You’ve seen them around: Mega Puppets strolling down the street, sometimes in parades; a giant Dolly Parton looming on the skyline. Where did they come from? Who is behind it? Is it a dream? You are not hallucinating. Those oversized representations of all things imaginable are the product of Cattywampus Puppet Council. Cattywampus Puppet Council is a product of the very active creative spirit of Rachel Milford, Executive Artistic Director, and founder of the group. I met with Rachel to learn more about her background and this crazy idea walking around on the streets of Knoxville.
Rachel was “born and raised in Knoxville.” Her parents met at UT but grew up mostly in Oak Ridge where her grandparents had worked at the plant. Her mother studied opera and sometimes sings with the Knoxville Opera. Her parents ran Crib and Carriage, a baby store, for about forty years. She graduated from Farragut High School in 2004 which is where she first immersed herself in theater and visual arts. Vicky Wells was particularly influential to her as head of the theater department.
“I was in every play, musical theater, improv team, a total theater nerd.” She had danced for years but began having joint issues in middle and high school and she had to stop, which drove her passion for theater. “I was always a natural performer.” She said the theater faculty and students formed a good sub-community at the school which helped her get through. In her senior year she turned more to visual arts and said that she, as would many artists working in Knoxville, gives a lot of credit to Windy Love, a teacher there. She taught Rachel ceramics as she also explored other mediums.
After high school she took a year off to travel to Israel and Palestine, an experience that helped shape her views on activism which were emerging at that time. She didn’t necessarily see herself returning to the south. After the year away, she attended Knox College in Illinois, which she says was “half the size of Farragut,” graduating in three years with a degree in Environmental Studies and Sociology.
She spent time in New Orleans during college gutting houses after Katrina. It added layers to her understanding of poverty and racism. She also became active in her community, working in a local diner, starting a community garden, and getting the first EBT machine for the local farmers’ market to be able to accept food stamps. She convinced a small tuxedo shop in town to allow her to plug a 100-foot cord into their outlet to give power to the machine, saying that she was developing her powers of persuasion, even then.
She continued to work on her art through college and after but felt a tension between art and social justice work. After graduation she signed up with Americorps and moved to Olympia, Washington. She worked with GRUB (Garden Raised Urban Bounty) working with high school students teaching them to garden. She also encountered large puppets for the first time through the Procession of the Species Parade, an annual event in Olympia. It’s a community parade on foot with community members invited to make their own puppet of any species and join the parade. She was a dragon fly in her first parade. Most importantly she saw the potential for art to bring people together to play and create.
While in Olympia for a year-and-half she read Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Prodigal Summer, and began to consider returning to the south. Around the end of 2009 she took her new ideas back to the south, landing first in North Carolina, south of Greensboro. While there she worked with an herbalist and began learning to make those giant puppets she couldn’t shake from her mind. She found Bread and Puppet in Vermont, which blends large puppets and activism. She also found a area group, Paper Hand Puppet Intervention and began work with them as an intern and then worked with them. Her current work is based on what she learned there.
Unfortunately, she became ill in what was later identified as related to mold poisoning from the house where she lived, but leaving the mold didn’t quickly resolve her issues. She returned to Knoxville in 2011 to live with her parents and work on her health. She thought she’d be here for a month, but the illness persisted as she pursued herbal remedies. It took a year for her to begin to emerge, though the struggles continue.
She taught workshops on herbal medicine and meeting people in the community. She started Reclaiming Your Roots, selling herbs and related items at the Market Square Farmers’ Market. “I hadn’t left puppets behind, I just had to sit them aside.” She worked for about a year with Jack and Lisa at Dragonfly Aerial Arts and One World Circus.
As she settled into the city again, she knew she wanted to bring the puppets she had enjoyed other places to her hometown. She missed the joy she’d experienced through community-based art. She started making art with Shelagh Leutwiler, making grandma and grandpa heads which the two wore around downtown on First Fridays in late 2014, engaging people as they went. The seeds of Cattywampus had been planted. “People were delighted. It was magical.”
