An ‘industrial puppet symphony’ by the transgender/gender-diverse community: Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, at Nextfest. A preview

“It’s not a play it’s a puppet show!” declares Emilia Fox Hillyer, the artist who instigated and “assembled” Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements. The collectively written “industrial puppet symphony” that opens Saturday at Nextfest is the only show of the festival, and indeed the season, in which dumpster-diving for cardboard is an essential part of the creative process.

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The 13-member ensemble, from the transgender/gender-diverse community, fashioned puppets as “giant cardboard sculptures that we throw around,” as director Fox Hillyer puts it. “All very crude. And  very intentional since it’s the result of the community engagement aspect of the show…. If I were working with a group of fabricators who’d worked in puppetry before, the puppets would have been much more kinetic.”

“A play is very text-based,” says Fox Hillyer, who emigrated across the border to work on a master’s degree in theatre practice at the U of A. “A puppet show exists in this other world where text is part of the world we create, but living sculpture is primary.” And “mediation through the performing object” is how the ensemble connects to the audience. Meaning-making is something to be shared, “important to the enjoyment of the show.”

Is the big foot in the show just … a big foot? In vertical position, toes on top, heel on the bottom, it’s a biggie, at six-and-a-half feet tall. “I’ve had people say to me ‘it’s so obvious that the foot belongs to Bruno’. And I’ve had other people say ‘oh my gawd, I am the foot’. Or ‘the big foot is surveillance culture’…. Eye of the beholder sort of thing: that’s what we’re going for.”

Fox Hillyer, an Emerson College acting grad originally from Massachusetts, learned how to “do giant cardboard things” in two years working with the celebrated Vermont-based activist Bread and Puppet Theatre, celebrated for large-scale pageantry and processions. And she discovered that puppetry, as a frame for performer-created work, was more satisfying than acting gigs in more conventional theatre.

There are a striking number of transgender and gender-diverse people amongst puppeteers, “and there are lot of reasons for that,” Fox Hillyer thinks.” Among them, “puppetry is a way for people who are experiencing discomfort with their appearance and the way they’re perceived can resist, or deflect, the attention of the audience on to a performing object.” And her historical researches uncovered parallel experiences between transgender and gender-diverse people and performing objects.”

Puppetry appeals, too, to that community’s need to “build something, to have control over something” in a world that’s sliding into more repressive societies. “Transgender people,” of which Fox Hillyer is one, “offer dignity to those in our community who are a really low place.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements. Coarse Arts Collective at Nextfest 2026. Rehearsal photo supplied.

“We’re engaging with ‘rubbish theory’, at the way society values and re-values things. Transgender and gender-diverse people are being pushed forth and further into the proverbial dumpster.” Hence the collective’s use of discarded cardboard is meaningful. And there’s a kind of theatrical activism in that.

When she was applying to grad schools — and being a transgender woman in the U.S. didn’t seem to be a promising scenario — what she had in mind “was some sort of big grand community engagement-devised puppet project. And this is what came out of it … very much what I was expecting and also very much what I was not expecting.”

It takes a village (and time)…. An ensemble of 13 — three musicians, me and eight performers, one technician — is “tough to organize that many people in a community engagement project,” Fox Hillyer says cheerfully. “There was just one rehearsal before tech week when everyone showed up.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, Coarse Arts Collective in rehearsal. Nextfest 2026. Photo supplied

Fantasies in Trash was a (school) year in the making. “We spent the first semester generating content and building the ensemble,” says Fox Hillyard. “The ensemble was whoever was in the room, a drop-in rotational sort of thing. Sometimes there were three plus me and the stage manager. Sometimes 40…. Basically if you showed up you had a voice, and you had authorship.”   

“We often used play-making games that included text, or video-editing and recorded text that happened….” Fox Hillyer assembled versions of the script, “and we did a lot of voting on things to make decisions.”

Does a story emerge in the course of the show? “Symphony,” as in ‘industrial puppet symphony’, implies a narrative arc, as she says. “Fantasy,” as in the show title, “means it’s all over the place…. Each movement could be its own performance. But I believe they weave themselves together to create something cohesive.”

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements, Coarse Arts Collective, Nextfest 2026. Rehearsal photo supplied

The arc has to do with the Fascist character, who has a large blue mask on which someone is constantly drawing in pink marker, and wings. “At the end the Fascist undergoes emancipatory self-mutilation, the loss of wings,” in parallel to the way transgender women “have to shed male privilege when they go into this whole new world of feminine expression.”

It turned out to be easy to acquire a transgender/gender-diverse cast from the community, which says something about need here. “I posted on Instagram and was buried by interest!” And in the end, making the show “created a space where we could all be ‘normal’, and also a space where young transgender people in their 20s could experiment, in a non-judgmental (environment), with being the gender they know themselves to be.”

“To have a community and see transgender people over 30 living happy lives….” Beyond everything else, in a darkening world for transgender and gender-diverse people, that has made it all worthwhile.

Fantasies in Trash: in eleven movements runs at Nextfest Saturday and Sunday plus June 10 and 14 on the Lorne Cardinal Stage at the Roxy. Tickets and times: theatrenetwork.ca.