His name is Basil Twist. New Yorkers will get another look at his creations this Saturday, at the annual Halloween Parade.
He's a third generation puppeteer, and he's made quite a name for himself here and in shows all over the world.
Twist is constantly surrounded by stuff.
Twist: "Up overhead is a camel, you didn't notice, you walked underneath it."
Mishkin: "Just another day in New York, walking underneath a camel."
Some of his best stuff he scavenged off the streets.
"This is an old Santa Claus wig," he says.
So for the acclaimed puppeteer, a cleaner New York is not necessarily a better New York.
"People throw out too much stuff and it gets hauled away. Twenty years ago that was not as much of an issue. People would just leave stuff out and you could take it."
Basil Twist's inventive work has been staged at small downtown performance spaces, Lincoln Center and all around the world. His work inspired the design for the “Dementors” in the film “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. His spider is a staple of the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. And he's the recipient of a Macarthur Foundation honor — the so called Genius Award.
The puppets he's made at his Greenwich Village studio for two decades have intrigued audiences.
But the most important audience is the puppeteer himself.
"If when I start to make it move, I actually am under its spell, that's the whole reason I do it," Twist says. "Because I like it. And then consequently I think it will work for other people. That's a secondary thing. It has to delight me first."
His most recent show, "Sisters Follies Between Two Worlds", incorporates the 100-year history of its home — the theater at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side.
Twist says the theater affords him a rare luxury — space.
"Mostly I work in little cool funky places that are converted spaces that were once a schoolhouse, or a mattress factory," the puppeteer says. "So here I can be on the ground. And I can make my ghost puppet come to life just by working it on the ground here."
Twist works with all types of materials — but his favorite is silk.
"No matter who's touching it, no matter if anybody’s touching it, it has a beautiful life to it," he says.
"Because its silk also it has all this life inherent in them. As they kind of whisk around the stage they’ve got tons of life. It doesn’t take much to make these feel ghostly and gorgeous."
The string marionettes made of silk are tangible.
The reasons why we find them so intriguing are not.
"When you see something that looks like it's alive but you know it's not, that's a huge," Twist says. "It's an existential dilemma. That's what happens in the simplest kids puppet show. That distinction between what you know and what you believe."
At the Dorothy B. Williams Theater in SoHo, named for Basil Twist's grandmother, there are encased puppets that belonged to Twist's grandfather, Griff Williams, a big band leader in the thirties and forties who used puppets in his act.
Twist's mother was also involved in puppeteering.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Twist took to puppeteering early.
But when he got to high school, he simply stopped.
"Because it was too childish when you're in high school and you're concerned with being cool and puppets weren't as cool as they are now," Twist says. "I am now, happily a gay man, but back then you're all concerned with your identity and what people think of you, and I didn't want to be childish or sissy and so puppets were a dead giveaway. So you had to be a closeted puppeteer."
He headed off to Oberlin College in Ohio — briefly.
"What was I going to study, history, philosophy, medicine?” Twist asked. "I had no interest, there was nothing clear that I wanted to pursue as an adult. And I had a reminder of puppetry when I was there and I said yes, that's what I want to do. That's what I was good at."
So he moved to New York. And desperation, the calling card of so many young artists who come here, kicked in. In his first week, Twist was looking up puppet companies at the library for performing arts when he approached a woman who was featured in an exhibit — renowned director Julie Taymor.
"Julie was there by herself, taking things down and wrapping them up,” Twist recalls. "I introduced myself, and got to know her and kept in touch and eventually was in one of her productions."
Twist had the tenacity. But he needed more skills.
Twist spent three years studying at an international institute for puppetry in France. He is still the only American to graduate from the school. He returned to New York and dove right into the downtown arts scene.
The show that put Basil Twist on the map was "Symphonie Fantastique" in 1998.
The New York Times described it as "the most difficult piece of theater in New York to describe," a show that had, as the Times put it, "adjectives running for their lives."
It started with a piece Twist found on the street.
"I found this aquarium, I had been wanting to make an abstract puppet show primarily, the water was an idea that intrigued me," Twist says. "And then it was clear that was a great way to make things more abstract."
"Symphonie Fantastique" opened doors for Twist.
One of them was an invitation to work on one of the biggest enterprises in movies — Harry Potter.
"It was amazing, it was incredible, it was intimidating also," Basil says. "We did create a simple sequence with a figure that we made out of fabric.
"It did become that they did use computers, to do it but they used, you can see in the film, it looks like they took the stylistic model of what I had done."
Basil Twist was first drawn to puppets as a child. The attraction remains strong, and profound. He is still intrigued by the idea of seeing life in something lifeless.
"We are surrounded by technology and magic that doesn't actually touch our souls in such a simple way as a piece of fabric on a string that can spook us," Twist says.