They were invited to put a thirty-minute show together for Dogwood Arts’ Children’s Stage. They created more puppets, while also developing a more adult show for Pilot Light. More invitations followed, along with more puppets, and invitations to attend events. They adopted their name (as a tip of the hat to whimsy and to our region) and incorporated as a non-profit in 2016. In spring 2017 they got a grant from Burning Man, and they produced their first parade at Open Streets that year, partnering with Centro Hispano, Birdhouse, Carpetbag Theater, and the Vestal Boys and Girls Club.
As part of the leadup to that parade they began developing curriculum which they now use. The group works with children for eight-to-ten weeks, introducing a theme for a parade and helping the children develop ideas for a puppet they will build and bring to the parade. That first parade included about two-hundred people and “it grew from there.”
They collaborated with Good Guy Collective to develop a full-length theater piece they called a “puppet hip-hopera,” called “What the Water Tells Me,” with local dancers, writers, and others and performed it at Modern Studio in Happy Holler. It sold out every night and they subsequently performed it twice out of town, including at the Highlander Center. In 2018 the group mounted a parade on MLK, Jr. Blvd and partnered with MUSE Knoxville to present a street party.
The parades are simply a culminating event for five months of work at various selected sites. The most recent parade, in the spring of this year, had nine program sites with teaching artists (a paid position) and interns (they now hire high school students as interns). With eight-to-ten-week residencies at each location, the amount of time and effort is massive. Most of Rachel’s time has been volunteered and she’s held other jobs. She’s raising funds to be able to do the work full-time.
In the two years leading up to the pandemic the group got more requests to participate in or lead events from Knoxville to Johnson City. They had a studio space in the Emporium for a couple of years. When the pandemic hit, the program came to a halt and the puppets went to storage. Rachel, uncertain what would happen next, took another job to get by.
A call from Big Ears resulted in her coming aboard to produce the parade and street party at Big Ears in 2022 featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. She replicated what she’d learned through Cattywampus and essentially ran their program leading up to the parade. “It was amazing. I’ve always believed in the power of this work. Community-based art is integral to the well-being of a community. It fosters wellness and gets people talking to each other. We are (allowing) everybody to be your weirdest, most unapologetic beautiful self.”
She followed that working full-time with Big Ears for the next year, culminating with the Our Common Nature programming with Yo-Yo Ma. While there she assembled the Knox Honkers and Bangers as a community brass band to perform with the parades. Intended to run for three months, it’s now grown to 35 years members. They led the way into the Our Common Nature Event.
The work, as well as the fun, has continued apace through the summer. “I think we paraded five weekends in a row.” They paraded at the Children’s Festival of Reading, Our Common Nature, Open Streets, Rhinestone Fest, SoKno Pride, and Juneteenth. With all the visibility and community connections, the moment seemed right to try to make the organization a full-time organization.
They are writing grants and have new partnerships on the way, including one from the Sociology Department to work with UT’s Art Department developing a course in community art. There will be another parade in the spring (TBA). They are also reaching out to the community to find financial support, hoping to grow their annual budget from $50,000 a year to $150,000 a year. If you are interested, you’ll find a donation form at the bottom of their webpage.
In the future, Rachel hopes to have a fully established organization with several employees. “I would love to see us have a space and for that space to be a collaborative space. This is something that feels important to me. When we rise, we want our partners to rise. We have so many incredible community-based art groups here like Canvas Can Do Miracles, like Drums Up, Guns Down, like Dragonfly Aerial Arts . . . I would love to see the parade become a tradition. I would love to see 3,000 people on the street.” She said she’d love to be able to involve more young people and spread their efforts across the region.
Community-based art is powerful at creating a container for us to imagine possibilities and use the arts to talk about our own experiences and listen to one another and imagine what is possible . . . I can see Cattywampus continuing to use art as a tool to bring people together and bring joy and magic and celebrate and be weird and wild . . . but also to imagine what is possible for our future and to imagine solutions to the problems we are facing.
Look for a fund-raising celebration in October at the Old City Performing Arts Center.