When Cirque du Soleil served as a headlining act at last month’s resurrected Immerse arts festival, the lion’s share of applause was aimed toward the colorful aerial acrobats dangling from a construction crane above downtown and the fairy-like unicyclists circling beneath them. However, the Orange Avenue audience also gave a big, warm hand to “Mainamie,” the giant white glove with legs who serves as the main heroine’s maternal mascot in Drawn to Life, Cirque du Soleil’s resident show at Disney Springs.
For the past year, that role has been primarily played by Caroline Bernier-Dionne, a multitalented Canadian performer who also serves as the production’s puppetry coach. To highlight this week’s celebration of World Puppetry Day on March 21, Cirque recently invited me on an exclusive backstage tour with Bernier-Dionne to learn how they make desks gallop and sheets of drawing paper dance five nights each week.
A native of Québec, Bernier-Dionne was cast in her first Cirque du Soleil show in part for her figure skating skills, landing a role in the 2018 touring ice show Axel. After a pandemic pause, Bernier-Dionne returned to Cirque’s stage last year. In addition to performing in up to 10 shows weekly, she’s “in charge of all the puppetry aspect of the show: supervising the puppeteers, how they work, the artistic precision [and] quality.”
“If you do [puppetry] well, it brings something really magical to the audience,” says Bernier-Dionne. “It’s really close to magic for me; it’s the illusion of life.”
Our tour took us from the grid’s vertiginous catwalks high above the stage down into the bowels below it, where the elevator lifts from the old La Nouba show still function, with stops along the way in the costuming department (where dozens of loads of laundry are washed every day) and the fully equipped training gymnasium. One highlight was the props shop, where technician Gracen Gilmore and her team proudly showed off a newly rebuilt animator’s desk that conceals a puppeteer inside.
“Puppets have a life, and so after a certain life span, we have to repair and replace them,” Gilmore says, explaining how they make each successive generation of props for this ongoing production increasingly ergonomic, using techniques like 3-D printing. “People in our props team and myself have all been doing this as a labor of love.”
Finally, we ended in a rehearsal hall, where Bernier-Dionne introduced me to two of the show’s signature supersized puppets — Mainamie and a Comforting Sheet — inhabited by Andréanne Nadeau, who ordinarily portrays the main character’s mother.
First, Nadeau danced delicately despite the enormous hand’s 18-pound weight, demonstrating how she manipulates the thumb with one arm while pulling wires with the other to clench its fingers. “Puppetry is really physical. We are sweating a lot,” Bernier-Dionne explains. “It’s also a lot of dance, so the person inside has to have some skills and elegance on how to position the feet.”
Next, Nadeau slipped inside one of the larger-than-life animation sheets, onto which Disney sidekicks like Olaf are projected, while Bernier-Dionne pointed out the infrared dots that allow cameras to track and adjust the images. Bernier-Dionne coaches new performers “how to breathe in this big structure, how to make it really alive, [and] to use all the curves,” she says. “I call my puppeteer the light catcher: They have to get the light on them and be aware of how the light responds.”
Despite the show’s exacting technical demands, “I always give to the puppeteer some freedom,” says Bernier-Dionne, who insists that there’s still some room for artistic freedom within their scripted tracks. “You can improv, you can do something creative, because we are not robots. We are puppeteers, we are creators. We create in the moment, in the present.”
Like most Cirque performers, Nadeau had no prior puppetry experience, but says that “puppetry is really an art that I think everybody embraced, because we all had to learn so much to perform it and really bring life into those inanimate objects.” She credits Bernier-Dionne with being “a master puppeteer [who] has such love and passion for the work, she had us all falling in love with these characters.”
To transform non-puppeteers into lovers of the craft, Bernier-Dionne employs “my enthusiasm, but also the fun of it,” she says. “I always gather like a hockey team. I always bring as a Canadian the spirit of, ‘OK, let’s go!’ and we clap before, and we do this as a game. It’s the game of puppetry.”
That kind of infectious, unpretentious enthusiasm makes Bernier-Dionne a perfect international ambassador for an art form she half-facetiously says “could bring peace on earth.”
She serves as vice president of the Canadian branch of UNIMA, the nearly century-old union of puppeteers around the world, during a challenging time for artists trying to work across the U.S.–Canada border, but she remains positive despite tensions between the governments.
“I feel art is really something that has no boundary,” Bernier-Dionne concludes. “Puppeteers are artists that gather internationally together really well, because in puppetry, it’s not [about] us, it’s always the object. It’s really, I feel, therapeutic for mankind to get some puppetry going around.”
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This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.