HOW I STARTED TELLING THE CHRISTMAS STORY WITH MARIONETTES

The art of marionettes has been my passion since I was eleven years old. Eventually, after studying art and music at university, I went to London to work in the Little Angel Marionette Theatre in Islington to gain some experience in theatre. I learnt so much. One of the highlights was that I learned to carve marionettes out of wood. Before returning home I travelled through Europe, staying overnight in many towns to visit marionette theatres. 

When I boarded a homeward bound ship in Venice a Christian missionary shared the cabin with me. Soon I met some more missionaries and I heard them talking about Jesus. There on the ship I entered into a personal relationship with Him and this sparked a new direction for my life. 

Immediately I longed to do a Bible story with marionettes. The story of the birth of Jesus Christ, as we find it in die Bible, stood out to me, so that is where I began. I started carving the characters for the Christmas story as soon as I got home. 

This was my first own set of carved marionettes for a theatre performance. Since I only had seven weeks before the first scheduled performance in 1969, my sister Amalie, a sculptor, helped to carve some of the shepherds’ heads and hands. To this day the Mary marionette has a special place in my heart. Some years after first carving her, I wanted to re-string her hands so that they could open as I lifted them upwards in a gesture of prayer. It was quite a challenge. (The technique is explained in my book Marionettes Untangled.)

We performed the Christmas story in our big old house in Westcliff, Johannesburg. I also performed it at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre for five years. Through the years I trained many teams to perform with me and it became a seasonal favourite in our home theatre.
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It became my heart’s desire to someday perform the story for Russian-speaking people. Imagine my joy when, thirty years later, I was invited to perform at a puppet festival in Lutsk, Ukraine. Their theme was the Nativity! There was a photographer from Moscow who filmed our show and took it to Moscow. 

When I reached retirement age I thought: maybe I’d better make something small so I can still tell the story, on my own, and without strings. That’s when I started doing table theatre. One day a lady said: I can see a book. So with the help of my grown children, we used the table theatre figurines and made the book called “He came from the Father”.