“Before I moved away from Baltimore, I didn’t realize that other cities do not have their own enchanted rowhouses of puppetry,” joked musician Eric Voboril in a short documentary about Hollins Street’s Black Cherry Puppet Theater that came out several years ago.

Michael Lamason, Black Cherry’s 68-year-old executive director, had never attended a puppet show—much less performed with a marionette—when he founded the original troupe with Corliss Cavalieri, Bill Haas, Rick Weiss, and Michael Richardson in the summer of 1980. They were just college kids at MICA and needed jobs and got creative.

Hired by legendary recreation and parks director Virginia Baker, who had been appointed by Mayor William Donald Schaefer to direct a special office he named Adventures in Fun (can we bring that back?), the motley collection of printmakers and painters put on 107 shows for city kids over school break that year.

Decades before YouTube, they taught themselves how to build sets, props, and puppets from Pratt library books, earning $6 an hour for their troubles.

“A small fortune in those days,” Lamason says with a smile in the theater’s Geppetto-like workshop as he stands and manipulates the knees, elbows, and face of a Jack and the Beanstalk marionette he’s been working on. “We were up all night before our first performance, still making everything we needed. No rehearsal, I just went and did the show. I thought it was a mess, but you dance a marionette in front of an audience and nobody has a clue how you’re doing it. They just see you doing this magic on the stage and there’s a suspension of disbelief. They’re transfixed.”

Far from mere child’s play, the ancient Greeks interpreted the Iliad and the Odyssey with puppets. In the Middle Ages, string puppets were used to depict biblical stories, with the Virgin Mary often a central figure (marionette in French means “little Mary”). And in the 18th century, leading composers like Haydn created adult operas specifically for marionettes.

Now in its 45th year, the nonprofit Black Cherry theater has presented thousands of shows and workshops at schools and festivals throughout the city, state, and region. Housed across the street from historic Hollins Market in side-by-side rowhomes, purchased for a grand total of $12,000 in the mid-1990s when crack cocaine was tearing at the fabric of its Sowebo neighborhood, Black Cherry’s central mission—and Lamason’s, too—remains performance.

Its quarterly Puppet Slamwich series for adults features tales and marionettes; ventriloquist dolls; and finger, hand, sock, stick, and shadow puppets of every imaginable variety. The 50-seat black box theater also hosts a variety of musical guests throughout the year, from folk to jazz and classical performers.

The puppet slams, which attract a mix of artist applicants from near and far, always include a musical guest as well, selling out within days of their ticket release. At a recent Slamwich, for example, the first performer was Matt Muirhead, an artist better known for his sci-fi Baltimore landscapes. He used a sock monkey named “Holly” to help tell a nonlinear narrative against a scrolling backdrop that included several of his paintings.

Muirhead was followed by Carmen Houston-Ludlam, a 27-year-old woman from southern Anne Arundel County with Down syndrome, who performed a ventriloquist act with a mermaid, cracking up the crowd with her hand puppet’s irreverent jokes about its shoe fetish and waterbed.

Lindsey Ball, an artist and past National Puppetry Festival coordinator from Chicago, used a toy-sized theater, a crankie, shadow puppets, and recorded voice-over to share a moving personal story that also honored the struggles of those in the LGBTQ+ community who came before her.

“I’ve always wanted to come to Baltimore and be a part of a Black Cherry show,” Ball said later. “The city’s support here for such a labor of love is amazing.”

After intermission and a musical interlude from a banjo, fiddle, and guitar combo, Houston Ludlam, still in the sparkling black dress that she performed in, slid into a folding chair with some popcorn to watch the rest of the show alongside her parents. Seated next to her in the back row, an audience member quietly congratulated her on her flawless performance as the second half began.

“I’ve been practicing for three years, but only in front of my friends and family,” she whispered back, beaming. “This was my first time on stage. My knees were nervous when I started. But only my knees.”

When an artist is given a blank canvas, the possibilities are endless, and the same can be said for artists invited to create a crankie.

The Creative Alliance hosts its Baltimore Crankie Fest each January (Janunary 4-6 this time) and encourages visual artists to make and present a crankie—even, and especially, if they’ve never done so before. This year, the festival lineup will bring newbie KAL (Kevin Kallaugher), editorial cartoonist for The Baltimore Sun, as well as a seasoned crankie artists Katherine Fahey, Emily Schubert, Liz Downing, and others.

