Pop Up Puppet Workshop

Rob D’Arc did not invent the mechanism that gives the Pop-Up puppet it’s name; that honor goes to the late Duke Kraus, who shared the idea with Rob at a puppetry festival in Ohio in 1997. Rob immediately escalated the idea by adding pattern pieces, complicated it further by adding swinging arms, using paint stirrer sticks to make large puppets,  attempting to ramrod these ideas into a separate branch of puppetry.  To explore the practicality of the form he then created a stylized lip synch show called “3 Minute Theater.”  In the summer 1999 edition of the Puppetry Journal, Rob’s article “Uncle Duke’s PopUp Puppets” kicked off the Pop-Up up revolution. Other puppeteers soon contributed modifications and alternate uses, such as classroom use, therapy and speech pathology, and working with differently abled students.