Photo: Sasha Arutyunova.
Austin Phillips, one of the last full-time professional makers of ventriloquist dummies in America.
Sometimes the unusual careers that one reads about seem to fall out of the blue onto the people.
Not so in the case of the young man making ventriloquist dummies in today’s story. It sounds like he was born to do this work.
Cornelia Channing writes at the New York Times, “In the backroom of a small, cluttered workshop in Portland, Maine, a figure lies facedown on a table. Its head has been cut open, exposing a delicate anatomy of brass rods, hinges and levers.
“It is motionless, as though sleeping. But soon it will turn its head, blink, crack a wry smile and part its lips to speak. Each movement will be directed by an intricate network of hand-soldered mechanisms concealed inside its small, hollow body.
“The figure is a recent creation of Austin Phillips, one of the last full-time professional makers of ventriloquist dummies in America. A craftsman working in a tradition that stretches back to Victorian music halls and vaudeville theaters, Phillips, 33, creates custom figures for performers and collectors while preserving a disappearing art.
“ ‘To some people, these are just puppets,’ Phillips said in a recent interview at his shop. ‘To me, there’s so much to them. It’s sculpture, casting, painting, sewing, mechanics, history, research, performance design — all at once. ‘They are like kinetic art objects.’ …
“Making a dummy begins with the face. Phillips pours resin into a handmade mold and then reinforces the shell with epoxy. Once the casting cures, a hollow skull is ready for eyes, a mouth and internal mechanisms. Phillips then paints the dummy’s features, creating distinct, expressive characters. …
“Phillips’s fascination with puppets began early. When he was 5, his parents took him to a mall where he spotted in a shop window a toy Charlie McCarthy, the monocled dummy made famous by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.
“Phillips was transfixed. ‘There was something about it that really drew me in,’ he said. ‘It looked mechanical and yet somehow alive.’
“By 14, he was carving his own figures from wood and building simple machines, obsessed with anything that could be taken apart and fixed, like pinball machines and motorcycles. While studying technical theater at the University of Maine at Farmington, he built dummies in his dorm and began selling them on eBay, which snowballed into a career. …
“To create the interior mechanisms, Phillips hand-solders brass components that will control every blink and smile. Each element is attached, via wires or strings that run through the neck, to a small lever in the puppet’s torso. …
“The puppets vary in complexity. Some have simple designs with just a moving head and mouth, while others are elaborately mechanized with 10 or more finger-operated levers. These can have eyelids that blink and wink, eyebrows that rise and lower, lips that appear to spit, ears that wiggle and legs that kick — all in one figure. …
“Most of his customers are collectors and hobbyists, but a few are professional ventriloquists. He recently repaired a talking-dog apparatus for a performer. Another customer, the comedian and ventriloquist Sophie Becker, has called him from the road for emergency repairs.
“ ‘We changed a string over FaceTime once,’ he said. …
“Phillips is a one-person shop. The workdays are long and, with only the puppets to keep him company, can be lonely. But business is good, he said, pointing to a small dry-erase board on his studio wall that was covered with orders. He has more work than he can keep up with. … A simple figure can take three weeks if he moves quickly. A custom job can take six months or longer.”
More at the Times, here.
