Company History

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop is a puppet theatre company, founded on a ranch in
southern Alberta in 1999. Our first year of operation was an experience of intense
collaborative isolation – we lived together, cooked together, and worked together. We
collected eggs, fed the pigs, and premiered our first show to a bunkhouse full of cowboys
and Hutterites. (We’re now located next to the trainyards in downtown Calgary, having
exhausted the joys of living in a coal-heated shack.)
We’re dedicated to making professional puppet theatre, for both children and adults,
that blurs that distinction. We launch forth to explore the outer edges of the puppet
medium, and to create original, unique, and exuberant art. An Old Trout show strives for
delightful allegory, joyful tragedy, and purity of spirit.
We’ve toured our productions to Halifax, Edmonton, Ottawa, St. John’s, Montreal
and Toronto, but in addition to creating our own puppet theatre, we also collaborate widely
in a variety of media.
With Dandi Productions, we have done several children’s productions for
orchestras: Roald Dahl's Red Riding Hood, Jack & the Beanstalk, Snow White, now touring
North America; and a new work commissioned by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra
entitled The Twins and the Monster. Latest in this long-standing partnership is The Mysterious
Maestro, which was most recently seen at the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.
Old Trouts have served as puppet masters on Disney's Honey I Shrunk the Kids,
Nickelodeon’s Littleburg with Whoopi Goldberg and
YTV's Nanalan’. They’ve toured California with The
Death of Benvenuto Cellini, a puppet operetta in
collaboration with the Green Fools, and traveled the
world with a Punch and Judy show in a suitcase.
Last fall we made our first short film with Dev
Singh for Bravo, using puppets and stop-motion
animation. It’s the inauguration of an Old Trout film
department, which is planning a new piece for
production in 2003/2004 entitled Rasputin.
We don’t just do puppets; we also do sculpture
in a puppet-ish way. For instance, we built a forty foot
tall puppet machine/wind-powered clock
commissioned by Big Rock Brewery, built out of
ancient combine harvesters and train whistles dragged
out of junk graveyards across Alberta.
We’ve written magazine articles on puppetry, and published two books, The Tooth
Fairy and The Maestro, released by Bayeux Arts/Raincoast. Two more are due out in the
fall of 2003.
We’re currently hard at work on our next production, Lunch, due to premiere as a
coproduction with the High Performance Rodeo in 2004.
“…the puppeteers are masters at conveying emotion with a mere arm gesture or head tilt…”
The Globe & Mail
www.theoldtrouts.org – mail@theoldtrouts.org – 403 508 4929
 presents:

THE LAST SUPPER OF ANTONIN

CARÊME
A culinary theology
In this, their latest production, the Old Trouts creep
trembling into the Great Kitchen of Heaven, to investigate
its secrets and reveal therein the fundamental truths of
existence. They plunge headlong into the stock pot and
sing hallelujahs to the feast before us, illuminating no less
than the very breath of the world, the spiritus mundi, the eternal and constant miracle of
creation.
The Old Trouts summon the ghost of Antonin Carême, Le Cuisinier des rois et le Roi des
cuisiniers, grandfather of classical French cuisine. Left alone as a child at the gates of
revolutionary Paris, he found apprenticeship at the humble restaurant of an un-named
Chef who taught him the mysteries of transcendental cuisine. Who was the un-named
chef? And what did he teach the grubby urchin who became the greatest cook in the
world?
This is no ordinary puppet-show about cooking and the French Revolution. It’s the first
congregation of the Church of the Un-named Chef.

“Pure joy. Great, great theatre.”

Alvina Ruprecht, CBC Radio
“Mind-blowing originality… [The Trouts] are boldly reshaping puppet theatre into
sophisticated adult entertainment.”
Fast-Forward
“A wonderfully innovative delight.”
The Globe & Mail

Co-presented by the High Performance Rodeo

 BEOWULF
a Viking puppet opera

“A few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch….”

The thousand-year old poem, strangely beautiful, fantastical and surreal, tells of
the monster Grendel who plagues the ancient king Hrothgar, and the feral
Beowulf who arrives to save the world from marauding evil. The Old Trouts
plunge into the depths of our old souls, digging in the muck of this earliest of
humankind’s nightmares, and what’s more, do it with the absurdity and
theatrical frenzy for which they are known: it’s an operatic extravaganza, replete
with shaggy beasts and prancing Vikings and girls in horned helmets singing.

