Ronnie Burkett found his calling when he was just seven years old.
The youngster, who grew up in Medicine Hat, Alta., was flipping through a World Book Encyclopedia, when the page fell open to “puppets.” It was the same year The Sound of Music came out, he remembers, and there was a photo of the film’s puppeteer, Bill Baird, surrounded by his marionettes.
“I read the article, and I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s what I’ll do.'”
It wasn’t exactly like the heavens opened up, but something spoke to him, he says. “It’s a great form for someone who feels that they’re a loner or a freak,” Burkett told CBC’s Hot Type in a 1999 interview from our archives.
“I looked at it and thought, ‘Well, there’s a way to control the world — you can make it small and reexamine it.'”
In the nearly four decades since he founded the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, the Canadian puppet master has won international acclaim and revolutionized the art form for North American audiences. In Burkett’s masterful hands, puppetry transcends the realm of children’s entertainment, exploring challenging and often adult stories with heart, humour and brains.
For his contributions to Canadian theatre, Burkett has been recognized with the Siminovitch Prize as well as multiple Dora Mavor Moore and Chalmers Awards. He’s also been appointed to the Order of Canada. Now, Burkett has earned another of the country’s top honours, a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, which will be celebrated with a gala in Ottawa on June 8.
“I am honoured, I am humbled and I’m completely gobsmacked,” Burkett told the GGPAA Foundation in a video message.
Get to know one of Canada’s foremost theatre artists by revisiting Burkett in 1999 during a breakthrough moment in his career with this interview from CBC’s archives, and learn what puppets can do in the hands of a true master.
Puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, aka the “Mozart of Marionettes” on CBC’s Hot Type in 1999.