Tim Gosley

Tim Gosley’s four decades in puppetry include a wide spectrum of projects. He just built and performed the lead puppet for a Toronto television pilot. Currently, he experiments through puppetry with autobiographical subjects: The Heart Coffer & Le Bloke de North Hatley (under development). He was the festival director for Puppets for Peace in Victoria, B.C. He is a Gemini Award winning puppeteer on TV series including the Muppets Fraggle Rock, and was Basil Bear for nine years on Canadian Sesame Street.

He creates his own shows for both families and adults in different techniques including LED shadows; low-tech live video; object manipulation; and Muppet-style manipulation. The content ranges from children’s shows like The Ugly Duckling, which toured German, the UK, Austria, Taiwan and across Canada, to the avant-garde including Michael McClure’s 60’s hallucination “The Meatball.” Since moving to Victoria (2008), he started building giant puppets, which he has created for The City of Victoria, Theatre Terrific, and Puppets for Peace. He conceived and produced a 24 cast of community mixed-nations performers with Roy Henry Vickers telling the Tsimshian tale, Peace Dancer.

His latest suitcase performance is with Runaway Moon Theatre’s project, “How did you get here?” In 2020 he had an artist-in-residence fellowship at the Center for Studies in Religion and Society at The University of Victoria where he has created The Heart Coffer: an exploration into the universal heart through puppetry.