Meet veteran Muppeteer Dave Goelz who has been bringing life to puppets—including The Great Gonzo, Bunsen Honeydew, Zoot, and many more—for more than forty years. Explore the process of creating a puppet character, feeding life and personality into it until it becomes real, to both the creator and the audience. Goelz shares his challenges, successes, and experience in creating life-like, lovable puppets, from concept to construction to performance.
DATE & TIME
Sat, Aug 13 | 1pm
COST
$18 members | $20 non-members | $12 student & youth members | $15 student & youth non-members
LOCATION
Theater
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dave Goelz has been a principal puppeteer with The Muppets for forty-one years. His characters include The Great Gonzo, Bunsen Honeydew, Zoot, Beauregard, and Waldorf from The Muppet Show; Boober Fraggle, Traveling Matt, and Philo the Rodentia from Fraggle Rock; Sir Didymus from Labyrinth; Digit from The Jim Henson Hour; Rugby and Ditz from Jim Henson’s Secret Life of Toys; Stinky the Skunk from Jim Henson’s Animal Show with Stinky and Jake; Randy the Stupid Pig and Gary Cahuenga the Vent Dummy from Muppets Tonight! and Chip IT guy from ABC’s The Muppets.”
Goelz first started working for Henson Associates in 1973 as a puppet designer and builder and periodically had the opportunity to perform. The first highly-successful characters that he built were Animal, Zoot, and Floyd Pepper. Despite the fact that he had no formal training for puppeteering, he went on to perform characters on The Muppet Show. He eventually stopped building puppets and worked exclusively as a performer.
Walt’s Circle donors, Supporter and Friend level members may purchase program tickets for this program beginning Wednesday, July 20 at 10am by calling 415.345.6829 or emailing membership@wdfmuseum.org. All other members may purchase tickets beginning Thursday, July 21 at 10am, online or at the ticket desk. Tickets will be on sale to the public beginning Friday, July 22 at 10am online.
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