Logan Robbins Is Giving Puppets (and the Planet) a Fighting Chance

About This Episode:

Logan Robbins is one of those rare theatre artists whose work sits at the intersection of science, storytelling, and a deep love for the natural world. As the artistic director of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Logan has built a practice rooted in environmental themes, puppetry, site-specific work, and creating space for emerging artists to find their footing in the professional theatre world. It’s a conversation full of warmth, curiosity, and genuine passion for what theatre can do.

Phil and Logan cover a lot of ground – from the origins of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company and what sustainable theatre actually looks like in practice, to Logan’s unusual path from aspiring marine biologist to professional puppeteer. Along the way, they get into the magic of making inanimate objects breathe, the Grogu effect on public perception of puppetry, and a surprisingly relatable detour into dyscalculia.

This is also a conversation about community, what it means to build one, how Halifax’s independent theatre scene functions with limited space, and why Logan started not one but two puppet festivals in the same year. If you’ve ever felt the inexplicable joy of watching a puppet come to life, this episode will remind you exactly why that feeling matters.

This episode explores:

• How the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company was founded and what sustainable theatre means in practice
• Logan’s journey from zookeeper and marine biology student to professional puppeteer and theatre maker
• The magic of puppetry and why breath is the key to bringing any object to life
• The Halifax theatre scene: independent companies, the Bus Stop Theatre, and Neptune’s growing role as a community hub
• Launching the Objective Puppet Test festival and the Atlantic Festival of Puppetry Arts
• And much more!

Guest: 🎭 Logan Robbins

Logan “Lo” Robins is a queer environmental theatre maker, puppeteer, director, producer, stage manager, science communicator, and Artistic Director of The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Co.

He is based in the Moolipchugechk region of Mi’kma’ki (colonially known as Herring Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada) and has performed around the world in theatres, on glaciers, and everywhere in between. In the summer of 2025 Logan performed as a puppeteer from Southern Spain to the Arctic Circle with “The Herds”- an international climate action project by The Walk Productions.

Logan is passionate about devised theatre, mask, puppetry, and outdoor site-specific theatre that connects audiences to the natural world. As a theatre maker they believe that prioritising collective creation and community care are key to creating art that forges pathways of empathy towards others, ourselves, and the planet.

Connect with Logan and The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company

🌐 Website: http://www.unnaturaldisaster.ca

📸 Instagram: @unnaturaldisastertheatre

📸 Instagram: @loganrobins

Subscribe & Follow:
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Podchaser | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio
📺 Watch on YouTube – Like, subscribe & hit the notification bell!

Support Stageworthy:
If you love the show, consider supporting on Patreon: patreon.com/stageworthy
Patrons get early access to episodes, participate in conversations about topics to cover, and more.
With three backer levels: $2, $7, and $20.

Thank you to my Patrons: Chris, Georgia, Heather J, Tanisha, Aisling, Cassie, Heather, Jeanette, Steve

Transcript

[Phil Rickaby]
Hello, welcome to Stageworthy. I’m Phil Rickaby, the host and producer of this podcast. Stageworthy is Canada’s theatre podcast, and on this podcast, I talk to people who are involved in Canadian theatre, from actors to directors to playwrights, stage managers, producers, composers.

If they’re involved in Canadian theatre, they’re people that I’m talking to. Some of the people I talk to will be household names, and the rest are people that I really think you should get to know. If you’re watching on YouTube, please make sure that you like this episode.

Leave a comment so that I know that you were here. Tell me what you enjoyed about this episode. And if you like Stageworthy in general, make sure that you hit the subscribe button and that bell icon so that whenever a new episode comes out, you’ll get notified that a new episode is available.

If you’re listening to the audio version, make sure that you’re subscribed. Go to your favourite podcast app, search for Stageworthy, and hit the follow button. And if the app that you’re using happens to be Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please consider leaving a rating and a review because those ratings and reviews will help new people to find this show.

It will boost this podcast and those apps’ algorithms so that more people can discover it. I do want to talk about my Patreon. It’s because of that Patreon that I’m able to do this show.

The people who’ve backed this podcast on Patreon are helping me to make this show because I can’t do it without them. And if you would like to help me to make this podcast, go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. It’s really affordable, and it’s in Canadian dollars.

So please consider doing that and helping me to make this show. I would be super grateful. My guest this week is Logan Robbins.

Logan is a queer environmental theatre maker, puppeteer, director, producer, stage manager, science communicator, and the artistic director of the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company. Here’s my conversation with Logan Robbins. I guess to get started, let’s talk about the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company and tell me what that company is and how did that name come about?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company is an environmental-focused theatre collective based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but our work is happening around the country and hopefully even further one of these days. It started in 2019 as a project with myself and some fellow graduates from the theatre program I went to, and the name just came about because I was consumed in school in theatre, but I also took a lot of science courses and studied natural disasters and sort of was interested in this idea of the planet as a whole facing an increasing number of unnatural disasters and what that looks like and how that folds into storytelling and responsibility as a theatre maker. So then, thus came the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Co.

[Phil Rickaby]
What kind of work do you do? Because I know that you do a lot of puppetry. Is that one of the mandates of the company?

[Logan Robins]
So the company, we’ve really kept it not free from mandates, but as open as we can just because, I mean, on one hand, selfishly, I have such a range of interests and if I see a really interesting project or play I want to put on or a story I want to tell, you know, it’s very open that way. I think the sort of unifying factor is this sense of creating sustainable theatre. We do a lot of site-specific theatre outdoors.

We do a lot of new works, a lot of musical theatre. There is definitely a lot of puppetry influence because I can’t help it, but it’s really, we do all sorts of stuff from, you know, producing new queer plays to writing musicals about deep sea creatures and all kinds of stuff.

