{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/sophie-becker-house-of-puppets-feature-nicole-kaack/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127092,"slug":"sophie-becker-house-of-puppets-feature-nicole-kaack","title":"Sophie Becker’s House of Puppets","excerpt":"In the age of AI, it would be easy to dismiss Sophie Becker’s ventriloquism performances as pure nostalgia, but in her hands it becomes a tool by which to question who’s really in charge around here","content":"\n<p><strong>In the age of AI, it would be easy to dismiss Sophie Becker’s ventriloquism performances as pure nostalgia, but in her hands it becomes a tool by which to question who’s really in charge around here</strong></p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the 1979 pilot to the unaired Orson Welles Show, the Muppets Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog perched on the plush arms of their respective chairs, swivelling under the spotlights and nodding blandly to the famed filmmaker’s introduction. Gradually the spot beam widened, revealing the puppeteers Frank Oz and Jim Henson behind the animals’ anthropomorphic antics. Welles began the interview with a question about the strange symbioses between puppets and handlers. Heatedly, Oz replied, “I think it’s crazy. People ask me, ‘Do you ever forget – when you’re talking to someone on the phone or at a restaurant – do you ever forget and start talking in Miss Piggy or Fozzie?’ I’d be out of my mind.” More subduedly, Henson adds, “That’s similar to the other question, ‘Does the puppet become real to you, and do you relate to it as another person?’” Neither puppeteer admitted to being hoodwinked by their own tricks.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Almost 50 years on, the same mythologies haunt New York-based actor and ventriloquist Sophie Becker, whose performances turn the artform of a bygone era on its head, flirting with questions of orality, agency and embodiment. By popular demand, Becker and her dummy Ronnie Woods have appeared on stages and in churches, at symposia and on TikTok. Recent profiles on Becker blur the bounds between puppet and puppeteer, pouncing upon slippages from first person singular to plural. They want to believe that the fantasy contains a seed of truth, that the puppet master is as enchanted by their own act as we are.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Becker falls somewhere between these animist and materialist beliefs. In an issue of The Whitney Review released earlier this year, she conducted her own interview with a former member of the Jim Henson Company, puppet-maker Bonnie Erickson, known for carving characters from Miss Piggy to Statler and Waldorf. During their conversation, Becker’s inquiries hinged on a parallel theme. ‘There are moments with Ronnie that I’m puppeteering her, and it feels like my spirit has been fragmented,’ Becker confessed to Erickson. ‘She feels so alive.’ Becker has said that ventriloquists learn their craft out of a desire to have someone to talk to; this was certainly the case for her. Becker started to practise ventriloquism during the pandemic without a doll and while in isolation. It began with getting a handle on the basic technique of throwing her voice, obsessively watching videos on YouTube, and running through words and phrases while on long walks in the countryside near her parents’ Upstate New York home. Persona play was next, and the world came alive around her. She remembers that her elbow had its own vernacular, as did a tiny figurine in a jar. As her performance practice developed, the range of objects that have begun to speak up has only grown; microphones and martinis can be thinking things in the ventriloquist’s panpsychic world.</p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img src=\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-1230x1844.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-127279\" srcset=\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-1230x1844.png 1230w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-600x900.png 600w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-300x450.png 300w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-768x1151.png 768w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911-1025x1536.png 1025w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Seferi_Becker_Sarai_Baranova-911.png 1334w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1230px) 100vw, 1230px\" /><figcaption><i>Ronnie’s World</i>, 2026, performed at MoMA PS1 as part of <i>Greater New York 2026</i>. Photo: Maria Baranova.\nCourtesy MoMA PS1, New York</figcaption></figure>\n\n\n\n<p>On the phone with me, she reflected on Ronnie’s character. Ronnie has all the ambition and self-seriousness of a true actor – talking technique, artistry and inspiration. As she says in a video pastiche of the late-night talkshows, “You can be anything.” At the same time, she is vain and psychologically myopic, by turns Becker’s nemesis and familiar, her It girl id that “everyone want[s] to be”. Slapstick with a Pinocchio twist, Ronnie’s bit is often preoccupied with the embodied and base: one last sip from her drink, flounce of hair and mouthful of nuts before she’s primed to break into song. During our conversation, Becker mused, “She’s the nastier parts of me that are also funnier.” Ronnie is the part of Becker that openly declares what the ventriloquist might not be entirely comfortable expressing herself: “I’m going to be a star.”</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ventriloquism’s oft-used abbreviation ‘vent’ might suggest a double entendre – ventriloquy, but also irrepressible emissions and psychological divulgences. Becker may not believe in the cognitive independence of the characters that animate her acts, but she acknowledges that they express discrete aspects of herself. Over the phone, her voice coming in delayed as it does occasionally in her performances, she conceded, “I have a very tender feeling toward them because they’re just little externalised spirits.” In her onstage dialogues with Ronnie, Becker exorcises her own anxieties through vignettes and details borrowed from her own life. Sometimes, the puppet is a scapegoat, as in Becker’s second full-length show, <em>Ronnie’s Big Idea </em>(2026),  which premiered at New Theater Hollywood this spring. When the titular doll splits off as her own ventriloquy act with an even smaller puppet named Mini, Becker watches from the sidelines and levels the same critique she gave herself early on: “I can see your lips move.” Other times, Ronnie is a consolation. As the show draws to a close, she and Becker reaffirm their collaboration, echoing back and forth, “I need you.”