PODCAST:

Miranda Elliott-Rader, a local puppeteer, is leading workshops in Charlottesville to prepare for the 50th anniversary Lantern Parade on July 3.

TRANSCRIPT:

Alissa Emond:

You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Miranda Elliott-Rader, one of the local artists partnered with Friends of Cville to lead a handful of Sunday workshops in preparation for the upcoming Lantern Parade that will commemorate the downtown mall’s 50th anniversary on July 3rd.

Miranda Elliott-Rader:

I’m Miranda Elliott-Rader, and I’m a puppeteer here in Charlottesville. I perform as Nettle Shirts Puppet Works and collaborate with other people as Nettle Shirts Puppet Works. So, the lantern building workshops are something that I and a couple puppetry-affiliated friends were commissioned to do by the Friends of Downtown Cville organization in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, and so they reached out to my friend and roommate Annie Temmink. She works for UVA and teaches the creatures building class at UVA, and then Melissa Goldman, the other teacher of the creature building class, and Annie and I were all like, “Oh yeah, we’d love to do something together, because I do puppets and they also do puppets, and we know each other. We’ve like sort of consulted with each other for a long time, but we’d never gotten to work together on a project. Between like Annie’s experience giving workshops, Melissa’s experience teaching people art, and my experience making this kind of luminary sort of built workshops together.

Something really important is that anybody can make any lantern they want and bring it to the lantern parade. Other people are also teaching workshops for kids. Other people are like doing like drop-in workshops at events. I think there’s something happening like various festivals and stuff in town, so you can keep an eye out for like different lantern making opportunities. Our workshops are for ages 13 plus, if you want to like get some support and guidance in a special time to make a more elaborate lantern that might not be something you feel up for making at home, but it’s really for anybody with any level of artistic experience to make things that will be cool things to be in our community lantern parade. We just invite people who are coming to the workshop to really make whatever they want. We did have one person make an ice cream cone, hopefully she’ll be there with her ice cream cone. We’ve had a couple of people make lanterns of their pets, and some people have just made like a box or a moon or a star or something that’s like simple and feels approachable to them, so really having it like a wide, wide range of skill and motivation levels are fully welcome, whether you’re like never really crafted before or you’re like, ooh, I like to make art and this is a medium I’ve never tried, let me like bust out a fancy thing, we’re really excited about working with sustainable materials for this, so I’ve done a lot of harvesting of autumn olives, which are an invasive species, and kudzu and bamboo harvesting, and we’ve been using those materials to build the lanterns and show people how to use those, so figuring out how to work with sustainable materials and using local invasive species is something we’re all really excited about, and then the three of us who are working on this workshop are also one of the groups of artists in town making a larger piece, and we’re making a larger lantern piece that we’re really excited to incorporate some historical images of Charlottesville in that, so historical images of Vinegar Hill, historical images of the downtown mall, both when it was a street and when it was landscaped, and so that’s something to keep an eye out for, that opportunity to see those history components in our artistic expression.

Our workshops are on Sunday afternoons from one to five, and they’re going to be the last three Sundays in June, so that’s June 14th, June 21st and June 28th, we’re hosting them at Live Arts Theater downtown, which is very graciously letting us use their kind of like shop and just outside the shop space. It’s a lovely, lovely space with great natural light, and the Lantern Parade is Friday, July 3rd, it starts with gathering at 8:30 at the pavilion, and there’s going to be a brass band, which is a great thing for a parade to have, and so the brass band will lead all of the lanterns and then parade down the downtown mall from there.

Alissa Emond:

For more information about the workshops, including tickets and scholarship support. Please visit downtowncville.com. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Alissa Emond.