[Phil Rickaby]
I’m curious about the phrase sustainable theatre. What does that mean to you?

[Logan Robins]
To me, it’s an experiment in trying to find out what it means. There’s not really a good answer yet. There’s a lot of organizations doing really excellent work to sort of finding out what we can do to make theatre more sustainable.

By virtue, a lot of theatre can be wasteful, especially independent theatre when budgets are very low, as they are for a lot of the arts and culture sector. It’s very easy to be wasteful because that’s just the necessity of making the art that we want to make. So questioning how we can lower our impact on the planet, how also we can uplift causes that are related to the environment and to the climate catastrophe.

So while not every one of our shows deals directly with themes of environmentalism, a large number of them do. So we try to uplift those stories about the natural world in a way where we’re hoping theatre can kind of be a way to not only put on a play that is done sustainably as best as we can, but also encourage people to hopefully challenge their own notions about deep-sea climate change or invasive species, be whatever be it in that play. So that’s sort of what we’re going for, is theatre that is not harming the planet on which we create the theatre because we need the planet to make the theatre on it.

[Phil Rickaby]
Honestly, how difficult is that? How difficult is creating sustainable theatre?

[Logan Robins]
At the scale we’re doing it, it’s not hard. It takes some conscious effort, but I think that’s the thing that is kind of maybe a happy surprise to a lot of people, is there’s a lot of satisfaction and joy in the creative problem-solving of how could we do this more sustainably? How can we reuse materials?

How can we build things out of natural materials? So sort of not just trying to find more sustainable ways of doing things, but finding the creative freedom of trying to do those sort of things. So it’s not just a measure we’re trying to implement, but rather part of the creation process.

It’s a lot more difficult for larger theatres, of course, because they’re producing much bigger shows on much bigger scales, often on a very quick timeline. So that’s something that I think we’re hoping we can really build something strong from the foundation, from the level where we’re an independent theatre, and it’s relatively easier for us to see how big we can grow while still prioritizing that. And maybe that will be a way to have this experiment yield a result of how it can be done.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Being in the Halifax area, being closer to the east coast, like on the ocean, I would imagine that the results of or the effects of climate change can be more apparent because the ocean is so greatly affected by that. And so being right there, it must be very apparent the things that are happening.

[Logan Robins]
Absolutely. I’ve been living in Nova Scotia for about 12 years, and even in that time, even in those 12 years, I’ve seen the ways in which anthropogenic climate change is impacting natural or unnatural disasters in Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. Just in the last three or four years, we’ve had some of the most devastating flooding and forest fires in history in Nova Scotia.

So it is really apparent. And being on the ocean too, it’s kind of this gift because we’re in a community of people where the ocean is such a part of their lives. For me anyway, I feel inspired to create work about the ocean and about the environment in general, but we did a musical for Ocean Week Canada a couple of years ago called Bottom Dwellers, a deep sea musical, which is about a young hagfish and urchin and crab who live in the deep sea, northern Atlantic, theoretically in kind of the gully marine protected area, which is near Nova Scotia.

And it’s sort of about these young deep sea creatures learning about climate change for the first time and sort of what eco-anxiety looks like for young people and also sort of trying to bring stories of the deep sea more to the surface. And that is so much easier to do in a place like Nova Scotia, where we have amazing organizations like Ocean Week Califax and Oceans North and the Discovery Center and so many places who supported us to tell a story and to write a musical about a 400-year-old shark and a singing hagfish.

[Phil Rickaby]
I do want to, I want to shift for a second because I know that you are a professional puppeteer. You’ve toured puppetry internationally. Puppets are a big part of your life.

Before we get into some of that, those details, my curiosity is what was your puppet gateway? What made you first interested in puppets?

[Logan Robins]
Oh, that’s a really good question. In retrospect, when I look back as a kid, I had a lot of stuffed animals that I would tell stories with and put on shows for my brother and sister. And it’s funny because as a kid, I found puppets to be an impure stuffed animal.

I didn’t like the idea of a stuffed animal having a hole in it and, you know, it took away its autonomy. But growing up, I very much pivoted the other way. I think the biggest gateway for me is I was a huge, huge fan of the film version of Little Shop of Horrors.

And in grade 12 in high school, I got the chance to direct the show and to do puppetry for Audrey 2. And that was really, that was kind of the lightbulb moment where I was just basking in the glow of like what puppetry is capable of. Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
A recent fact that I learned about the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors is that in order to make the puppet, the giant Audrey 2, work the way it does, Rick Moranis had to move in slow motion. Everything he does in the scenes with the puppets, he’s moving in slow motion and they will speed it up later. And so all of those scenes are him like trying to move as slowly as possible so that it doesn’t look like the puppet is moving slowly, which is an incredible feat of acting to do in a show like that.

[Logan Robins]
Totally. It’s that whole movie is just like when people talk about movie musicals, I feel like that’s truly one of the best and just like the puppetry and it’s such a, you go back and watch that and there’s such a like richness to just like the practicality of it all. And it’s the same with all, you know, film and TV from that time period where there was way more puppetry than, you know, in 2010s where it was just, but we’re going, I think society is moving back to puppets.

I think people miss the practicality of that, especially in film and TV. So yeah, puppets are like coming back.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, I mean, the, the, you know, Little Shop of Horrors as a perfect adaptation of a musical is, I saw that in the theatre when it first came out and I didn’t know much about this show. I knew it was on the commercials. I knew that I’d seen a little bit and I was curious to see it.

And it didn’t hit me that it was a musical until halfway through the opening number. It is so perfectly constructed that the singing doesn’t come out, doesn’t feel like it doesn’t belong. You know, it doesn’t have that like, now I’m going to sing moment.

