Consider, if you will, puppetry as the ultimate handmade art form. Not only are puppets often created by hand, they require human activation.
“I think the reason people are so drawn to puppetry, regardless of age, experience or art genre that you’re working in, is the opportunity to create life from nothing,” said Cass Bray, one half of the shadow puppetry duo Shadow Girls Cult, whose new show, “Unraveling,” comes to Theatre Off Jackson July 16-18.
“It’s magic,” added Zane Exactly, the other half of SGC, “because you can see all of the inner workings, yet you’re still fully captivated by this thing that somebody painted — you’re invested in its life and its story.”
This queer shadow puppetry and performance art duo shares the power and possibility of their analog art form through their shows: moody, tender and cinematic mini-epics made using overhead projectors, hundreds of shadow puppets, innovative transition techniques and a delicious layer of narrative ambiguity.
As they create their own work, SGC also strives to bring Seattle’s puppets to the wider world, and vice versa.
Each came to this work, initially, from different sides of the artistic spectrum.
Exactly, a visual artist by training who studied sculpture and printmaking, found their way to puppetry almost by accident after attending the second iteration of “Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam,” a puppet variety show, more than a decade ago at Theater Off Jackson.
“I was interested in figuring out, ‘How can I tell more complex stories through visual art?’ ” Exactly said. Shadow puppet theater, which gave two-dimensional art narrative possibility, allowed that complexity.
Bray, who was working as a theater director and lighting designer, was having the opposite experience. “I feel like the theater world was getting so prescriptive, and I didn’t have enough opportunity to create something visual,” she said.
The two first worked together in 2017, on an Annex Theatre production of Amy Escobar’s play “Scary Mary and the Nightmares Nine,” and then again on “Into the Deeps,” the final production from now-shuttered Seattle performance outfit DangerSwitch!
As they were finding their way toward a collaborative devising style and a shared creative vocabulary, three events came along that Bray said “really catapulted us into this art style that we’re working in.”
In close succession, Bray said, they participated in workshops by Chicago-based Manual Cinema, which uses overhead projection in its live puppetry shows; Vancouver puppet company Mind of a Snail; and a Portland art installation featuring work from several Polish shadow puppet artists that let attendees play with light and shadow.
Since then, the two (sometimes in collaboration with Escobar) have constantly experimented, refining their shadow puppetry style. One hallmark, Bray said, is seamless transitions, courtesy of camera irises adapted to fit underneath overhead projectors, which allows them to control the output of light and create what feels like a short animated film made live on stage.
Their first piece, 2019’s “Giant Woman,” was inspired by the animated show “Steven Universe.” It centers on a larger-than-life woman who crash-lands on Earth and, Bray said, “her curiosity and longing to be like the people around her.”
“Giant Woman” formed the initial kernel of “Unraveling,” and a 2025 Jim Henson Foundation Workshop Grant and a 4Culture grant spurred SGC to finish the work, which weaves together shorter vignettes into a surreal, full-length piece, infused with sci-fi, horror and film noir.
“We realized that it had a throughline of everything falling apart, of this moment in time when it all breaks away and you’re left with what’s beneath,” Bray said. After touring the show around the country in recent months, they’re bringing it home to Seattle.
Up next: Filipino horror play “Blood/Sucker” with Washington Ensemble Theatre and Seayoung Yim’s “Jar of Fat” at Theatre Battery, for which the duo is performing and creating an “immersive shadow world using giant mirror portals.”
“We’re so steeped in (artificial intelligence) and in internet culture that people want something tactile, something that feels real,” Bray said.
That appreciation for the analog is also why very little SGC work is available online. “Part of the magic is in the process,” Bray said, of a show “made live with four hands using three overhead projectors, 300 puppets and shadow masks,” referring to “Unraveling.”
Even seen live, that intricate choreography can be hard to believe. “I’m pretty certain people have seen the show and are sure that we’re just sitting back there and hitting play on something,” Exactly said, with a laugh.
There will be no such misapprehension at “Unraveling.” To show off the intricate choreography that their shows require, Bray and Exactly are staging it in an approximation of an in-the-round layout. Seats will be available on both sides of their screen and audience members are encouraged to move seats between the show’s vignettes.
“We’re all feeling a little broken, a little shaken, and I think that now is an opportunity to see live theater and puppetry, and to watch things being handmade in real time,” Bray said. “I like to be a part of that magic, and I think there’s something healing about puppetry because it creates this bubble of safety and community naturally, through creating life.”
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