INTERVIEW: New puppet show envisions one’s search for self
Photo: CUMULO was created by Emily Batsford. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
CUMULO is a world-premiere puppetry play by Emily Batsford and Concrete Temple Theatre. Performances of the unique piece continue through May 3 at MITU580 in New York City.
In the show, the character of Plum falls through the sky, passing clouds and creatures, brought to life by a unique set of cotton candy and fans, according to press notes.
Batsford not only created the show; they are also a puppeteer in the play, alongside Justin Otaki Perkins, Takemi Kitamura, Camille Cooper and Gaby FeBland. Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Batsford to learn more about the show. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
Could you describe the skydiving experience that inspired this show?
During the pandemic, I was actually having an intensely manic experience. I was teaching 16 classes a week on Zoom, which amounts to, oh, I don’t know, 35 hours a week dedicated to dancing and singing and teaching children puppetry through a screen, which is its own version of madness. And then, in my own household, I was in a relationship that was crumbling for many pretty serious reasons, including my own inquiry into gender identity and sexuality. The only space I really had to myself was up on the roof of my building — I would literally pack a backpack, and climb up a ladder and just be up there on the roof with the sky for hours. Sometimes listening to music, sometimes reading, but a lot of that time was just spent thinking about what I wanted from my life. So, the sky really carried this intense significance for me. I mean it always has, but during the pandemic it felt like my place.
So, that year in September, as a birthday gift to myself, I booked a tandem skydive through Long Island Skydiving Center. I really was not at all nervous, even going up in the plane. And my tandem instructor was amazing — so positive and calm. He said his jump with me was his seventh of the day, which is hard to even imagine. But, yeah, we got up in the air, and we got to the edge of the open plane door. And he says, “Here it comes,” and then we just fell out into the sky.
It was so much scarier, disorienting, more violent than I could have imagined. The air was so loud and so cold, and the speed of the wind made it so I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t tell which way was up. The first minute or so, I was so dysregulated in my body that I had absolutely no awareness of the landscape around me or below me. My instructor kept encouraging me to relax, to look around, to breathe, and thank goodness he did because it did help me finally take stock of how unbelievably beautiful everything looked from the sky. By the time the parachute deployed, I was fully present again, and then the remainder of the descent felt comparatively peaceful. But yeah, the sensory experience was so profound. I think about it all the time, and it made me imagine a world where that feeling of complete overwhelm is the baseline and how, actually, we do live that experience in many ways. We are, metaphorically, skydiving a little bit all the time.
How long have you been working on this show?
I first started experimenting with materials and a household oscillating fan in the summer of 2024 with Amanda Card, out in my backyard. From there, CUMULO has its first work-in-progress showing, a 15-minute excerpt, as part of Concrete BOOM! Volume 3 in November 2024 at Dixon Place. We had another WIP at the wild project Special Effects Festival in January 2025, and that was, I thought, the end of the life of that piece for a while.
But then, in February 2025, I received the Culture Lab LLC Emergence Artist Residency, an eight-month space grant that culminates in a long weekend of workshop performances. And so, we developed a first draft of the full piece in those eight months and used the workshop run to gather feedback from our audience before attempting a full run of the show.
In 2026, CUMULO has received an incredible amount of support ahead of our run at MITU580: We’ve received a NYSCA Support for Artists Grant; a Jim Henson Foundation Production Grant; a development residency through PATCH, which is a collaboration between The Jim Henson Foundation and Green Feather Foundation; and MITU580, our incredible venue partners, have supported us through their Artists-at-Home program. All of these contributions have truly made all the difference in CUMULO’S development, and I feel really grateful for each curator and foundation that said yes to what we’re creating. I can’t wait to share it with wider audiences this month.
How is a cotton-candy aesthetic worked into the production?
When devising the show, we thought a lot about the mechanics and aesthetics of traps, specifically how the bait of a trap is a shiny, sweet, warm treat of some kind, with a caveat waiting just on the other side of commitment. When designing the sentient clouds in CUMULO, we wanted them to feel like traps in that same way: candy-coated and lovely on the outside, a child’s imagining of the sky, with something rotten and terrifying at the core. Cotton candy is such a fluffy and sugary depiction of cloud matter. But then, when it melts, it’s horrid and drippy and wet. Add to that the unnatural coloring, the affiliation with circus, the similarity to spider web, it was impossible not to use it as our main source of inspiration for the texture of the environment.
How would you describe the character of Plum?
Plum is curious, open, bold, at times brazen. They are by turns violent and sweet. They are earnest, stubborn and quick to engage. More than anything else, they are resilient.
When did you first discover puppetry as an art form?
When I was growing up, many of my favorite movies had puppets — my entire family loved The Dark Crystal, so much so that my family dog was named Fizgig. The Muppet Movie was on repeat all the time. And my parents were really good about taking us to theater growing up, including puppet shows. I remember going to a Mummenschanz performance with my dad and having my elementary-aged mind blown by what was happening on stage.
Despite all of this early exposure, I didn’t really get to practice puppetry as a craft until 2018? My dear friend Sam Jay Gold was leading a puppet residency through CO_LAB Theater Group, an incredible organization that I’ve been teaching with since 2013. He invited me to volunteer in the classroom, to learn more about the art form. I was immediately hooked, and he recommended me for a puppetry workshop that was happening at New Vic Labworks.
I just remember being in the rehearsal room on that first day of the workshop and thinking — oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. It was like traveling to a country where everyone spoke a language I didn’t realize I was fluent in until I arrived there.
What do you hope is the ultimate takeaway from seeing this show?
CUMULO explores the cost of autonomy. I do hope that audiences find resonance in Plum’s search for self, and that they are reminded of moments from their own lives, when self-advocacy came at a price. I’d love to quote Lindy West, in an excerpt from Adult Braces: “If you freeze a moment in time, it’s impossible to tell whether you’re falling or flying. A place that was a triumph on your way up looks like a failure on your way down. The selfsame moment — both progress and regress, depending on perspective. Maybe the only metric we can trust, the only thing that really matters, is how we feel in the now. We all smash into the ground in the end.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
CUMULO, created by Emily Batsford, continues through May 3 at MITU580 in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