It just like flows so well. So that either in the middle of that song, I was like, oh shit, it’s a musical.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s like, I, and I’ve been really lucky last year in Neptune theatre in Halifax, I did Little Shop of Horrors and I got the chance to assistant direct and do puppet direction and it was, it’s, it’s just the kind of show that is so musically tight and perfect and concise in its vision.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken are geniuses, very much what I aspire to when I try and write musicals and yeah, it’s, that’s a, that’s a show where if you’re ever susceptible to the influence of puppetry, I think that’s the one that gets a lot of people on the hook.

[Phil Rickaby]
For sure. You were talking about how the world needs, needs puppets and here we are recording this in the month that The Muppet Show made a return to screens and hopefully will do more, but I don’t, did you have a relationship with, with Muppets growing up? Because I know you’re younger, so you may not have had as much exposure.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, I definitely, I think I was born in 1996. I think I was definitely growing up in probably not, not the Muppet-iest of times. It was something I think more, it felt a little bit before my time as a kid, but then as I grew up, I was probably 12 or 13 when I first, first watched the original Muppet movie and that was also quite transformative, just sort of, it’s like kind of very adult story being told with these puppets.

I think really, and that’s always sort of inspired me, this idea that puppetry has sort of spent a lot of time being pushed into this box that it is for children. And I think the Muppets have always rebelled against that idea that, you know, puppetry is only for kids. And in fact, it can be for everyone.

And The Muppet Show did that. This new version of The Muppet Show, we can thank Seth Rogen and Sabrina Carpenter because it’s, it was great. I really loved it.

[Phil Rickaby]
The Muppets absolutely have been able to always push against that. I mean, I think they had, they suffered a little in retrospect from their association with Sesame Street, but that wasn’t what Jim Henson wanted to do. And the original Muppet Show series was absolutely a, it was a show for grownups that kids could also watch.

Any of the innuendos fly over the kid’s head because they’re subtle enough and they’re there for the adults to enjoy. And I think that’s one of those amazing things. And I agree that it was kind of perfect, this return.

Yeah, totally. With that, you know, you’re telling stories with your stuffed animals and your exposure to Little Shop of Horrors. When did you start to want to really work with puppets and make things with them?

How did that start for you?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, it kind of felt in a way like it came out of nowhere. I was pretty sure for a lot of my life that I was going to be a wildlife educator. I spent several years as a zookeeper and science communicator and working in a very different industry than, than theatre and puppetry.

And I went to university to study marine biology and animal behavior. And within my time in the hallowed halls of Dalhousie University, did a full 180 to my theatre degree. And I think, I think what I always wanted was to tell stories about the environment and about animals.

And I think I used to think I had to be a scientist who used art. And then what I realized is deep down, I was actually more of an artist who uses science. So I think that got the wheels turning of, you know, connecting people to the natural world and to non-human animals.

Puppetry is the best way to do that. And I think those cogs were spinning through my theatre degree, but it wasn’t until 2019, which is the year I graduated from Dalhousie. I took a puppet course with Dr. Don Brandes, who’s an incredible professor at Dal. And then I went to Mermaid Theatre, Nova Scotia, and did their three week animation training program, which is like as full throttle, trial by fire kind of puppetry training as you can do. And Nova Scotia is so lucky to have that resource, you know, 45 minutes from Halifax. Right out of my undergrad, I got fully headfirst into the puppet world.

And I was really lucky to get to work on several puppetry and mask product or projects right after that until pandemic. So I got like just enough in to really sink my teeth into puppetry. So even COVID couldn’t take it from me.

[Phil Rickaby]
I am really curious about that, that 180 that you did in school. How did that come about? How did you start making that change?

How did the idea occur? What happened?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, it happened slowly. It happened with some, you know, stops in geology and psychology along the way. I sort of had a very, like, I talked to a lot of people in theatre whose, you know, parents were like, I wish you were a lawyer or a doctor or a scientist.

And I really had the opposite where I told my parents I wanted to be a scientist. And they’re like, why, Logan, you’re an artist. So they were right.

Yeah, I got to give them that. And I’m very fortunate to have a family who supports having a puppeteer as a son and grandson and brother.

[Phil Rickaby]
And I have to say that is absolutely like the reverse story that you usually hear 100%.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. Yeah. And so I just, I went to, I am bad at math.

I’m bad at math. I struggled with statistics. I struggled with calculus.

I struggled with chemistry because it turns out that’s mostly math. Then we got into microbiology and all of a sudden we started measuring things and there was numbers. And yeah, so it was really like I was confronted with the fact that the parts of science I was interested in, the animal behavior and the science communication and animal husbandry, those were things that you can get a degree in, in some places, not at Dalhousie necessarily, but you’ve got to go through all the math and the chemistry and the calculus.

And they were things that I just, my brain, I’ve come to accept the things that I cannot change about my brain. And one of them is math. And I think once I kind of got over that hump of okay, I’m probably not even going to be able to get this degree in microbiology because I can simply not do these advanced functions equations.

But then I was also taking electives in theatre. So my very first year at university, I needed a writing credit. So I took writing, but theatre writing where I met Dr. Yuri Gantar, who’s an incredible professor who pretty much single handedly kind of took my hand gently and guided me toward the theatre path I was always meant to take. And then in my second year, I took a first year acting class as an elective for fun. And at the end of that class, they told me I should audition for the formal acting program just for fun, for the experience, knowing that I was a scientist. And then I auditioned for fun, for the experience.

And then they called me and told me I got into the program. And I was like, okay, I’ll see you in the fall.