Crankies are moving panoramas with long pictorial scrolls that are typically hand-cranked, hence the name, to tell a story inside a viewing box. The boxes are often backlit for shadow puppetry, and song and narration accompany the performance.

But at Baltimore’s annual festival, there’s really no such thing as typical. Some artists have shown digitized versions of their pieces, essentially creating short films of crankies. In one of Emily Schubert’s pieces, artists used their bodies to transform into life-size human cranks—turning in place, one unraveling while the other collected the story scroll. A fourth show was added this year, but even with an extended run, tickets are expected to sell out.

Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle—known for their quilted crankies—founded Crankie Fest in 2014, and around that same time, the Black Cherry Puppet Theater had started its puppet slam series, Slamwich, through a grant from The Jim Henson Foundation. Several festivals and puppet slams later, not to mention numerous crankie workshops, more and more artists are making their own crankies in the city, and several take them on tour for additional performances.

“When I go to the National Puppetry Festival and say I’m from Baltimore, they say, ‘Ohh—there’s a really strong scene there, isn’t there,’” says Katherine Fahey, who some have called the Godmother of Baltimore Crankies. “People know about Baltimore, and I think that’s largely because of the puppet slams and the Crankie Fest.”

Crankies were a natural fit for Fahey, a singer and visual artist who often works with musicians (see her first crankie of intricate paper-cut puppetry in Wye Oak’s 2011 music video “Fish”). When Fahey met Roberts-Gevalt and LaPrelle (aka folk duo Anna & Elizabeth), it was a revelation, she says.

“They were already musicians and thinking of themselves as performers, but I was a visual artist. I got really inspired that they were performing with visual artwork on a regular basis. It seemed like the right direction to move in, but it was also terrifying.” They began working on crankies together and taking them on the road shortly before Crankie Fest was created. “Visual artists, I think, are too solitary sometimes, and this really gives you the opportunity to share your artwork in real time, in a personal way.”

For this year’s festival, Fahey, who also teaches crankie workshops, will bring to life the story of Sedna, Inuit goddess of the sea. Two Inuit sisters from northern Quebec will fly in for the show, performing Inuit throat singing alongside the crankie images.

“I chose that story because it’s been kind of an interesting time for women,” Fahey says. “Sedna is a woman who suffers a lot and then, out of that suffering, becomes very powerful. There’s a harshness in the story that I think in the U.S., we kind of gloss over in our fairy tales. Most of my crankies have been all-ages [appropriate], but there is some violence and harsh reality that was a little bit of a struggle for me, but I realize the importance of including it.”

Another favorite, Downing will return to the festival to present a crankie based on a dream she had during times of changes in her life. “They were instructional kinds of dreams that I deciphered in many different ways,” she says. “I feel like it’s an important part of our daytime to understand our dreams,” she says.

A musician and visual artist, Downing is known for her tall vertical crankies that use a scroll of solid paper. She incorporates paper and wooden hand puppets, rather than shadow puppetry, to add another element of interaction to her stories. Because her songwriting and visual art is primarily psychological in nature, incorporating dreamscapes and abstract ideas, it took her a moment to reorient herself to crankies, when she was asked to participate in Crankie Fest years ago.

“I had to find a way to make a different sort of crankie,” she says. Long, horizontal landscapes were so different from her usual work, so instead, she tapes each illustration to one another, panel by panel, to tell a story vertically through surrealistic portraiture. “When first thinking about it, I didn’t want to start a whole new art form. I thought, what do I love to do and what do I do best—drawing, singing, and storytelling. It’s actually just the absolute perfect fit for me, to create scrolls of drawings and sing their story. . . . It’s kind of part of the revival of going back to handmade and away from technology.”

Her first crankie, Piggly Wiggly, illustrated the story of her getting lost in a cemetery while she wandered off as her mother visited the gravesite of Downing’s grandfather. The angel statues were of no help, as all their hands pointed to the sky, she explains (and not in the direction of her mother), and when they were finally reunited, her mother had eaten all the cream horns they’d gotten from a Piggly Wiggly on the drive to the graveyard (a portrait of half a dozen cream horns was included).

The Creative Alliance is known for featuring genre-defying are just like this, but even this festival stands out on their calendar. Performance director Josh Kohn, who helps curate Crankie Fest, says it’s his favorite event of the year.

“There’s a fireside magic to it,” he says. “It’s like an old-school variety show.”