Seattle artist creates rock-band hand puppets for Muppet exhibit at EMP

Walk into the Fremont studio of puppetmaker Annett Mateo and you'll find yourself in a marionette menagerie.

There's a swan and an elephant from Camille Saint-Saën's "Carnival of the Animals" and a tortoise and hare from "Aesop's Fables" — both productions Mateo put together for the King County and Seattle library systems.

Posters on the wall advertise "Frankenocchio" and "Drunk Puppet Nite," evenings of alternative-puppet mischief produced by Seattle's Monkey Wrench Puppet Lab, of which Mateo was a founding member.

Mateo's new puppet project, however, is more mainstream: a hand-puppet rock band modeled on Jim Henson's Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem from "The Muppet Show." They're part of an interactive exhibit that's an add-on to "Jim Henson's Fantastic World," a traveling retrospective of the puppeteer/filmmaker's career opening at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame on Saturday.

The local angle was dreamed up by Sam Vance, director of public programming at EMP/SFM, and Margie Maynard, director of education. The idea, Vance says, was to place Northwest rock icons in a Muppet universe.

Maynard came up with the band-and-venue name: Mudgarden Experience at the Rainbow Connection.

The band lineup consists of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Carrie Akre and "Animal Moon," as everyone's calling him. He's a hybrid of Keith Moon, local drummer Michael Musburger and "Animal" — the Moon-inspired drummer in Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.

At the Rainbow Connection, the public will be able to operate the puppets on a stage arranged to give them the experience of creating a Muppet TV show.

There will be a monitor inside the puppet stage to let the puppeteers see how their action looks on screen. There's also a small Sesame Street-like stoop ("Sesame Street by way of Capitol Hill," Vance quips) where audiences can watch both the live action and its "televised" version.

Mateo is thrilled to be involved with the project.

"I'm a huge Henson fan. You can't be involved in puppets," she says, "and not be influenced by Henson — either for or against."

She concedes that some puppeteers have an allergy to "to the cuteness and silliness of Henson." But she's not one of them.

Mateo, who is lead properties artisan and resident puppet master at Seattle Children's Theatre, can certainly take a sinister turn when a show requires it. For SCT's recent production of "Pharaoh Serket and the Lost Stone of Fire," she had to make a cobra to be placed in the pharaoh's bed to kill him: "Not exactly a cute and cuddly puppet."

With Mudgarden Experience, Mateo is in more playful territory.

Still, there are challenges. "I've had to really scrutinize the aesthetic of the Muppets," she says. "They're a type: It's a crazy drummer. It's a Swedish chef. It's a newscaster. They don't make puppets that look like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain. So trying to deconstruct their aesthetic and put it into another character has been really fascinating. ... Their designs are so simple — but they're so effective."

The starting point in building a Muppet is to get hold of some Muppet Fleece.

"It's a nylon-Antron fleece," Mateo explains, "just perfect for doing this stuff. It only comes in white. You have to dye it to whatever colors you like. It's not like the polyester fleece you make sportswear out of — it's a lot tougher and a lot more resilient."

It needs to be tough because of all the handling the puppets get. At SCT, Mateo estimates, they average 110 shows per theatrical run. "So whatever we build to go onstage has got to be able to withstand 110 repetitions of whatever it's doing."

Knowing that the Henson show will run for three months, Mateo is making her rock puppets as sturdy as possible. As another precaution, she's making two identical sets of puppets — "so that if something happens [to one] we can replace it right away and then I can take it and fix it."

There are also safety concerns. Muppets usually have rods in them. But rods can be a hazard to kids. So Animal Moon's and Carrie Akre's arms are "basically springs."

It's this "melding of artistic and technical" that fascinates Mateo. When she was in grade school, she worked in her school library and discovered a book on puppetry — which she signed out for an entire year. "I was just totally smitten with the whole thing: the building of the puppets, and building little puppet stages."

Her first encounter with Henson's work probably came when she was in her teens in Minnesota, baby-sitting kids who watched "Sesame Street."

"Even way back then, I was like, 'Oh, man, I wanna go do that.' "

At the time, Henson's studios were in London, which felt impossibly far away. She moved to Seattle when in her 20s. But it wasn't until she was in her 30s that she took the leap "off the cliff" into professional puppetmaking. (Her last pre-puppet job was doing Y2K computer coding for Seafirst Bank.)

Her connection with EMP/SFM and the Henson exhibit came through the saddest of circumstances. Seattle Children's Theatre's in-house puppet master Douglas Paasch, whom Mateo worked with closely, died suddenly last November.

EMP/SFM had been in talks with Paasch just two days before his death — and Mateo would have worked with him on the project. With him gone, it fell into her hands entirely, through the recommendation of SCT production manager Michael Wellborn.

The collaboration, by all accounts, has been a happy one. And the puppets are a delight: especially Animal Moon, with his carnival-striped jacket and purple-feather hair (sewn on, not glued — "because gluing feathers is just a mess").

As for Mateo's worries over the kind of wear and tear her puppets will endure, she has a point. Once I had Animal Moon and his wildly waggling drumsticks on my hand, my first instinct was to have him thrash his fellow musicians as though they were timpani.

Score: Juvenile instinct, one. Adult restraint, zero.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com