Bob Baker Day pulls Los Angeles into a puppet-powered daydream
Great shimmering bubbles danced overhead as Los Angeles loosened its tie, dusted itself in glitter and came frolicking out in rainbow polka dots. Wonder enveloped L.A. State Historic Park on Sept 20 as the curtains opened to three stages, dozens of colorful booths and a sea of picnic blankets in a parade of music, glitter and lovingly off-kilter creatures at the 12th annual Bob Baker Day. The free, all-day festival celebrated the life and legacy of Bob Baker, the late puppeteer who co-founded Bob Baker Marionette Theater in 1963 according to their website. The program was a choose-your-own-adventure book: puppet performances popped up every 30 minutes alongside live music, crafting activities, food trucks, a kids talent show and enough curious characters to make an ordinary Sunday feel like a particularly colorful dream. “There’s such an L.A. hub,” said Julia Rie Moquin, a set decorator and longtime Bob Baker fan. “Bob Baker Marionette Theater really brings the L.A. community together. They’re so classic L.A.” The festival began 12 years ago as a much smaller birthday party. After Baker died in 2014, he did not want a funeral or memorial, so the theater celebrated his birthday with puppetry instead. About 50 people gathered for the first block party. The event has since grown into a roughly 30,000-person community arts festival that celebrates everything that the theater has come to represent in LA: imagination and the idea that art belongs to everyone. “It’s meant to be in community, for community,” said MJ Thompson, director of communications for Bob Baker Marionette Theater. “It’s really a time-worn place where people can play, have fun and make art together.” Throughout the day, puppeteers performed with marionettes that are 50, 60 and even 70 years old. Winona Bechtle, the theater’s director of partnerships, has been coming to the theater since she was five and remembers rainy January birthday parties there while Baker was still performing. She said keeping the puppets twirling, kicking and charming new audiences, rather than locking them away, preserves the legacy Baker built over more than 70 years of delighting generations of Angelenos. “I think Bob would be thrilled to see this all come together and his memory not only continuing but also expanding to include so many other types of arts,” Bechtle said. The puppets were the stars, but everyone had a chance to shine. Many attendees arrived with their own puppets and creations. The Hooray L.A. Village invited visitors to make, paint and tinker with museums and arts groups from across the city. At the Velaslavasay Panorama booth, guests added creatures and shapes to a spinning collaborative landscape that grew more curious as the day went on. “The blend of audience and presenter is very murky, which is super, super fun,” said Sara Velas, founder of the Velaslavasay Panorama. Nearby, Hollywood Entertainment hosted the festival’s first dog costume contest, with categories including L.A. Icons, Puppet Face and Goof of the Year. Matching dogs and owners could compete as couples. Alex Gootter, a representative of the nonprofit screening series, helped organize the competition after noticing how many dogs were already arriving in costume in previous years. “There’s just no shortage of cool creativity, and you run into kind of every weirdo you know here,” said Gootter. Some visitors dressed for their inner child. Set decorator Julia Rie Moquin dressed like their own 5-year-old self. For a friend’s clown-themed birthday outing, Moquin recreated a clown costume from an old photo, spending about 25 to 30 hours bedazzling the outfit. The look fit right into a crowd where ruffles, rainbow wigs and sparkly cheeks were the apparent dress code. “I love the people — the fashion and everything,” Moquin said. “It’s so great to just walk around and people-watch.” Rachel Sheng, a USC senior majoring in cinema and media studies and curatorial associate at the Velaslavasay Panorama museum, spent her first Bob Baker Day helping young children twist pipe cleaners into flowers, animals and whatever else they could dream up to escape this increasingly digital world. “We’re living in such a digital, technological age, where every day we’re using screens more and more,” Sheng said. “It’s really nice to carve out spaces like these where you’re not on your screen. You’re being hands-on.” Sheng said the festival showed her a side of L.A.’s creative community that can be easy for students to miss when they stay within the boundaries of campus. Events like Bob Baker Day can be a gentle push to leave their “habitat,” explore the city and meet people beyond campus, she said. The festival’s free admission and location beside the Metro A Line’s Chinatown station made that wider creative community easier to reach. “It was really nice seeing a lot of little kids from many different backgrounds and the community coming together to make their childhoods a little bit more colorful, a little bit more creative,” Sheng said. Bob Baker Day celebrated the theater’s past as the nonprofit worked to secure its future. After losing its original downtown location, moving to Highland Park in 2019 and nearly closing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the theater is raising money to purchase and restore its current building. Regular performances welcome about 120 guests at a time, Thompson said, while Bob Baker Day opens the theater’s world to thousands of Angelenos at once. Donations and sponsorships keep the festival free and allow families to experience puppetry, art and live performance together, as Thompson did with her mother when she was a child. “The theater really has become, for me, a place where LA is its most itself and its most unique,” Thompson said. The day ended as whimsically as it began: with clowns, puppets, children and roughly 400 mini pies for an all-out pie fight. “It all ends in a big pie,” Bechtle said. Edited by Camille Culbertson and Sammie Yen