Epidermis Circus: spicy puppets, drag clown costuming, saucy strange work, and a trail of slime

25 Feb 2024 - Photos by Helene Cyr

"I'll give you our content warning," says Ingrid Hansen. "Epidermis Circus includes cartoonish sexual content, swear words, and puppet suicide. There are moments of dark lighting, loud music, and surprises. For audiences age 14+ . And I may or may not puppeteer underpants." The more Hansen tries to explain, the weirder and more enticing Epidermis Circus, touching down briefly on its way to off-Broadway, sounds. "I perform a live puppet film, animating cheeky vignettes in the palm of my hand and projecting them onto a huge screen. Imagine the hand dancing of Kiss & Cry or the live-puppet-animation of Kid Koala's Mosquito Show, but solo, sexy, and, as one reviewer wrote, akin to watching 'Lambchops puppeteer Shari Lewis possessed by David Lynch.'"

For anyone for whom those last few references are too puppet obscure, Hansen hastens to add that her dear friend, superstar Jimbo the Drag Clown, winner of the eighth season of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars, is involved. "I asked Jimbo to design an over-the-top goddess costume for me for a grand entrance," says Hansen. "I then promptly take it off and leave it in a heap onstage. Underneath I reveal puppeteer's black clothes, I need to blend into the background so that the puppets pop. I have always been a huge fan of Jimbo's clowning, the weirder the better. He's a great example of the weird performing art scene nurtured in Victoria." 

Hansen is proud of her Victoria, BC roots. "I was the original costume designer, and Epidermis Circus' director Britt Small directed the premiere version of Ride the Cyclone which toured across Canada for five years." That statement twigged a memory of an interview I did with puppeteer/musician Hank Pine about that very memorable production. He said, ""My boyfriend, James Insell, plays Karnak, the mechanical fortune-telling machine, and I play a giant rat, Virgil, who plays the bass.” Thirteen years later, Insell is now internationally renowned as Jimbo, Pine's music career is wilder and weirder than ever, while Hansen is on her way to conquer to New York City. There might be something in the water in Victoria.

"Britt is an artistic leader of Atomic Vaudeville, a wild Victoria theatre company that puts on audacious cabarets," says Hansen. "Being a part of their cabarets, testing out new work and ideas, and creating in such a raw, spontaneous way has been and continues to be a big part of my artistic fuel." Epidermis Circus itself was born in a raw, spontaneous way. "I started off puppeteering my clothes. Then I did a residency with a camera and live-feed video, and brought in mirrors, started playing with reflections and bare hands. It's evolved so much, I continue tweaking it all the time. Keeps it exciting. While collaborating with Britt Small, the air always feels sparkly with ideas. We constantly write new jokes for the show together, she's the co-creator and a huge part of the discovery of all the characters. It's difficult, to re-learn new lines I've re-written so many times. What's my line again?

It should be noted that Hansen has also done a lot of mainstream puppeteering, from Sesame Street to Fraggle Rock. "I love both worlds," she says of working high profile productions. “We created our own b-storylines performing puppet extras in the background of scenes. Our puppet extras had crushes, conflicts, complex backstories—we wanted to give them fully developed personal lives in the background of the Fraggle Rock universe.”  But "I love surreal object puppetry and body puppetry. I'm super inspired by La Causeuse, a bare-hand puppetry piece by Quebec theatre artist Olivia Faye Lathuillière, and the online videos of Hugo and Ines. They feed my different inner artistic goblins." 

Hansen is on a roll and name checks fellow Canadian, and adult-skewing, puppeteers Ronnie Burkettt (Little Dickens, Forget Me Not, The Daisy Theatre) and Adam Proulx (Family Crow) before, when requested, offering up further examples to googled. "There's Mr. Meaty, a hilarious tv series about teens working in a dingy mall food court, which, was produced for tween audiences but is a great watch for adults. The tapeworm episode will give you nightmares. Theatrically, check out Big Nazo, a Gwar-style monster band. Locally in Toronto, Eric Woolfe [MacBeth: A Tale Told By an Idiot, Doc Weathergloom's Here There Be Monsters),  does some great weird puppetry at Red Sandcastle Theatre that, while not explicit, is great for adult audiences."

Though Hansen claims she is an "extreme extrovert," she is less successful promoting her own work than that of others. "The show is very difficult to describe in words," she says, "the audience has no reference point for the strange work we're doing. So I love when reviewers capture the essence of the show much better than I could. Reviewers: please write my show description for me, is what I'm saying." She quotes her favourite "and most accurate" review courtesy of 12thNight.ca, "We see Hansen create characters from her own hands, fingers, tongue, in a saucy and jostling vaudeville of ‘stars.' Nutty, ingenuous, mesmerizing." While her bally may need work, Hansen has no shortage of well-earned confidence. "I love performing in Toronto," she says of the city with a reputation for cold staidness. "I lived there for six years. I've toured Epidermis Circus across Canada, to raucous audience response. One guy in Winnipeg came back to see the show five times in a row." 

There is one other thing that enquiring minds need to know, so I ask Hansen, with your hands doing much of the heavy lifting for the show, what is your moisturizing regimen or recommended lotion to keep them supple and vibrant? "Seriously," she says with no hesitation, "Body Shop Hemp Hand Protector. Comes in the silver tube. Best. Ever. That, and sometimes I just use baby oil. And then everything I touch leaves a trail of slime."