TALENT, Ore.- Puppeteers for Fears, an artistic nonprofit based in Talent, receives a $73 thousand grant from the Oregon Community Foundation (OCF), as a part of its 2024 Creative Heights awards.
“It’s either you don’t really care that much about it or it’s the thing you’ve been waiting for your entire life and you’re like ‘Oh my god, finally. This is it’,” Puppeteers for Fears Artistic Director Josh Gross said.
Puppeteers for Fears started in Talent back in 2015.
Gross says there wasn’t a lot of room in the artistic community, with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and other theaters dominating Southern Oregon.
“Growing up in Ashland, you’re surrounded by theater, really high-class theater, but you’re also sort of given the impression that all of the good stuff has already been written. Plays written by dead people, starring actors from New York for audiences that drove in from California,” Gross explained.
He knew they had to do something different from what anyone else had ever done and that there was work to be done in the realm of music.
So, when a friend reached out to him about a Halloween puppet show, the idea sparked.
“It was intended to be a one night only show, but when we showed up to the venue, there was, like, a line out the door and around the block. People were sitting six deep on the floor and when they laughed, it was so loud the room shook,” Gross said.
Nearly a decade later, the group has toured the country with its comedic and horrific musical show, performing at sold out shows.
Oregon Community Foundation Senior Program Officer Jerry Tischleder says it wasn’t hard to see the group’s potential.
“This group has been going at it for ten years, it made 11 original shows. They definitely demonstrated a really high quality of artistic caliber,” Tischleder said.
With this funding from OCF, Gross says they’re going to bring Robopocalypse: The Musical, which centers on artificial intelligence, all over Oregon.
“We’re trying to do this show that’s very ambitious. We want to do this, sort of like, cyberpunk thing but, you know, that means we want to do all this stuff with lighting and lasers, and I have this, like, crazy plan to do holograms on stage that no one else thinks is going to work, but I know we can do it,” Gross said.
While the funding is going to improve the quality of the performance, it’s also allowing the group to bring the art to more rural locations.
“It has been hard because those performances don’t make as much money because it’s just not as many people, but one of the things that this grant will allow us to do is to be able to perform in those places without having to worry as much about if it makes enough money to justify going there,” Gross said.
Gross says being selected for this grant money was an honor that blew their minds.
“They actually called us up and they said, ‘We don’t think you asked for enough money, we’re going to give you more’,” Gross said.
“We do a lot of grant-making, but this one felt really special and the folks that were selecting a lot of the awards- it just seemed like it really sparked a lot of joy with them,” Tischleder said.
Gross says the current time frame they have for the show opening is scheduled for spring or summer of next year.
“It’s being taken seriously on the level we want it to be taken seriously, not as just, like, a little goof-around or a little thing, but something that’s actually worth investing in because it’s a cornerstone and a major contributor to local arts and culture,” Gross said.
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