Beowulf premiered in February 2002, presented by One Yellow Rabbit in

Calgary’s Big Secret Theatre at the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts; it
won a Betty Mitchell Award for outstanding sound design by Peter Moller

“astonishing… Beowulf proves Old Trouts convey unlimited range.”

FFWD Calgary

www.theoldtrouts.org – mail@theoldtrouts.org – 403 508 4929

 THE UNLIKELY BIRTH OF ISTVAN
an oddly sexy puppet skirmish
After six months of monkish isolation on a ranch in southern Alberta, the Old
Trouts managed to distill the fundamental truths of the cosmos into what they
call The Unlikely Birth of Istvan. It’s an underground puppet production for
adults, a grand unifying theory explaining birth, death, and everything in
between – a fantastical visual poem about the essence of being human, from
the perspective of puppets. It is an absurdist creation myth, equal parts Beckett
and Sesame Street.

The play begins with a nightmare and ends with a miracle, careening through
the profane, the divine, the magical, the surreal, and the sensual. On one level,
it is the simple story of a conflict between a painter and a cook over a pig. On
another, it’s about the war waged between Mind and Matter, the soul and the
rumbling belly. It tackles, with childlike wonderment,
the grand mystery of the
formation of a human being.

With rollicking music and

frolicking puppets, a
colourful world unfolds in
which This and That battle
for supremacy in the womb.
The eternal conflict builds in
desperation, as each strives for their own satiation. Finally, the world implodes
into the metaphysical impossibility that is Istvan.

Istvan was presented by One Yellow Rabbit as part of the High Performance
Rodeo 2000, and because it had such an enthusiastic reception, they presented
it again as part of their 2000-01 season. It was one of the top ten selling shows
in their history, and was invited to showcase at CINARS in Montreal. It has
played in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Ottawa’s Magnetic North festival and
Toronto’s SixStages.

“shoots straight to the most ancient part of us, where we feel love and loss wordlessly…”
FFWD Calgary

www.theoldtrouts.org – mail@theoldtrouts.org – 403 508 4929

 THE TOOTH FAIRY
a fable of lost innocence

The Tooth Fairy treads the strange and beautiful line between adult and child:
an odyssey from innocence to experience, a children’s book adapted for adults,
an avant-garde puppet show adapted for children.

What horrors accompany the loss of baby teeth, symbols of our innocence?
Why, in the name of all that’s good, would we trade them for money, the
source of all that’s evil?

The Tooth Fairy is a fantastical leap into those dark and troubling waters, our
childhoods – what we have lost, what we have gained, and, most disturbing of
all, what the Tooth Fairy does with all those teeth.

The Old Trouts do not shirk from extravaganza. The Tooth Fairy is an
unprecedented colossus of the puppet stage. Monsters! Cosmic curses! Sea-
battles! Foggy nights haunted by lurking defilers! The epic saga of every soul’s
horrifying leap into adulthood enacted with puppets of edifying ridiculosity!

The Tooth Fairy premiered at the High Performance Rodeo in 2001, and has
since played in Edmonton, Halifax and Ottawa.

It’s also a book, published by Bayeux Arts/Raincoast, which is part of a series

entitled Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children.
“one of the best, most surreal works of imagination I’ve seen in ages.”
See Magazine, Edmonton

www.theoldtrouts.org – mail@theoldtrouts.org – 403 508 4929

 WHAT THE PRESS HAS SAID:
“A wonderfully innovative delight.”
The Globe & Mail
“One of the wildest, wackiest most inventive puppet shows you're ever likely to see.”
The Toronto Star
“Indelible visuals… weird and wonderful… by turns comic, macabre, and sublimely surreal”
The Globe & Mail
“If Old Trout keeps producing work like this, it will surely become one of the most vibrant
and vital puppet companies in the world.”
The Calgary Sun
“A truly original theatre experience… universal and visceral.”
Fast-Forward
“Someday very soon there will be a style of puppetry that will come to be known as ‘Old
Trout-like’ – it’s just too good not to be imitated.”
Fast-Forward
“Alberta’s own miraculous Old Trout Puppet Workshop.”
The Calgary Herald
“…deeply felt and intelligent… one of the best [theatre companies in Calgary].”
Calgary Magazine
“Utterly captivating.”
The Ottawa Citizen
‘Marvelous… dazzling… it is as if we have stumbled on a group of talented overgrown
children.”
Fast-Forward

www.theoldtrouts.org – mail@theoldtrouts.org – 403 508 4929