Volume 87 #19 Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Estee plays her marionette Jessica, the lounge singer, while Joe Jazz waits his turn at the piano.

When Estee's fingers start flying, marionettes Joe Jazz and Jessica start jumping. Jessica sprawls seductively over a tiny piano or slinks across the stage, belting out an Ella Fitzgerald jazz tune with ease. When it's Joe's turn to perform, he sits on the piano bench and tickles the ivories and sways and bobs to the music like the pro he is. The wooden marionettes are fascinating and almost eerie in the way they come to life. And that's exactly the reaction Estee wants.

I'm standing right next to them, making them move, but after a few moments the audience forgets I'm there and they concentrate on the puppets. They become the actors and I'm merely their voices.

Estee is a rare breed. There aren't many marionettists in Canada, Ronnie Burkett is best known, and no others in Winnipeg that Estee is aware of.

The 33-year-old single mother of two has been bringing her puppetry, which she calls Jazz on a String, to Winnipeg audiences since 1998. That's when she returned from living in Italy, where she had spent 10 years as a street performer, painting works of art on the streets and piazzas before eventually becoming interested in marionettes.

Street performance is a big industry in Europe and Estee, who had gone there for a year immediately after graduating from River East Collegiate, quickly discovered its allure. When she saw a veteran marionettist perform in Italy, she knew she'd found her niche.

That was it. I was in love. I wanted to do that because it brought in an element of drama, but the spotlight wasn't on me. It's on the puppet.

She honed her craft by apprenticing with a Czechoslovakian marionettist. His brother sold her her first marionette, Joe Jazz, the piano player. From then on, countless hours were spent practising the art of "playing" the marionette, learning how to operate the control, called the cross, that pulls the tangle of strings.

"Some strings are for balance and some are for motion. The number of strings depends on what the marionette needs to do, " she explains. "With each marionette, you learn exactly every motion it"s capable of and then you continue to learn and try new things."

Joe Jazz was joined by Jessica, the lounge singer, in 2000. Estee designed her and commissioned the Czechoslovakian builder to create her. The piano, which also sings and is called Bosendorfer, was built by her uncle Victor Harder. PJ, the ninja, was crafted by Estee. Two other store-bought marionettes join her puppet troupe.

Estee has performed at the Winnipeg Children's Festival, special events at the Forks and at the Lyric Theatre at Assiniboine Park, and has been a big hit at the Fringe Festival. In fact, Jazz on a String won "best of kids Fringe" last year.

She has both children and adult repertoire and performs at everything from family barcues to corporate functions. "One thing I don't do is children's birthday parties. Kids want to be up there touching the puppets, when it's really more of a viewing thing."