Procession puppet maker hopes 24-foot bird will work

The 22nd annual Procession of the Species will march, dance, wiggle and roll its way through downtown Olympia on Saturday.

The human-powered procession, a moveable feast for the eyes, celebrates Earth Day with birds, bees, flowers, trees and at least one rhinoceros — all set to a soundtrack of samba, brass-band and African drumming.

It’s definitely a highlight of Olympia’s spring social calendar, drawing tens of thousands of spectators, but the fun isn’t meant to be frivolous, said procession founder Eli Sterling.

“Our goal is not to provide people an afternoon of delight,” said Sterling, president of Earthbound Productions, the nonprofit behind the annual celebration. “The goal is to generate an understanding that being on this planet is both a miracle and a responsibility.”

Last year’s procession drew about 1,800 participants, a smaller number than in years past, and Sterling predicts it will again be on the smaller side — he guesses there’ll be about 1,500 people showing off their costumes, dancing, pushing floats, riding bikes, carrying windsocks, playing music and so on.

But if size matters, the participants in this procession will have plenty to crow about.

Besides such standbys as the smiling sun, the zebra and the aforementioned rhino, this year’s procession will feature several new creatures on a grand scale.

There will be an octopus with legs 8 feet long.

There will be a bigger-than-life manta ray.

There will be a 19-foot-long narwhal — a horned whale that’s known as the unicorn of the sea — swimming amid fabric waves. (The narwhal can also be illuminated, and it will make its debut in Friday’s Luminary Procession.

And there’ll be a big bird — a lot bigger and more realistic than the Sesame Street character, though both are puppets.

This bird — whose species will be revealed Saturday — is 24 feet tall, 25 feet long and 30 feet wide. It’s a stick puppet, with a spine of metal and a skeleton of plastic, and a team of up to two dozen people needed to move it through the streets. It will process surrounded by a flock of chicks portrayed by costumed children, second-graders at Olympia Waldorf School.

The puppet is the work of longtime processioneer Jerry Berebitsky, who created the 22-foot-tall giraffe that made a splash in the processions of 2013-15.

That giraffe, said to be one of the world’s largest nonmotorized puppets, wouldn’t look so big next to the massive and mysterious bird.

Building a puppet on this scale is itself a massive undertaking, although the construction phase is taking him just three weeks.

The design was the big challenge, said Berebitsky, who plans everything on graph paper before he builds it. And until he assembles the whole creature — which he can’t do without a full team of volunteers — he can’t be sure of its success.

“I tried to pick a piece that I didn’t know how to make,” he said in an interview last week at the Procession Studio. “I keep telling people that it’s possible that this won’t work, and I won’t know that till the day of the Procession.”

He also wasn’t sure whether he’d have enough volunteers to carry the bird. (Anyone interested in helping is welcome to meet him at 11 a.m. Saturday at the studio, 406 Water St. SW, Olympia.)

But if Berebitsky admits to moments of doubt, he does have plenty of experience with ambitious puppets.

Before moving to Olympia, he did technical and production work for opera and theater, and that included making a few puppets, something he discovered he loved to do.

When he moved here in 2006, Berebitsky quickly got involved in the Procession — watching in 2007; participating in 2008 with wife Diksha and children Celena, then less than 2 months old, and Yuri, then 3; and making his first big procession puppet, a bigger-than-life pink elephant, in 2009.

“When I came into the studio and made the elephant, people laughed at me and wondered who that crazy guy was,” he said. “It barely got through Procession.”

The following year, he made a spider with a web 34 feet across, convincing those who’d doubted his skills. The web was, like the elephant, pink.

“The pink came from me and my wife’s wedding celebration,” he said. “We had bolts of fabric to decorate with, and when I moved to town and discovered the Procession, my thought process started with, ‘What can I make out of all this pink fabric?’ ”

“When I did the spider, I really made a connection with spiders,” he said. “It was magical. We always get spider webs at our house, but that year, there was this abundance of webs.”

The connection has continued.

“My children like to watch the spiders,” he said. “We never knock down the webs. And we sometimes feed them when we catch a bug.”

This story was originally published April 20, 2016 at 8:45 PM with the headline "Procession puppet maker hopes 24-foot bird will work."