Tales From Cowtown - A Puppet Show

Tales From Cowtown is a project by The Cowtown Serenaders, a Humboldt County based puppet troupe created by Tayloranne Finch and Daniel Nickerson. This project is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, through the Upstate California Creative Corps program.

The show addresses environmental and public health in rural communities with a rustic multimedia performance featuring folkloric storytelling, a variety of puppetry techniques, and interjections of live and recorded music.  A group of artists are collaboratively building the show and executing a spring 2024 performance itinerary that includes schools, libraries, farmers markets, street festivals, and other cultural hubs in four rural counties of Northern California: Humboldt, Mendocino, Lake and Trinity.

The show invites rural audiences to creatively engage with the issues facing their communities: a fragile environment, an unsure economic future, and limited access to social support systems. Rural resilience is the unifying theme, encouraging audiences to take an active role in recovery efforts, and in the restoration of balance to the environment.