ArtsThe OBJECTive Puppet Festival, on at the Bus Stop Theatre on Oct. 28 and 29, is showcasing Nova Scotia’s rich puppetry sceneThe OBJECTive Puppet Festival is showcasing Nova Scotia’s rich puppetry sceneMorgan Mullin · CBC News · Posted: Oct 28, 2025 5:19 PM EDT | Last Updated: 1 hour agoListen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesA promotional image from the Edgar Allan Poe Puppet Show, on as part of the OBJECTive Puppet Festival in Halifax. (Courtesy OBJECTive Puppet Festival )A pair of wind socks working at Halifax Stanfield International Airport take you inside their inner world. A love story unfolds aboard the Dartmouth ferry. The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe appears to a young writer. These are just some of the offerings at OBJECTive Puppet Festival, a new fest celebrating puppet and object-based theatre at Halifax’s Bus Stop Theatre on Oct. 29 and 30.When OBJECTive co-director Logan Robins was tasked with directing puppets during his high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, he probably never would’ve guessed that, all these years later, he’d be bringing Halifax’s first puppetry festival to life. Robins has carved out a niche as the go-to puppeteer in Halifax. He’s created a puppet-based TV series for Bell Fibe, worked with puppets on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and performed with the region’s biggest theatre company, Neptune Theatre. “In a way, I feel like I’ve kind of been barreling toward puppetry my whole life,” he says. But also, I think it sort of has kind of snuck up on me, just in terms of the intensity of my passion for it.”Robins is an alumnus of the Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia, the province’s world-renowned puppetry theatre based in Wolfville, and a veteran puppeteer. Festival director Logan Robins. (Courtesy OBJECTive Puppet Festival)Earlier this year, he was planning a host of events with other puppeteers from around the province, when he realized their calendar had somehow forgotten Halifax completely. Robins says the “ad-hoc” group, known as the Atlantic Festival of Puppetry Arts, had “[committed] to making October puppet month” before adding a stand-alone event in the city. They corrected the oversight by booking the two-day-long engagement at the Bus Stop. “I had no idea what the response would be for people to perform in the festival,” Robins says. “But I have never gotten more traction on a social media post in the five years of [operating his theatre company’s Instagram] than the call for proposals for this festival, which blew my mind.” Performer spots at OBJECTive filled up almost immediately. Robins thinks that puppetry may be having an upswing because it’s so tangible and physical. It acts as a bit of a counterweight to our increasingly digital, mediated world, he says.“We are staring down the barrel of AI and animation, and we have all of these screens that are competing for our attention. I think we all have this deep, innate desire not just to gather and connect in the way that all theater does, but to see practical magic in front of us. And I think puppetry is the truest form of that: to see objects and to believe that they’re alive.” While Mermaid Theatre’s longstanding presence in the province means puppetry isn’t a new medium in Nova Scotia, Robins notes that, for the first time in a decade, there was a crop of new puppet-based plays at this year’s Halifax Fringe Festival. Further proof, he says, that puppetry is on the rise.Charlie MacLean and Emma Chapman-Lin are multidisciplinary artists who do puppetry under the moniker A Flat of Thirty Eggs Puppet Company. They were part of this year’s puppetry wave at the Fringe and are also taking part in OBJECTive with an interactive play called Puppet Game.“I’ve always been very interested in creating characters as a part of my art,” MacLean says. “And puppets are kind of the final form: You can create a character using your art skills, and then actually tell a story with it, using performance. It just felt like the perfect way to combine those two things.” Chapman-Lin adds: “When you have a puppet in your hands, you can bring it to life really immediately. And there’s something very beautiful about that.” “What’s going on with puppets right now? Why are puppets so good? I don’t know. It’s real. I’ve noticed it,” MacLean says while Chapman-Lin laughs and murmurs agreement. “I don’t think it’s just in the city, too. There seems to be some sort of, like, puppet renaissance happening that I’ve seen people online talking about,” MacLean adds. The pair say puppetry is the perfect medium for the moment because it’s more challenging and immediate than the easy, passive entertainment found on our phones.For Robins, the need for a festival dedicated to puppetry in Halifax is only the beginning. “It’s very niche, and it’s maybe a small community compared to, you know, musical theatre artists or visual artists,” he says. “But having a chance — even for two days — for the Bus Stop to become the hub for puppeteers and puppet makers and object artists, I think it’s just really cool.”As MacLean sees it, the festival will provide a platform for a lot of people who are interested in the art of puppets to come together and connect with each other. “And the more puppet people connect with each other, the more confident and brazen they become,” he says. “Giving confidence and a sense of community to people who are involved in puppetry in the city will do great and terrible things for the puppet scene in general.”OBJECTive Puppet Festival runs Oct. 29 and 30 at The Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen St.) in Halifax. ABOUT THE AUTHOROriginally from rural New Brunswick but based in Halifax for almost a decade, Morgan Mullin is a freelance journalist with bylines in Chatelaine and The Globe and Mail. A Polaris Prize Juror, she covers music, arts and culture on the east coast—primarily at local news site The Coast, where she is Arts Editor. She can be found on Twitter at @WellFedWanderer.
‘There seems to be some sort of, like, puppet renaissance happening.’