[Phil Rickaby]
It’s interesting your story about math, because throughout my entire life, I struggled with math. And it was later at a certain point, I was diagnosed with, they called it a math perception problem. And they were like, the brain just doesn’t, the numbers don’t work in the brain.

And because they just called it that, and it didn’t have a name like dyslexia or anything like that, I was like, I’m the only one, I’m a freak, I’m dumb, all this sort of stuff. And it was only relatively recently that I learned that there’s a name for it. It’s called dyscalculia.

And it is a diagnosable thing like dyslexia. And as soon as I realized that I was like, okay, I can relax about this thing. It’s not just me.

Some people are, their brains don’t do math.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, yep. I have like very, again, very recently, like you encountered the idea of dyscalculia. And it happened, I was ordering food to a friend’s house.

And they got the app buzzed and said the food was there. And we went downstairs, and it wasn’t there. And we realized I had put in the address wrong, I put in the numbers just in the wrong order.

And we were walking like all along like the streets trying to figure out where it ended up. And then I was just like, you know, this isn’t the first time it’s happened, where the numbers just don’t go in the right order in my head. I googled that.

And I went down the rabbit hole and learned about dyscalculia. And I was like, oh, yeah, I guess in the same way that a person’s brain could run into obstacles with anything. Of course, there’s something for math.

Yeah, of course, I’m not the only one.

[Phil Rickaby]
Anytime that I have to write numbers down, like if I’m like looking over here, and somebody says, here’s some numbers, write them down over here. If it’s more than four numbers, I’m like, concentrating so hard. Because as soon as I look away from the numbers, it’s like they slip away like, like air.

[Logan Robins]
Yep. No, I it’s I’m the exact same. I’ve gotten in the habit of giving people my phone to like put in a phone number instead of taking it by ear.

Because I realized like, I will take it and I’ll read it back to them. And they’ll be like, No.

[Phil Rickaby]
Was that something that sort of plagued you when you were in public school as you were growing up?

[Logan Robins]
Enormously, like truly, and I was a really high achieving kid. I was kind of I was a teacher’s pet. I really, you know, I was the sort of kid growing up who it only took a couple people telling me, yo, you’re so responsible, like, oh, you’re so you know, what a, what a smart kid.

And that’s that, you know, that fueled the fire. So I really had a sort of complex of, oh, if I work hard, and I can impress these adults, like this is really great. And like, I like being smart, you know, quote, unquote.

And math was always this thorn in my side, where I was like, I don’t know why I can’t figure out this one thing when like, you know, I, I can write an essay, just fine. I can, you know, do this, like, genetics square thing. But as soon as it’s math, it’s like, just a nightmare.

And my poor father would help me with homework. And like, I think I nearly drove him to the edge. Because I can only imagine how difficult it is looking at something that you know, there’s an objective answer, and your kids there and not getting it.

Absolutely.

[Phil Rickaby]
It’s wild. Because like you, I was like, I was in grade four reading at a grade 12 level, I was like writing, I was doing all these things. And then math would happen.

And my brain would fall apart. And people would be trying to help me. I made somebody break pencils once they were so frustrated, because I couldn’t get the math thing.

Right. And that was a student, another student, not a teacher, but like, I frustrated everybody. Yeah.

And it’s, it was, it’s just like, to then finally be like, Oh, oh, it’s not. It’s I, I couldn’t help that. Yeah.

But there were no supports for that at the time. There was nothing that that that could get me through that.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, no, I had a very similar experience. And like, in retrospect, I’m just so grateful to have had like theatre and English class and like those things that I not only excelled in, but also like loved and like, you know, it’s I’m constantly grateful for my theatre community, especially because it’s often a bunch of people who were kids who could not, you know, do long division.

[Phil Rickaby]
I have to, I have to tell you one of the, I remember when we were seeing this, this doctor, this random story, see this doctor who’s eventually going to diagnose me with a math perception problem with, with what I realized later was dyscalculia. And they were trying to express to me the importance of math. And I’d always know, I’ve always known what I wanted to do.

And so they were like, well, math is so important. What do you want to do when you, when you grow up? And I was like, I want to be an actor.

And they went and they stopped because they were like, they weren’t expecting that. They were trying to tell me like how important math was going to be to every career. And, and I stumped them.

And so I felt I, there was a little part of me that was like, yeah, I gotcha.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

That’s the first acting challenge and you nailed it right there. You started a puppet festival. Yeah.

Yes. Very, very recently. Like just, just this past year.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. October, 2025. So tell me about, about the puppet festival and, and, and first off, how did, how did it come about and how did it go and how, what do you want it to be in the future?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. So I, I first have to say that it only came about because I was part of this ad hoc group called the Atlantic Festival of Puppetry Arts, which was also just this past year for the first time, a bunch of puppeteers and artists from Atlanta, Canada, a lot from Nova Scotia, wanting to put together a puppet festival because Atlanta, Canada has historically never really had a puppetry festival. So I was working with these incredible artists and presenters from across the province.

And we toured some shows and we had a kind of big final celebration at the Ross Creek Center for the Arts. So that was, that’s just a whole other very hugely exciting kind of puppetry festival. But what kind of came from that is just by virtue of where we were located and timing and budgets, there was no plan to really do anything in Halifax as a part of this big Atlantic Festival for Puppetry Arts.

So I was like, okay, I’m close to the city. I’m going to do something because we sort of had come up with this idea that October was going to be puppet month. So anything in October was kind of part of this big dream of a festival.

So I was producing a Halloween cabaret called the Macabre for the second year in a row alongside Around and Out Theatre Co. And we booked the Bus Stop Theatre, which is an incredible black box venue in Halifax, the only black box venue in Halifax because they’ve gotten rid of all the other ones to make condos. And we had the space booked to do this Halloween cabaret.

