How Jani Lauzon got drafted into the big leagues of professional puppetry
In a Q interview, the award-winning Canadian artist recalls her audition for Fraggle Rock
Jani Lauzon is basically the Swiss Army knife of Canadian artists. She's the person you call if you need someone to play in your band, act in your show, direct your play, or hold a puppet.
When it comes to professional puppetry, Lauzon's credits include Fraggle Rock, The Muppet Show, The Big Comfy Couch and Mr. Dressup.
"Puppets are fantastic," she tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "My mom was a doll maker … and she would manipulate the dolls. Later on in life, I went, 'Oh, that was sort of the beginning of my understanding of how dolls could come to life.' She talked about the fact that each doll had a spirit. I don't know what that meant for her, but I ran with that…. I help the spirit of the puppet come to life."
After leaving high school, Lauzon studied mime, circus and puppetry at South Paris's Celebration Barn Theater in Maine. She was living in Vancouver when she heard about auditions for Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock.
"My friend Rob Mills, who was one of the producers of The Big Comfy Couch, phoned and said, 'You should come back to Toronto and audition for Jim Henson because Fraggle Rock is coming here,'" she recalls. "So I packed up my stuff, came back and had a job within a week. It was great."
At the audition, Lauzon was supplied with a puppet from Jim Henson's Creature Shop.
"The first audition was a group audition, and it was kind of like a lesson or a workshop," she says. "And this is Henson-style puppetry [with] … rod and mouth puppets, so the mouths move and then you have to learn how to move the rods, which the hands are attached to….
"A lot of the Canadian puppeteers started out as, what we call, right-hand puppeteers. So the only thing you do is move the right hand. If your puppeteer is right-handed, they will move the left hand and you move the right hand. So I started out doing that — it's like bringing folks coffee when you get a job."
I help the spirit of the puppet come to life.- Jani Lauzon
During her time on Fraggle Rock, Lauzon says she never had a named character or a lead character, but that came later with other opportunities. She still remembers something Henson told her and the other puppeteers, which is reminiscent of what her mother had said about dolls.
"One day he came in and he sort of gave us this pep talk about how we needed to bring our whole being and our whole selves to the work," she says. "What we were doing was creating these stories that would help children mainly, but also the world — like they could feel our energy. He would talk about the fact that they could feel our energy."
If you're in Toronto, you can catch Lauzon's new show, Prophecy Fog, which runs now until Dec. 10 at the Coal Mine Theatre.
The full interview with Jani Lauzon is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. She also talks about turning to art as a way to cope with a turbulent childhood, why thinking like an artist has always been the key to her success, and her new play. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Jani Lauzon produced by Vanessa Greco.
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