By Kaija Swisher
The black gloves move swiftly, and Markie Scholz is no longer alone on stage. She shares the spotlight with dragons, talking animals, trolls, and witches, to name just a few of the cast of characters that make up Dragons Are Too Seldom Puppet Theatre. Entertaining audiences of all ages with stories of good thwarting evil, Markie Scholz reminds people that dragons might be too seldom, but magic is never rare within her puppetry.
Watching Markie create whole worlds with puppetry, her passion for her art is almost palpable. “I think the key is to remember that you are creating a vehicle to provide entertainment, and unless you are providing entertainment, you are failing,” says Markie. “I am not in the top million of the greatest puppeteers around, but I do puppetry well, and I am a storyteller, and I do that extremely well. I combine the two in a way that I think not many people do. I try to combine puppetry as entertainment with storytelling as entertainment—and to make the two mesh so well that you don’t know where one starts and one stops.”
(Read the rest of this story in FACES Fall ‘09)
