“The Return” is a hybrid puppet show and group art exhibition, with eight performances that took place at CPM Gallery between September 17-25.

In The Return, a woman relives her near-death experience in an effort to cope with her past and remember what she learned on the other side. This exploration of what it means to live significantly is examined through a multi-artist collaboration of marionette puppetry, sculpture, painting projection, and sound installation, to consider what contemplating death within a culture prone to death-denial can teach us.

The idea to do a puppet show at CPM arose at the beginning of covid in mid-2020, when much of our lives were controlled by fear, uncertainty, and the state. For many people, the novelty of being home alone for long periods, unsure about their future, became a heightened experience of being precariously close to death. Covid created a communal near-death experience (NDE), where people from different walks of life all around the world may have gone through a similar process of vacillating between existential crisis and revelation. This show is about returning into our lives with a new sense of purpose and clarity that can only come out of an extended meditation on the simultaneity of being both alive and near-death. In The Return the gallery, the home, the artwork, and the mind become a theatre in which the known and the unknown weave together into stories that give us purpose.

The script for The Return was written with these ideas in mind, and references real stories of individual NDE experiences and what people have claimed to see and feel on the other side of life, before being returned to their bodies. In The Return it is never stated explicitly what the NDE event is—the protagonist addresses the audience with an existential exploration of meaning in her life, now that she has been given a second chance.

The show includes two marionette performers and five contemporary artists, who have made works that respond to and engage with the five acts of the play:

Mark Fox – Producer of “The Return”, marionette and set design

Megan Murtha – Writer of “The Return” Script and Director of performance

Zoë Geltman – Lead marionette performer

Emma Wiseman – Marionette performer

Andrew Brehm – Sculpture

Luba Drozd – Sound installation

Florencia Escudero – Hanging sculpture

Meredith James – Ceramic sculptures

Reid Ramirez – Slide paintings and projections