The Puppet Farm Mission

To enliven and enrich communities by engaging people in collaborative and eco-concious art-making.

Puppet Farm Arts was born out of a desire to engage communities in the magnificent act of creating theatrical spectacle and fantasy in the public-square. From its inception, the Puppet Farm has been dedicated to the multi-disciplinary theatrical arts as a vehicle for social change and community enrichment. We teach the endangered art of artistic improvisation, often integrating the repurposing of waste-stream materials into imaginative inventions for “public-square community theater” and culminating in collective storytelling and spontaneous acts of pure performance-art.

Puppet Farm Arts harbors a fierce dedication to the enrichment of children's lives and the revitalization of educational settings into places of joyful creation and boundless imagination. For over 15 years Puppet Farm Arts has facilitated art-making workshops and performances across the country—working with a vast array of populations in a variety of settings and contexts—helping people to plumb their own unique identities and define the meanings of their place and purpose in their community and their world.

The existence of the Puppet Farm, since its founding, has been predicated on the belief that all people have artistic ability and the capacity for art-making and creative action, given space, resources and guidance. But more than this—the Puppet Farm has been driven by the belief that hands-on, visual, kinesthetic creative-arts experiences are essential to the full and healthy development of individuals, as well as to the fostering of a well-balanced and enlightened society.

Pacifist-to-the-core, Puppet Farm Arts has always been dedicated to the promotion of peace and justice through its work.

Biography of Christopher Lutter:

Christopher Lutter is a designer, inventor, theater-maker and community educator whose work revolves around the design, construction and performance of puppets, masks, props, costumes, unique theatrical inventions, kinetic-sets and sculptural installations. He produces his art predominately from waste-stream materials, exploring the unique potentials inherent in the material.

For two decades Chris has been working to inspire and facilitate original thinking in the realms of theatrical, educational and public-art design. A deep and abiding emphasis is placed upon eco-consciousness, resourcefulness, integration and improvisation.

As a community educator and artist-in-residence, Chris engages community members in re-purposing various “waste materials” into performable art-works, while deepening their connections to the Earth and to one another.

Chris received a 2006 Bush Artist Fellowship, a 2008 Public Art Saint Paul Sustainable Practices Fellowship and a 2012 McKnight Theater Artist Fellowship. He is on the Minnesota State Arts Board and COMPAS/Young Audiences of Minnesota teaching-artists rosters.

Chris also manages and directs Puppet Farm Arts, a humble nonprofit community-arts organization, founded back when he used to squat in a barn with his collection of trash and puppets, in Wisconsin. The mission of the Puppet Farm is to improve the health of human communities and the Earth by teaching people the process of transforming waste materials into imaginative art.

Recently, Chris has collaborated with the following theaters and organizations: Tiger-Lion Arts; MN Jewish Theater; MN Boy Choir; Circus Juventus; The Guthrie Theater; John Ferguson Theater (now Theater Forever), Southern Theater, Open-Eye Figure Theater, Bedlam Theater, Home Base Theater, Theater NoviMost, In the Heart of the Beast Theater, VSA Arts, Alan Berk and Co., Backbone Campaign (Seattle WA), the WormFarm Institute, James Sewell Ballet, and the Puffin Foundation (Columbus OH).

Chris regularly performs his famous “Big Animal” puppets in the public square—in parks, schools, parades—at libraries, fairs, and anywhere else where the intervention of marvelously-large wild-animal puppets might be desired!

Chris is also a bona-fide, licensed, certified, accredited, registered, and bonded puppet doctor.

Contact Christopher Lutter: puppetfarm@yahoo.com· 612-695-6871