Puppeteer Will Schutze holding his main puppet – Mr. Bonetangles (Photo by Zain Haider)

Will Schutze and I sit in a van rolling down US-75, hopping into the air briefly every few seconds as the vehicle bounces over bumps in the road. As we head towards downtown, Schutze’s lifelong friend Elliot, in the passenger seat tinkering with a camera and tripod, puffs on a cigarette barely making contact with his lips. Lying next to my feet are a dusty top hat and a brown suitcase – the tools of Schutze’s trade.

Performance is Calling

Will’s bed is in the back of the van separated from the rest of the vehicle by a curtain, and when he’s not living in Dallas with his parents’, Will ekes out a living sleeping inside his car like a hermit crab that visits its family on a regular basis. Performance is Will’s calling, and in recent years he’s gotten tangled up in puppeteering. For Will and his close circle of friends and family, the shift into busking – or street performance – wasn’t a shock.

“I thought he’d do something in show business,” Elliot says. “We put on plays when we were kids.”

Elliot Kaiser, Will’s friend and neighbor since the two were in elementary school, helms the A/V equipment during our excursion to Pegasus Plaza. Kaiser’s experience shooting videos of Schutze and his gang of friends skating or pulling pranks led to his involvement in Will’s more recent projects filming his performances as Mr. Bonetangles.

“We’ve always been interested in it [film], more or less. We used to make videos in high school. I was always filming them when they would go on skating exhibitions,” Kaiser says.

Recently Schutze and his crew (including Kaiser and Alex Wagner, a cinematographer) turned their teenaged fascination with video and media into several projects involving Will’s performances including straightforward footage and a possible TV pilot. However, for most of the time since Will started performing in the fall of 2008, he’s kept both his plans and performances running at a modest pace.

“I just thought of it as an odd job to save up money to go out to LA. I got out there and everything happened all at once. I got an agent. I booked this commercial. They were really excited. They were like ‘Wow you’re awesome. This is great!’ and then nothing else happened,” Schutze says, reflecting on his time spent trying to make it in Hollywood.

From L.A. to the State Fair of Texas

Before he made the neo-classic American pilgrimage to that Mecca of lost dreams and cosmetic abundance, though, Schutze experienced puppeteering for the first time and felt an immediate connection with the craft. At the State Fair in 2008, 22-years-old and unsure about his future, Schutze performed as a puppeteer and emcee under the helm of John Hardman. Hardman, who’s behind many of the puppetry attractions at North Park Mall near Christmas and runs the “World on a String” show for the State Fair, trained Schutze for a month before his debut. Hardman’s approach – hands off and organic – led Schutze to appreciate the puppets as more than toys.

“Every time I had a coach or a teacher, it just drove me crazy. I just wanted to figure things out on my own. It was great that John was just like ‘Here go play.’ It just fit perfectly,” Schutze says.

Schutze’s first lesson in the puppet biz was that the majority of a puppeteer’s time is spent taking care of parts and maintaining the puppets with new clothes and coats of paint. With less than a week before the actual show, the puppeteers at the State Fair begin to rehearse their performance.

This focus on foundation and development seeped in Schutze’s creative process now that he busks full-time (although he still performs at the Fair every year). While Schutze loves the time he gets to spend out performing on the streets and meeting pedestrians, he devotes more time thinking about new directions to take his show and clever additions.

The Star of the Show

Even the name of his troupe’s main star – Mr. Bonetangles – took on this type of creative evolution. Starting off with the song “Mr. Bojangles” by Jerry Jeff Walker, something Will remembers Elliot listening to as a child, and incorporating the irritating tangles a puppeteer faces during every performance, Schutze landed on the name Mr. Botangles.

Travelling around the country, Will’s encountered many other buskers and a few that stood out for their oddity. In New Orleans, Will’s favorite city to perform, Schutze had a brief puppeteering battle jam with a local artist named Kalan.

“I’m sitting there doing my show, and this guy my age pulls up on a bicycle wearing a filthy, purple spandex leotard,” Schutze says. “He’s just this squatter, punk puppeteer, anarchist, shaman that studied comparative literature at Oberlin.”

With a little help from Will’s friends, the name eventually became Mr. Bonetangles and the witty influence of this title creeps into the performance itself with easy-to-miss jokes and the occasional, well placed pop culture reference.

Family Support

Will’s creative bent can be traced to his parents – both journalists at different newspapers. Jim Schutze, Will’s father, sparked controversy with his ideas about racial politics in his 1986 book “The Accommodation” and continues to undermine the mainstream establishment viewpoints with his work at The Dallas Observer. Will inherited this contrarian style in his work, and more recently, in political statements.

 “During the 2008 election, Will and his friends made this huge, gigantic banner that they hung over the freeway in Austin with pictures of Obama, McCain, and the Vice Presidential candidates saying ‘Welcome to the puppet show’,” Jim Schutze says.

Although Jim struggled with the idea of his son as an itinerant puppeteer, he’s recently started to appreciate Will’s writing and specifically his work making music.

“I realized in listening to it that it’s very layered and interesting. I know that he’s a real thoughtful, smart guy. I still just feel sort of out of it in terms of trying to understand it [puppetry] and his particular take on it,” Jim says.

While father and son don’t share the same vocation, they have a lot in common when it comes to spreading information and championing transparency.

“We have this almost divine access to information now – which is the shit. I think there could be a lot discussed about intellectual property with my show. It’s a sort of experiment. I believe in freedom of ideas, and I believe in the more we share the better we’d be,” Schutze says.

Meeting Will

I met Will at a birthday party for our mutual friend Rachel Wilson. Deep into the night, as most of us became bleary with drink, Will propped open his suitcase in the center of the room (which contains a stage and internal speakers) and started to run through his performance – a mixture of creepy carnival music, classic rock, and original songs.

“Will and his premiere puppet – Mr. Bonetangles – have a special bond. They sweat together. They travel cross-country together. They enchant the masses together,” Wilson says.

While alcohol definitely made the audience more receptive that night, Schutze still draws a crowd on a Thursday afternoon as we huddle in Pegasus Plaza and fight off the wind. A homeless man named Randall calls out from the other side of the street nicknaming Schutze “The Puppet Master” and coming over to laugh at new additions to the set.

A few pedestrians recognize Will and stop to talk or drop money in his overturned hat. Will clearly makes friends on the streets, but busking makes for a solitary existence.    “When I’m just by myself, I have so much freedom, but it’s very lonely. That’s the price you pay. You run the risk of it getting stale if you don’t bounce ideas off anyone,” Schutze says.

This Summer it’s South Carolina

However lonely he gets on the road, Schutze maintains a long distance relationship with his girlfriend Ashley Brundrett, and plans on living with her in Charleston, South Carolina this summer while she begins her residency as an Ophthalmologist. The two have been dating on and off since they were 19, and at 26, Schutze still hasn’t completely made his peace with the nomad lifestyle.

“I’m going this way, but there’s this really strong rein pulling me over here. I’ve always had to reconcile polar pulls in different directions. I guess mainly the only example that I can give – a concrete one – is Ashley, my girlfriend, as opposed to my nomad lifestyle. I really love driving down the highway to someplace I’ve never been. I really believe, or I’m telling myself, that I can get that out of my system,” Schutze says.

For someone who spends most of his day stringing along marionettes, Will Schutze deals with forces constantly tugging at him. Schutze may not be willing to commit to living in a single place just yet. For now his home is in a suitcase with a motley crew of skeletons, clowns, and jackrabbits.