Ann Arbor's FestiFools parade announces return just months after its cancellation

After a two-year hiatus, FestiFools, the annual Ann Arbor-based papier-mâché puppet parade, will return.
 
Mark Tucker, the University of Michigan art professor who founded FestiFools, briefly turned leadership duties over to Assembli (originally Wonderfool Productions), the nonprofit he'd founded to handle the administrative and logistical details associated with the event.
 
"I really feel like these events belong to the community now, but there's got to be someone who's driving this train," Tucker says.
 
When the nonprofit disbanded earlier this year and announced the end of FestiFools, Tucker realized he had a decision to make: "'Do I just let [FestiFools] go? Or do I jump back in full force?'"
 
Tucker says he was originally inspired to create FestiFools when he was teaching a class primarily attended by students who weren't art majors.
 
"If this was going to be maybe the only class they ever took that was art-related, instead of just putting [their work] away in a drawer … they could take it out into the public," he says.
 
Tucker also wanted to see students focus more on collaborating and asking for help: "You need people more and more, the older you get."
 
Over the years, FestiFools has proved immensely popular, garnering increasing numbers of participants and spectators.
 
"I think what [people are] responding to, if I take a guess, is the fact that we're making these inanimate objects and we take them to the street and they become anthropomorphic," Tucker says. "They turn into real live monsters or beasts or characters. … There's that weird childhood magic that takes place between the spectators and the pieces the students have made."
 
But Tucker thinks the increase in spectators has had at least one unintentional result: "diluting the creative content" of FestiFools so that the focus shifted from attracting participants to attracting spectators. He'd like to shift the emphasis back to being creative, as he says "it's much more powerful if the folks that come together for these events actually created the event themselves."
 
Tucker says he was also drawn to a Mark Twain quote about April Fool's Day: "April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364."
 
"I just thought that's so true," Tucker says. "We think … especially in a college town — we're brilliant, but really, we don't know. We don't know what's happening tomorrow."

Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.

Photo by Doug Coombe.