About HI
I'm Adam Ende, a quixotic puppet show maker based in Brooklyn, NY, and the director of Jawbone Puppet Theater. I am also the director of Ren Jian Bao Puppet Theater in Taiwan, as well as an imaginary puppet company in Mexico called Tamales de Chivo Teatro de Titeres. In Thailand I was director of a mobile bicycle roasted squid cart known as Squid and Puppet Theater.
Without realizing it, I was in training as a puppeteer all my life, drawing cartoons all day as a kid, studying writing in college, becoming a potter and sculptor, spending many years drawing naked people, and painting portraits in oil, eventually taking up the uke. When I finally realized I was a puppeteer, I cried, "Ah ha! This is the reason I've spent my life learning all these stoopit things!" Puppetry is drawing and painting, sculpture, writing, music, acting, literature, carpentry, sewing, and god knows what all--it encompasses all the arts.
It was very satisfying to realize this, but it's also important to remind myself all the time that it's not about puppetry. Puppetry is dumb, just like all man's endeavors under the sun. All is vanity! The search is the only thing I can be quite sure of. And for a long while now, puppetry has been a damn fine vehicle for my search. Listen to this:
"The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everydayness of his own life. To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair." - Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