</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Codependence is a prominent theme of <em>Ronnie’s Big Idea</em>, in which Becker and Ronnie part ways and each unsuccessfully attempts to make it on her own, vying with each other in what Becker described during our conversation as a “weird battle for the spotlight”. The narrative hints at a resonance between puppets and actors more generally – both require a director’s initiative and a playwright’s words to come to new life on the stage. For Becker, who moved to New York to act and has performed in a handful of playhouses throughout the boroughs, the actor’s lack of autonomy is only too familiar. Incongruously, it is through ventriloquism that Becker has freed herself from the whims of the theatrical apparatus; it has allowed her to get out of her box and, with Ronnie in hand, improvise worlds and characters of her own.</p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img src=\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-1230x1844.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-127534\" srcset=\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-1230x1844.jpg 1230w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-600x900.jpg 600w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-300x450.jpg 300w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-768x1151.jpg 768w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy-1025x1536.jpg 1025w, https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Roman-Koval_Becker_Success-Seminar_LA-copy.jpg 1334w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1230px) 100vw, 1230px\" /><figcaption><em>Jerry Mahoney Success Seminar: Find What Animates You</em>, 2024–25. Written and Directed by Henry Gunderson. Photo: Roman Koval</figcaption></figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Becker credits <em>The Jerry Mahoney Success Seminar</em> (2024) – her first show, written by Henry Gunderson and presented in galleries and hotel conference halls – for helping her envision where this one-woman dialogue could go and catalysing her to develop further full-length works. Taking the format of a masterclass in negative capability, the seminar was led by Becker’s puppet Jerry Mahoney, modelled on a historic doll wielded by ventriloquist Paul Winchell from the 1930s to the 1980s. With Becker fawning at his side, Jerry narrated his journey from living wood to sound stage in front of a PowerPoint advancing through photographs of a lupuna tree, puppet-maker Frank Marshall and Paul Winchell in the CBS studios, before giving a motivational speech. In light of Jerry’s vacant braincase – also illustrated among the projected images – the slide deck quoted Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki: ‘If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.’ Becker, playing her puppet’s assistant, avidly clicked through the PowerPoint and participated in exercises. Her investment paid off; looking back on the Success Seminar, Becker told me, “As I performed it more and more, I actually think that it really affected me. I needed to watch a success seminar to be open to my own artistic practice.”</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Per Jerry, it is not the dummy that must become more lifelike, but the handler more wooden. Following that cue, Becker began <em>Ronnie’s Big Idea</em> with the lines, “Just this morning, I got 400 units of Botox injected directly into my face because I want to be the greatest ventriloquist in the world.” Ronnie’s independence and Becker’s wilful inanimacy satirise contradictions endemic to certain contemporary conceptions of self. While watching reels from Ronnie’s TikTok account – in which she bakes pies, arranges dining table decor and twiddles with her bangs like a good trad wife – I am reminded of the clockwork rhythms and dead-eyed stares of other influencers who have throttled their social-media selves into inert set pieces. We don’t need to look as far as deepfakes and artificial intelligence for the automaton; as T.S. Eliot writes in his <em>Four Quartets </em>(1943), ‘human kind / Cannot bear very much reality’. Despite Ronnie’s flamboyant character, her woodenness is a reassurance. Considering her partnership with Ronnie, Becker speculated, “As humans, we innately have this fear of being controlled and not being in control of our own ideas. But our ideas are coming from everywhere all the time. No one is actually their own person, and no one is ever really in control.”</p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https://shop.artreview.com/products/artreview-september-2026\" target=\"_blank\">get your copy.</a></em></p>\n","path":"/sophie-becker-house-of-puppets-feature-nicole-kaack/","format":"standard","date":"14 September 2026","rawDate":"2026-09-14T09:03:09.000Z","branch":{"name":"ArtReview"},"author":{"name":"Nicole Kaack","path":"/author/nicolekaack/"},"category":{"name":"Features","path":"/category/feature/"},"featured_media":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/f20251006_UFOVONK_Farah_Lieten-31.jpg","caption":"","alt_text":"","media_details":{"width":2000,"height":1125,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/f20251006_UFOVONK_Farah_Lieten-31-300x169.jpg","width":300,"height":169},"medium":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/f20251006_UFOVONK_Farah_Lieten-31-600x338.jpg","width":600,"height":338},"large":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/f20251006_UFOVONK_Farah_Lieten-31-1230x692.jpg","width":1230,"height":692},"wordpress_1536x1536":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/f20251006_UFOVONK_Farah_Lieten-31-1536x864.jpg","width":1536,"height":864},"wordpress_2048x2048":null}}},"acf":{"article_artist":null,"article_video":null,"article_audio":null,"article_collaboration":"","article_custom_html_snippet":"","article_featured_title":"","article_featured_description":"","article_highlight":false,"article_custom_link_url":"","hero_image":{"source_url":"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Success5_Roman-Koval.png","caption":"Sophie Becker, <em>The Jerry Mahoney Success Seminar</em>, 2024, performance view. 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