We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shadow Girls Cult a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Shadow Girls, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?
We have been fortunate to take a couple of workshops with other overhead projector puppeteers but like many puppet artists, we are largely self-taught. We have learned much of what we know through experimentation and playing around with our projects and materials. Cass has a background in lighting design and Zane has a background in visual arts so our schooling has given us some of the useful skills we’ve been able to bring to our projection work. Since we are working in a discipline with very few practitioners, there aren’t formal ways or classes at school you can take to learn what you do. Even knowing what we do now, I’m not sure if we could have learned our craft any faster. Like most art forms, the best way to learn is to do and we’ve put in a lot of time making new work and continued to develop the pieces we’ve created as we learn more.
Our work is very multi-disicplinary and so many skills apply to shadow puppetry. I think some of the most crucial skill we were able to bring to the table is our understanding of theatre and theatrical concepts, Cassie’s light design, Zane’s understanding of visual composition, and our shared ability to be self-critical of our work.
The biggest obstacle of learning more is the lack of support for puppetry education. There are very few schools in the country with puppetry courses and even fewer that offer degrees. There are also very few artist creating overhead projector work at a high level to learn from. It’s one of the main reasons that we do our best to teach workshops so that other artists don’t have such a hard time learning to do what we do.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We are Cass Bray and Zane Exactly and together we are Shadow Girls Cult. We create shadow puppetry and live projection performances using 3 overhead projectors (like what some of you may remember using in school). Although our work falls under the branch of shadow puppetry, our work extends beyond one single genre. Within the body of work we have built in the past 4 years, we have incorporated human silhouettes; theatrical lighting techniques; textural & found objects; innovative patterns and cinematic techniques; comic/graphic novel components; and liquid light techniques. And we’re always looking for new things to incorporate into our work!
Both of us are Seattle transplants, originally from the Midwest. While initially performing and designing in different artistic circles in Seattle, we met working on a production at Annex Theater in 2017. Cass has a background in theatre, lighting design, and poetry, and they were naturally drawn to the impact of storytelling through puppetry. Zane’s background was originally in sculpture and print-making, but by this time they had been working in puppetry for 7 years and interested in expanding.
This initial collaboration sparked an interest in working together, which led to multiple collaborations over the next year. Soon we were experimenting with our own blend of performance art and shadow puppetry. Once we started collaborating in earnest, our career development also took off. Now, 7 years later, we have created work that has been thrice-nominated for the National Slam (2019, 2022, 2024), as well as featured in the 2024 SE Regional Puppetry Festival (2024), The Giant Puppet Festival (2024), The National Puppetry Journal (2019), and the arts section of The Seattle Times (2022). Our work has been showcased in Chinese Theatre Works’ 2021 International Shadow Slam, as well as the puppetry track at Dragon Con 2022 and 2024. Over the past few years, we have also ventured into educational outreach, presenting workshops for local film festivals, youth theatres, and schools.
Every piece of original work that we have created includes heavy themes of queerness, fatness, otherness, and how it feels to navigate life with dysmorphia and dysphoria. We choose to tell stories and highlight characters that are often disposable in other storytelling mediums. We enjoy creating together largely because we share the same philosophy about our craft. Put simply, we both want to expand the definition of puppetry and shift the audience’s expectations of what puppetry looks like. There is something delicate and crucial in preserving an ancient form of community storytelling, while also showing that puppetry is never static, and always transitioning. It is bodies and imagery in motion, stories as breaths, and can be haunting in its specificity.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Our primary goal as artists is to expand the definition of puppetry, and bring puppet magic to as many people as we can. We really want to show people that puppetry is for everyone, and is a special, unique form of storytelling and performance art. We put so much time and care into the stories we craft, and are always striving to expand the audience base we share those stories with.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
The best thing society could do in its current state is to give more money and opportunities to artists. Most of us do it for the love of the art and the feeling of creating, but to do it professionally and long-term requires consistent opportunities and funding. The best way to create a thriving creative ecosystem is to ensure that artists (and their time, craft, etc) are respected and nourished. This means providing living wages for the work they are creating, and support from local and regional agencies.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.shadowgirlscult.com
- Instagram: @shadowgirlscult
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/shadowgirlscult
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@shadowgirlscult
Image Credits
#1,2,5- JenBen Media