension of disbelief that we can capture in audiences,” Freer said.

“Seeing these puppets existing with no human, it does take adults into a child-like state. Especially when the puppets are bigger than them, they’re suddenly squealing and laughing in this moment of innocence.”

Wilson said the obvious lack of technological bells and whistles helps audiences connect to the puppets.

“You might not see a human face but you can see their hand marks and glue stains and paint brush marks. You might not hear a human voice but the interaction is still very direct, dynamic and responsive to people.

“You see less of the human, but it feels like there’s almost more of a human hand in the work and people relate to it instantly.”

The way art is distributed and consumed has changed significantly since 1992, and old-school puppets may be fighting an uphill battle for your attention. But no matter who or where you are, if you see a giant rhinoceros trundling towards you on the street, or a human nose dribbling green snot wiggling along the ground, you will feel something.

“Life can be boring out on the street, and hard and stressful and grinding us all down into this concrete world of just too much harshness, and I think levity is really important,” Freer said.

Aleksandra Bliszczyk is the Deputy Editor of VICE Australia. Follow her on Instagram.