Courtesy Damon Griffith
D amon Griffith may be known to some as a member of freak-folk act, Cloacas, and to others as so-called “mouth DJ,” Heavy Breather. But he’s also the only authentic puppet engineer in town, and that’s as cool as it gets. For his most recent project, Damon and his wife Sabrina helped construct and operate custom puppets for The Love That Would Not Die, a locally produced short film/pilot episode for a puppet-led zombie musical.
Why puppets?
I guess for me it comes down to the art of the fool, or how it's a way for people to pick something up and use it to reflect. You can put a puppet out, and people will want to play with it, and then there's this part of them that is allowed to come out through that. It's almost insidious, like, 'Oh, it isn't me doing this thing!' People are so inhibited, I think, and it's a way for them to let some of that out. And it isn't all we do ... we make what you could call old-world toys, and that's kind of unique. We do hobby horses, handmade stuff. Puppets aren't that big of a thing in America. Usually they're more, like, muppet-y, and there's a perception that they're kind of just for kids, and they're not. It's an old-world art form, and I know there are some other businesses that do handmade toys, but as far as I know there's not places making puppets on the same scale.
What was your involvement like with The Love That Would Not Die?
Originally they had come to us with these fully made puppets that they wanted me to make talk, but it doesn't really work that way. I have to be able to design and engineer the puppet from the start to get it to work a certain way, so while they painted and costumed the puppets—and they did just an amazing job—I engineered them. I'm honestly much more of an engineer than a sculptor, that's more what Sabrina does: the sculpting and designing of the look. And anyway, I really hate to mess up a puppet, so I had to start from the beginning. And then we operated some of them for the filming, and they work kind of like ventriloquist dummies, but when we started the filming I had to engineer some things on the fly to make it work right. Like, that day when we started filming, I was looking around for duct tape to jury-rig this thing for my arm that would hold the weight of the puppet and still allow me to let it talk.
Tell us a little bit about your studio.
Well, we used to be called Puppet Meat Market when we were first starting, but now it's Flying Wall Studio (flyingwall.org). We kept getting compared to Meat Puppets then, and also if you're, like, looking for a business that makes puppets ... maybe that wasn't the best name. And Sabrina and me, we both have day jobs; we work at SITE Santa Fe, and some people know us as those people from Cloacas, but we're hoping to be a little more focused on Flying Wall when we can. We just need to make our Etsy shop. These puppets are all one-of-a-kind—we tried to reproduce one once, and it just looked wrong; guilty—they're all made from the same materials, and we build things on commission. Really, if we could just do this and play our music, that'd be ideal.