And I was like, you know what, just for a laugh, I wonder if like the day before is available. And it was. And I was like, okay, well, if I booked a theatre for this day already, and it’s available the day before, maybe we can have like a little mini Halifax centric puppet fest.

And the response was huge. There was a lot of people interested. Our social media, like I’m not one for like, checking views and algorithms that much, but we like spiked when we announced it.

It was our most viewed post of all time in the six years or seven years we’ve been a company, this call about a Halifax puppet festival. So it was just two days and we had workshops and performances and works in progress and short films. Like it was just a big smorgasbord of puppetry stuff.

The idea was to keep it really open and accessible so that everyone who wanted to participate could sort of for this first year. And it was really great. Oh, and all of this to say it’s called the Objective Puppet Test.

[Phil Rickaby]
It does not surprise me that an announcement about a puppet festival was like one of the most viewed things, because I, I think deep down, everybody loves puppets, right? Everybody loves the inanimate thing being brought to life. And I think everybody has, we’ve, we’ve had like, we’ve, whether we grew up on Sesame street or things on CBC kids or whatever, we grew up with puppets.

And then there’s something about them that is, that is almost always, there’s a joyfulness to puppets. Yeah. And I think, I think that that’s what people respond to.

You must have had like this, like a lot of response, not just from people doing the puppetry, but the audience as well.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, definitely. I think it just, it catches people’s attention because it’s, it’s new. There hasn’t really been a program like that in Halifax.

And I think people’s just awareness is kind of growing and like, this is all theoretical, but I think something kind of happened with the Mandalorian and with Grogu. And I think there was suddenly this thing where it’s like, look at this incredibly high profile puppet that people are obsessed with and they love that it’s practical and a real, and that, you know, there’s real like people controlling it. It’s not just a hundred percent animated.

And I feel like there’s kind of a moment in time around the Mandalorian coming out. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but I just think there’s sort of this became this greater appreciation for like, oh, I actually love knowing something is like tangible and real. And, you know, I think that has sort of like when people hear puppets now, it’s not just, oh, I remember watching Sesame Street as a kid.

It’s like, yeah, like puppets, like, you know, like that giant King Kong on Broadway or like, you know, Life of Pi on stage. Like it’s, I think there is a greater perception now of what puppetry can be. And it’s also like you said, it’s always been there.

It’s a such a universal art form. Pretty much every culture in the world has a historical practice of puppetry and it’s ancient. It’s thousands and thousands of years old.

There are cave paintings by like early humans that were painted in such a way that against flickering firelight would move to tell a story in a form of, you know, primitive object theatre. So it’s something I think we all hold deep down inside, like the same way you walk into a forest. And I think most people feel this some kind of deep stirring or connection to nature.

I think puppetry, at least for me, elicits that same kind of like, oh, I’m connected to actually something very deep and profound.

[Phil Rickaby]
I think you’re absolutely right about the Grogu effect and the Mandalorian. I think that, I don’t know if it may have like sparked a thing, but that was a set like such a moment because up until that point, they would have absolutely said, well, we’ll just CGI that in later. But because Jon Favreau was like, no, no, no, we got to do this practical.

It became a thing that exists, right? Everybody who’s in the scene sees how fucking adorable this thing is. Yeah.

Right? Like it’s not just like, oh yeah, we’ll make it adorable later. No, everybody sees it’s adorable, it’s moving, it’s there.

And it gave such weight and gravitas to everything that was happening. And I think you may be right about how the practical in that sort of spurred, would the Muppets be coming back? If not for that, maybe, but maybe not.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. Yeah, totally.

[Phil Rickaby]
One of the things that I always, and I’ve become aware of it more just as the art of puppetry, and I appreciate it so much. And it’s a thing that I didn’t think of, but many years ago, I did a stage show in which I was portraying a beloved children’s character with a large, tall head. That’s all I will say.

And one of the things that was said to me at the time is, oh, you can’t just stand still like that. That head has to move. Otherwise, he’s dead.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re not doing anything, you have to move even just a little bit to keep him alive. And after that, every time I would see the Muppets or something, I would notice the tiny movements that are just like, oh, this thing is still alive because it’s not doing anything, but it’s still moving. And that became the appreciation of keeping the puppet alive throughout all of these scenes.

It struck me as one of the finest parts of the artistry of it.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. And it’s beautiful and it’s unlike anything else. And when I teach puppetry, the very first thing, and I think it’s disappointing, especially when I’m teaching kids and they want to get their hands in there and start flailing around, just that it has to start with breath because we humans have so many preconceived biases when we see another living thing.

And those are evolutionarily hardwired into us. When we see a snake, there’s something way back in that primitive brain that’s like, whoa, I know how that thing moves and I know what its deal is. And it’s the same thing for any living thing.

And the thing in common with every living thing, I’m excluding jellyfish and whatever. Well, I won’t get into the minutia, but is breath, is this idea of animacy. And any object can come alive with breath.

And it doesn’t have to be this incredibly designed puppet on a Broadway stage. You can take pillow, a shoe, a pair of scissors. And if a puppeteer gives it breath, it will be alive.

And that is like, that’s like the key. That’s the trick. And like you’re saying, like when there is a puppet Grogu there that is breathing, because Grogu doesn’t, I mean, Grogu flips around, Grogu does a lot of stuff, but a lot of the time he’s just sitting there twitching his ears and looking really cute.

And when you see that, I can only imagine if you’re acting opposite Grogu, like that we, before our brain can think about the fact that this is not a living thing, we accept its animacy when it is breathing like that. And like that kind of fine work, the puppeteers do to me is like magic. Like it feels like a magic show in a way.

