ATHABASCA - If you happened to be walking by, you wouldn't even notice Hawkey Studios, unless you knew it was there, and you would have no sense of the treasures that await you there once you cross the threshold — it's like Santa’s Workshop tucked away into its own little, magical space.
It's a centre for imagining, experimenting and creating that just so happens to share a building with a dental office in the heart of Athabasca, but if you walk into the right door, the colourful walls will introduce you to the dozens of felt creations that adorn them, just waiting for personalities, as you are transported back to the heyday of Jim Henson’s Muppets, or Fraggle Rock, and that is exactly the whimsical style that Jonathan, 38, and Dusty Hawkey,35, have been perfecting for more than 15 years now.
“When we started the puppet studio, what we wanted to originally do when we opened was to provide something that was art space, that you would normally only get a chance to see if you were in an urban centre,” he said. ‘We can really do our business almost anywhere now; we just choose to do it here because we love it here.”
Dusty is the reserved one, a little more behind the scenes, until you hear one of her puppet characters sing, then you are mesmerized by the amazing voice that comes out of someone as quiet as she is. Jonathan is the high energy one, excited to point out hidden treasures in their main line of work — puppets — and now in the new music studio they’ve built called The Nest.
It was a leap of faith that led to Hawkey Studios, he said, the hidden gem tucked away in the unassuming office building in Athabasca — who would expect that puppets ordered from all over the world would be made right here near the river? And now a recording studio being built right in the in the middle of a pandemic.
"I've got this real firm understanding that in business, if you don't change your model, or your plan or what you're doing every five years, you really run the risk of not lasting," he said. “That's why it's always good to kind of look at your model, look at what you're doing, and look at how you can grow and change and diversify because the world is always changing.”
Jonathan had ties to the area long before he and Dusty officially moved to town, and while Dusty is originally from Newfoundland, the pair met in Edmonton.
“The cabin out at Baptiste Lake has always been in the family and my folks retired, kind of semi-retired, and moved out here about 13 years ago,” Hawkey said as he provided the Advocate with a tour of the studio last week. “Then we had the opportunity to move out here and take over the cabin there so, that's what we did and we've been here ever since.”
It took a while, but they eventually outgrew their workshop at the cabin and had to relocate to a larger space in town, finding the unassuming location they are in now.
“We converted our boathouse there into a workshop and so that's kind of where we were primarily doing a good chunk of our business,” he said. “And then it came to the point, about two years ago, that we outgrew our workshop.”
In that workshop though they made three different-sized versions of Audrey II for a production of Little Shop of Horrors complete with root pants for the puppeteer to wear to make the roots move, along with two other puppeteers running the mouths of the other vines with bicycle breaks, inspired by a technique used in the movie Tremors.
“When the movie first came out, I saw this little behind-the-scenes, in the making of Tremors,” Hawkey recalled. “They were testing different cable lengths and what they wanted to do is see how long they could make the motion work before the brake cable snapped. So, I started thinking about that.”
Dusty went to school to be an archeologist and anthropologist and is an artist and Jonathan studied music and Fine Arts, all of which has been translated into making puppets in some way, which is mostly a self-taught art.
They did however take a course at the Stan Winston School of Character Arts — Winston was known for his creatures in Terminator, Alien, Predator, the first three Jurassic Park movies, Edward Scissorhands and more — and one from Rick Lyons who did the puppets for Avenue Q, a musical comedy featuring actors and puppets that won a Tony Award in 2004 for Best Musical, Book and Score.
“And then a lot of it is just from guessing and tests,” said Hawkey. “I'd say most of the things that we get are just from trying things and seeing if they work.”
The Nest, the teaching room and recording studio, has a definite 1970s vibe to it, with an old keyboard you might expect to see Ray Manzarek playing alongside Jim Morrison. There is a ton of colour in every direction, and an old reel-to-reel just feet away that really drives home the vibe, while nearby, a much-more-modern computer is used to mix the music.
"None of this is new. Actually most of the stuff is from the 70s including the old (Fender) Rhodes (keyboard), the old reel-to-reel, which is pretty cool,” said Hawkey. “A lot of what I have here is kind of like old school 70s kind of stuff, because a lot of what we are starting to do in here is a lot of lo-fi, cool Motown stuff.”
The saying is, "If you love what you do you will never work a day in your life," and while some things require more work than others, the joy that emanates from the Hawkeys as they perform with their puppets extends to and is absorbed by anyone watching them.
“It's actually very similar to the Jim Henson Company. He had his production facility where he did all his Muppet-making and then he had his production studio, which was kind of like this, where he did all this video-editing and all the music and things,” he said. “And then what's really nice for the community is, we can offer some other services as well, like recording services for people, which is going to be really nice.”
For now, as the pandemic rages around them, the Hawkeys will continue to pour love into their puppets, their music and their students who learn guitar, keyboard, drums, ukulele and more from Jonathan and piano and vocals from Dusty, all either virtually or one-on-one. Jonathan also does instrument repairs and digitizes music and Dusty has added mask-making and some seamstress work to her long list.
“Dusty and I have always been musicians, and we've always kind of wanted a bit of a platform to put our music through, because we didn't always necessarily want it to be us" said Hawkey. “So, that's kind of where puppets come in. We were able to kind of use puppetry as kind of the vessel to put music out there.”
As for those puppets, made right in Athabasca, that find their way around the world?
Hawkey is bound by a non-disclosure agreement, but he was able to say that two of their puppets would soon be featured in a commercial. He was also able to talk about a custom Lemmy Kilmister puppet. Kilmister, who died in 2015, was the bass player and singer for the band Motörhead and is considered an icon by many in the heavy metal world.
“We're building an actual Lemmy portrait puppet,” he said. “It's gonna look exactly like Lemmy with the chin and the moles and his hat and the Ace of Spades looking thing; it's bigger meat hook hands. That's a commission for a fella for the holidays here. So, yeah, we get some interesting ones.”
