Timothy Gosley is best known around town right now for being the director for this year’s Puppets for Peace festival weekend, but there’s something that not everyone knows about the man: he was once a puppeteer for the beloved children’s show Sesame Street.
“I have been a puppeteer since about 1980,” he says. “One of my claims to fame is working on Fraggle Rock and the Canadian Sesame Street, which I think people are probably tired of hearing about by now.”
However, it’s hard to hold back curiosity when it comes to learning about the behind-the-scenes goings-on of a television show so many of us enjoyed as children. When explaining how he got involved in the world of puppetry, Gosley says it all fell into place by chance.
“Working on Fraggle Rock, which was in the early ’80s, occurred because I had just moved to Toronto, and I was a young hippie, and I was looking for a career,” he says. “They had come to Toronto to do Fraggle Rock at the same time that I had been there. Fraggle Rock was really like a master’s degree after my acting degree, and then I got the role of Basil the Bear on Canadian Sesame Street.”
According to Gosley, Puppets for Peace is well in line with Sesame Street values and is a community effort incorporating many forms of talent (such as, for example, local slam poets) making it a logical progression in his career in puppetry.
“This is kind of my vanity project,” he says. “I really love the fact that there’s this whole poetry world smashing into the Fraggle Rock world. Fraggle Rock was created to help with world peace and how to live together, so it kind of makes sense in an odd way.”
Gosley says that the event is full of opportunities to be entertained, as well as to gain awareness.
“We have a parade with giant puppets,” he says. “It’s actually really neat. Kids bring their puppets and it’s intergenerational. More people are walking in the parade than watching it, so it’s actually pretty cool. I think this year we have a little Buddhist group, we’ve got Boy Scouts, we’ve got the Shakespeare Society, we’ve got all of our crazy puppets, and then we all walk through the Fernwood area, and it’s kind of a community walk.”
Underlying all of the components of the production, Gosley stresses that the building of awareness is a crucial element, particularly because, as he says, “In Victoria, we are very fortunate, so we are a bit complacent about what is going on around the world.”
Above all, Gosley insists that Puppets for Peace is for everyone.
“We don’t want it to be partisan, we don’t want it to be a protest,” he says. “It’s very embracing for everybody.”
When it comes to promoting education in the creation of peace, Gosley says that puppetryŃor any art form, for that matterŃis a natural conduit for the facilitation of a peaceful world.
“I think if you are participating in the arts, you’re generally participating in a peaceful activity,” he says. “Even when it gets sort of rough, it turns into a celebration, or a thoughtful exploration of certain patterns of things.”
Puppets for Peace
Friday, September 11 to Sunday, September 13
puppetsforpeace.org