[Phil Rickaby]
It is a magic show. And the other thing that becomes magic for me is the fact that like, the puppeteer doesn’t actually have to hide. Like I’ve seen video of Jim Henson going on talk shows with Kermit, with Rolf, with different puppets.

And like, he’s just sitting there acting the puppet, but as soon as that puppet starts to talk, it’s the one you’re talking to. The eyes go to that, the host, without having to think about it, talks to the puppet. And it’s like, oh, it’s because this thing is alive.

Now I’m talking to it. And also it doesn’t hurt that so many of us have a warm feeling about these particular puppets, but I think that it’s a fascinating thing that the puppeteer doesn’t have to hide to make the puppet alive.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. It’s really like, and even as a practitioner of the puppetry art, you know, it’s still sometimes is inexplicably magical to watch. Like when I see a puppeteer, when a puppeteer believes an object is alive, everyone else will believe it’s alive.

And it’s like, it’s wild. A puppeteer can be doing the most technically perfect performance, but if they don’t believe it’s alive, it still won’t quite be enough. And as soon as you, and that’s a hard thing to teach, that idea of like, you actually really have to believe it.

You can’t think I’m going to make this object breathe up and down. I’m going to make the object look left or right. You have to kind of connect through into it.

It starts to become what almost feels like a very spiritual practice, but it’s, yeah, it’s a cool, it’s a cool thing, puppeteering.

[Phil Rickaby]
I want to back up a little bit again, and I want to talk about, I want to talk more about your journey towards becoming a theatre practitioner. Like you, I mean, again, apparently your parents knew that you were an artist before you did. So how did they, like, were you, you mentioned telling stories with stuffed animals as a, as a child, were you doing theatre as a child, things like that?

And then what made you not want to pursue that as a career?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. I was always an incredibly theatrical child, to put it gently for myself, both telling stories with stuffed animals and just, I had a lot of character. I really didn’t do theatre for the first time until I was in probably grade eight.

So I would have been 12 years old, and they were doing a production of Peter Pan. I don’t remember why I decided to audition or to suddenly be involved in theatre when I’d never really done it before. But yeah, that it just, that was the time that’s when it kind of seemed to make sense.

It’s, it’s probably more than coincidence that the infamous television show Glee came out around the time that I was like, wait a second, I think I might like theatre. Yeah. And then I went to high school and I was really fortunate, Bowmanville High School in Bowmanville, Ontario has a really great arts program.

It’s not like an arts specialty school necessarily, but it has a dance studio and a beautiful theatre, which the more I tour around, the more you know, you see cafetoriums and like, there’s sort of been this great dispersal of the actual theatre. So I like, I am so lucky that we, you know, I had a real proper theatre in high school. And I just decided, I’m like, I want to sing on stage.

I wanted to be a musical theatre performer was kind of the first instinct into it. And I was in West Side Story in grade nine. And then that summer, there was a community theatre production of West Side Story.

So I did it again. The next year, we did the Laramie project, which taught me that theatre can also be devastating. And then at that point, I was pretty all in, like, I really loved theatre.

I was taking the theatre courses. In grade 11, we didn’t do a show at all because of a teacher strike, which worked out for me in the best way, because in grade 12, they were kind of all still amiss. And I went in with a really good pitch to do Little Shop of Horrors.

And I had a drama teacher Catherine Lawrence, who believed in me. And she said, if you will do all the work and direct the show, then we will, I’ll make sure you get the funding and we’ll give you the resources. And I had to find a responsible adult.

So I was lucky I had a friend who was a teacher in a different district, who I’d worked on community theatre, West Side Story with Mike Johnson. And by the time I was finishing high school, like I was a theatre kid, hard. But I was also working at the zoo, and doing conservation and doing wildlife education.

And it was sort of this thing where I was starting to kind of formulate this idea of how I could use my storytelling ability and theatricality to toward this purpose of conservation. And like I said, I was just I was just convinced that no one would ever take me seriously unless I had a science degree, which I think is kind of pushed on kids a lot, this idea that if you ever want to be taken seriously for a thing, that’s what you have to study. And what I learned was, you can be a professional theatre artist and puppeteer, and write a musical about, you know, invasive hippo species.

And people will take you very seriously, because you got to know what you’re talking about, if you’re silly enough to do that. And everyone was like anyone who knew me, when I made the switch, was just like, yes, this makes sense. And like, it’s so much better to, to feel that you’re excelling at what you’re doing, than doing what you think is the right thing to do, but struggling every step of the way.

[Phil Rickaby]
It is very interesting how I think schools strip the arts out of people. Because it’s not even something that is like, all the schools are concentrating on STEM. It’s, it’s, we want science, technology, whatever the E and the M are, but not music, right?

Like, like science, technology, and whatever the other two are, it doesn’t matter. But like, when the, what they’re doing is they’re stripping out all of the things that are actually building empathy, and building creativity, and all that sort of thing. And so when you, when somebody wants to become an artist, or is thinking about that, they don’t have the foundation of these things, because schools aren’t dealing with it anymore.

And so it kind of makes sense that you would be like, I could be an artist, but nobody would take me seriously, if I don’t have a science background, which is wild.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. Yeah. So, and it’s the kind of thing where now I look back, and, you know, I have no regrets about the, the extra year it added to my degree, and all of the like, flipsy flopsy, and late nights crying over chemistry homework.

Like, I think, in the end, what I’m grateful for is now, I have, I was able to get more of the knowledge that I think I craved about the parts of science I was interested in, about animal behavior. I took every animal behavior course they had at Dalhousie, which was not very many of them, because you can’t get a full degree in that there. And, you know, so I think it was a, as I’m sure they’d be happy to hear, at the university, it was all a learning experience for me in a way that ultimately, is kind of got me where I am.

So I, I’m grateful to have all that background. But I think, you know, I think there’s probably, I think I learned a lot of lessons the hard way, where I think there are ways maybe it would have been great if I could have been set up to learn them the easy way. But it’s tough, because it’s, there’s a real cultural perception, even still, that this idea of like, if you go into the arts, you’re gonna be miserable, and you’ll never succeed, and, you know.

[Phil Rickaby]
Well, not, not with that attitude, you won’t. I mean, there’s, there’s so many different ways that you can, that you can use the arts, right? And it, it, it, it gives you so much, and yet, so many people are dissuaded from even like, considering it, which is so sad.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah.

[Phil Rickaby]
Now, I, I would love to talk to you, since I, you know, I’m in Toronto, and I don’t, I don’t know the Halifax scene intimately well. When I, I was in Halifax for the Halifax Fringe in, I think it was either 2017 or 2018, I don’t remember when, which one. And it was the last year of, you know, the bus stop, and there was another theatre across from the Rona, but it was like, built into like, I guess an old bus stop.

Yeah, yeah. That was like, the last year they were gonna have that, because it was going to become condos. Yep.

And I know about Neptune Theatre, but I don’t know much else about the theatre scene in, in Halifax. What, what, if you were to describe theatre in Halifax, how would, how would you describe it?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, I think, I think in a lot of ways, it’s an incubator. I think, you know, I think a lot of things that grow in Halifax, then expand, and, you know, out to Toronto, to BC, anywhere else, you know, like, I think Halifax sees the origin of a lot of incredible theatre artists. And, you have a lot of incredible theatres, but it is that there is also this sort of, it’s a small province, it’s a small city.

So it’s definitely, I think it’s really not so different than any other theatre community, other than maybe the scale. But what it really has is this sense of warmth and community. And, you know, any artistic industry, like, there’s obviously pros and cons of that kind of closeness.

But at the end of the day, it’s a community of people who all really care about each other, and just make some really brilliant theatre. Like it’s, I’m only where I am today, because I lived there for all those years, seeing what not just what Neptune Theatre was doing, and 2B Theatre, but like what the independent theatres are doing. And that’s really what it is.

Halifax feels kind of like this mecca for independent theatres, to formulate, to try stuff, to mix things around, which is what I’ve been doing, which is what I exactly what I did. And I think it was a really great place to do that. Because if you’ve got the moxie to make it happen, it’s the kind of city where you can, which is amazing.

[Phil Rickaby]
I mean, you mentioned that the bus stop is essentially the last of the black box theatres. If you’re an independent company in Halifax, outside of the bus stop, where are you producing? Or is it just bus stop, or if you can afford to take a space in Neptune or something?

[Logan Robins]
Yeah. I mean, really, thank God, Neptune Theatre has opened up to the Halifax Fringe Festival. So now not only is the Halifax Fringe using the studio theatre, but they’ve also converted, or during the Fringe, they convert two of their rehearsal studios into small black box theatres.

So for Fringe, Neptune has now become this kind of hub, which is amazing because it’s such a resource. But when it’s not Fringe season, and Neptune is using their spaces for Neptune stuff, the bus stop is really pretty much all we have left. Shakespeare by the Sea has a great black box-esque theatre, the Park Place Theatre down in the park.

But I think in a lot of ways, it’s made it really hard for people who want to produce theatre. The bus stop theatre, I forget the statistic, but they’re booked almost every day of the year, which is amazing for the bus stop. I’m part of the co-op.

So it’s a win for me, technically, as a member-owner, but it’s also it’s tough when we have this kind of one last stronghold for independent theatre. And they’re amazing. But it’s also, like you’re saying, not that long ago, there was the waiting room theatre, there’s the living room theatre, there was so many of these other little spaces that have just kind of been wiped.

But I think it has inspired creativity. A huge part of the reason I have developed so much site-specific theatre is to circumvent this problem of space. And you don’t need a black box if you’re doing a show in a pond, or if you’re delivering a show to people’s doorsteps like an Amazon package.

So it’s, again, similar with the whole environmentalism thing, is just finding how what presents itself as an obstacle could actually be a creative problem, and letting that inspire you rather than kind of hold you back. Almost every good idea I’ve ever had is like, ah, you know, the bus stop theatre’s booked, what am I going to do? Well, wait, what if this show was, you know, done here?

[Phil Rickaby]
It’s interesting that the Neptune theatres are being used there in fringe because I think, I believe, in the very early years of the Halifax fringe, the Neptune theatre was a hub then. And then something happened because things always happen and things moved around. But it’s good to see Neptune stepping up in a spot that’s needed because I don’t think fringe could happen without that.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s been huge. And it’s really like, like you said, things change, tides turn.

But really recently, like Neptune theatre, especially like since Jeremy Webb’s been running it, it’s been really, I think it has become much more of a support hub for the theatre community rather than this kind of orb on a pedestal that maybe has been in the past. So which is like, and I’m obviously biased because I’ve, you know, taught at Neptune and worked at Neptune and done Puppet Directions like it’s, they’ve been very good to me. But I think they’ve been, it’s become much more of a resource to our community in recent years, which is really great because as we’re losing more and more, it’s every last bit we have the values, it’s going up.

Yeah, for sure.

[Phil Rickaby]
Speaking of community, I know that, I mean, we all talk about community and we talk about theatre community, whatever that is, or communities in some places. For you, what is the role that you see for yourself and the Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company in terms of community building?

[Logan Robins]
It’s a good question. For me, like we talk about the theatre community. I think it’s very quaint that, you know, if you have a bunch of artists in a geographic location, we refer to ourselves as the community.

It’s a very artsy thing to do. But I think to me, it’s this sort of, not just knowing that you’re surrounded by people doing what you do, but it’s about that kind of co-creation and collaborative creation. The Unnatural Disaster office is in this building called The Nest on Quinnpool Road.

It’s a multi artist office building. There’s like five or six theatre companies crammed into there, into a bunch of little offices. To me, that is actually the synthesis of what a theatre community should be, which is going to get tea in the kitchen and you talk to this person who’s doing a music lesson and this person who’s writing a grant and just this kind of synthesis, this sharing of ideas and support.

Everything I’ve created has only been great when it is from that collaboration of multiple people. I learned that very early on. It’s like, I can write a play, I can direct a play, I can do puppetry.

But as soon as there are more voices involved, suddenly it’s like, whoa, this has become elevated to a whole other level. In terms of Unnatural Disaster’s place in the community, what I really wanted was to create this kind of landing pad for emerging artists. When I came out of Dal, I got super lucky.

I was cast in a summer season at Theatre Bidek. I was really in an exceptional circumstance where I got to work with a lot of great companies. But for so many students coming out of educational institutions, it feels like a huge jump from, I just graduated school, to professional theatre.

What I really wanted was to create this place where it’s like, you just graduated, great, come devise this show with us. You just graduated and want to do your first fringe show, come join our friendship program and let us mentor you and give you financial support. Putting on your first fringe show, that’s tough shit.

I learned the hard way. I did it myself. I took a big gamble on myself in a shadow puppetry musical about snails.

It was great. But I remember just thinking, I wish there was a more readily available way to know how to do this. Because it’s scary to ask when you’re young and you’re taught all these ideals in theatre school about how to be a professional and how to be self-sufficient.

So trying to create an open and hopefully accessible space and community where people can email me and say, hey, I want to produce a show, how? Or hey, can you help me? I don’t know where to go to audition.

And I feel since we started, we have carved this space in the Halifax theatre ecosystem of this safe haven in that interstitial area between school and main stage Neptune, where people come from both sides to play and create and share ideas. And we’ve worked with professional actors and we’ve worked with brand new actors. And I think that kind of openness is what makes our community strong.

It is what I guess we want to try and do whatever we can to enrich so that we have it to sustain us.

[Phil Rickaby]
That kind of connection and being able to ask questions is so important. Years ago, I was talking to Jackie Maxwell from Theatre Gargantua and she was like, listen, anytime I ever talk to somebody, I tell them the most important secret that I learned many years ago, and that is that people want to help. And if you ask, chances are they will help in the way that they can.

And that is very true because the worst that can happen is somebody says, I don’t have time. But nobody tells us that when we’re in school. Nobody tells us that when we’re in theatre school that like, oh, if you’re interested in the work that somebody does, you could like go for coffee with them and ask them questions or you could like email them and ask them questions.

And I think it’s one of the most important things and it’s an important role to fill in the theatre.

[Logan Robins]
Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. Once I discovered that people want to help, I was like, oh my gosh, if only this wasn’t such a secret that people want to help.

And like when I go in and like I’ve worked a lot with the Fountain School at Dalhousie since I graduated doing outreach and education and it’s such a, for me it’s a joy to go and kind of not just like teach puppetry or improv or whatever I’m teaching that day, but to also like pass along. Here’s if I had known this five years ago when I was where you are, like that would have been amazing. So I’m going to give it to you, take it or leave it.

But it’s to me that’s really rewarding to get to still be so close to when I was an emerging artist and like kind of feel like I can help bridge the gap while I’m there all along, you know, my own journey.

[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Logan, thank you so much for talking with me.

I really appreciate the time you’ve given me and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and the theatre company. Yes, thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Stageworthy.

Thanks for sticking around to the end. As promised, I’m going to tell you about who my guest is next week. But before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about my Patreon.

I had to stop doing Stageworthy for about a year. And one of the reasons why I had to stop doing this podcast was because the cost of living was just too high and the cost of making this podcast was becoming untenable. But I really missed it.

I really missed doing this podcast. And so I figured out how many people I would need to back me to help to make this podcast. And what was the minimum number of people that would just cover the cost of the tools that I use to make this podcast.

And I got enough people to do that. And then a few more people came on board to help out too, because there are other tools that I wanted to use. It costs money to make a podcast, you can listen to it for free on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube.

But for me, it costs money. So I have to pay for I have to pay for a website, I have to pay for a place to host the audio file so they can be distributed to all of the podcast download places. I have to pay for audio for editing software, image editing to create images for every show.

And one of the latest things that I was able to add, thanks to some of the newer patrons is transcripts, because I really think that people should be able to follow along and people who are are deaf or hard of hearing. Or sometimes for some people, it’s easier to read along when they’re listening to something. So I really wanted to have that for those for that purpose.

I’ve been told in the past how important that is. But again, that’s another thing that costs money. So I was able to add that but only because of the people who chose to back this podcast on Patreon.

So if you would like to help me to make this show and know that the people who back this podcast on Patreon are helping to make this show, please go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. I would be so grateful for your support. And you would be helping to create Canada’s podcast.

patrons get early access to episodes, we’ll have conversations about things that are important in the theatre world. I have a few things I want to talk about. So make sure you get in there because I think we’re gonna have some lively conversation.

So please consider becoming a patron go to patreon.com/stageworthy and become a patron. My guest next week is Alexis Milligan. Alexis is a Canadian actor, movement specialist and director.

She’s the resident movement director at the Shaw Festival, and the host of the Let’s Get This Shaw on the Road podcast. She’s also the director of the groundbreaking theatre of medicine program created in partnership with the Canadian Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. So tune in next week for that conversation with Alexis Milligan, and I will see you then on the next episode of Stageworthy.