"Jeghetto’s Variety Show"

by Jeghetto’s Entertainment LLC

Whimsical marionette lions, dinosaurs made from recycled materials, and found-object “moving sculptures” — enter the wonderful world of Jeghetto’s Variety Show! Get ready to marvel — and maybe even try your hand at manipulating one of Jeghetto’s marionettes. Self-taught master puppeteer Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins became a puppeteer after a fateful meeting with Fred Rogers. Since then, his upbeat, inventive approach to puppetry has been seen everywhere from the Center for Puppetry Arts to a Missy Elliott video. Help us kick off our fall season with the unique artistry of this North Carolina-based artist, who returns to Puppet Showplace for the first time since his sold-out run in 2018!

All ages welcome, recommended for 2+
Found-object marionettes

About the Artist

Tarish “Jeghetto” Pipkins is a master builder and puppeteer based in North Carolina. The stage name “Jeghetto” is a nod to Pinnochio’s creator, “Geppetto,” and is a way to explicitly connect Jeghetto’s artistic self with his experiences growing up in a small steel mill town south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “To me, I’m confronting and knocking down stereotypes, and embracing that I am from the ghetto, I am from the inner city, but I’ve chosen this path, this unique path of puppetry,” Jeghetto said to WBUR in 2018.

After working as a barber for many years, while also creating art, Jeghetto moved to North Carolina in 2005 and began working with Paperhand Puppet Intervention, a puppet theater company based in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Since then, Jeghetto’s puppetry has continued to evolve and he has established himself as an innovative puppetry artist whose work can be both joyful and somber, and that centers the Black experience. His work ranges from the whimsical to the heart-wrenchingly real, and often looks back on history with a discerning eye while also looking towards the future. In 2018 Jeghetto brought his adult show Just Another Lynching: An American Horror Story to Puppet Showplace Theater, with support from the BU Arts Initiative. Some of his other work tells modern and futuristic stories, like The Hip Hopera of 5P1N0K10, which uses music, video, and found-object marionettes to spin the classic story of Pinocchio as an Afrofuturist parable about a robot that longs to be a real B-boy in a post-apocalyptic future.

In addition to his own original productions, Jeghetto’s work has been featured in a Missy Elliot music video, in an Amazon Echo commercial, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and at Blackspace, a North Carolina-based Afrofuturism arts collective. He was also a guest on The Steve Harvey Show, and performed puppetry on The Voice and HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness.