Steven Friedlander writes about art and artists for Compass. He is a book and magazine editor, writer, and communications and marketing consultant.

Artist and community organizer Rachel Milford has the presence of someone who could anchor an independent film. Her open, receptive, unguarded manner invites trust — and quickly establishes her as a natural center of gravity as executive and artistic director of the nonprofit Cattywampus Puppet Council.

Cattywampus uses puppets to activate the imagination so the unexpected can happen.

Milford speaks passionately of access and participation, and she returns often to the idea of a “container” — a space structured enough to hold people yet loose enough to let something unexpected happen inside it.

In that space, large-scale puppets — towering heads, animal forms, improvised figures with bamboo skeletons and papier-mâché skin — take shape in public view. Children drift between piles of cardboard and drying paint. Volunteers with glue guns and brushes crouch on concrete floors. Half-finished creatures stare mutely from shelves and loading docks as if waiting for instructions from another dimension. People step into roles they do not typically occupy and, in the process, become visible to one another.

Milford describes her aim with characteristic directness: Cattywampus is a place where people can show up and “be seen and witnessed and celebrated.”

Milford’s instinct to gather, direct and perform has roots in East Tennessee. She grew up in Farragut, the daughter of Sarah Milford, an opera singer, and Bob Milford, longtime owner of the now-defunct Knoxville baby-furniture business Crib ’n Carriage. Even now, Milford carries traces of both theatricality and practicality.

She speaks with the quick emotional fluency of someone accustomed to organizing groups, calming anxieties, improvising solutions and persuading hesitant strangers to participate in things slightly outside of their comfort zone.

One suspects she has been recruiting people into ambitious collective schemes since childhood. After graduating from Farragut High School, Milford spent a gap year in Israel before attending Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where she majored in sociology and graduated in three years.

The through-line connecting those experiences was participation, service and the belief that communities are built through shared labor and shared attention.

“I wanted to be useful,” Milford says simply.

After college, she worked with AmeriCorps in Olympia, Wash., helping establish community gardens and engaging in urban agriculture and food-justice initiatives. Olympia’s activist arts culture introduced Milford to oversized puppets, political theater and collective spectacle as tools for further community-building.

The catalytic moment arrived during Olympia’s Procession of the Species celebration. In 2009, Milford created a dragonfly costume. “Something clicked,” she says.

The dragonfly costume fused together instincts that had previously been traveling alongside one another: organizing, activism, theater, environmentalism, performance, celebration, emotional openness and the strange democratic power of building something too large to complete alone.

Cattywampus itself emerged in Knoxville in 2014, initially through what now feels like an almost mythological origin story. Two friends built oversized puppet heads and began wandering downtown during First Friday events. Grandma and Grandpa — the original puppets — appeared arm in arm among unsuspecting crowds in the Old City. People stopped. They laughed. More puppets appeared. Then came Raven, Bear, Possum and eventually a towering Dolly Parton puppet that became something of a local celebrity.

To understand Milford’s work today, it helps to understand that Cattywampus is not really about puppets. The puppets are the invitation — the visual seduction and improbable hook — but the deeper project concerns imagination itself.

Again and again, Milford returns to what she calls “a crisis of imagination” — the exhausted contemporary feeling that enormous social problems have calcified into permanence. Housing insecurity. Climate anxiety. Loneliness. Economic precarity. Political paralysis.

Cattywampus pushes stubbornly in the opposite direction.

“We talk a lot about radical joy-making,” Milford says. “Creating joy with one another and playing together is a tool for resilience.”

The idea initially sounds almost whimsical — until one begins to understand how serious she is.

Two years ago, for example, Cattywampus staged a parade and theatrical performance centered on housing justice in collaboration with local organizers, including SOCM (Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment).

The resulting spectacle unfolded like Pynchonesque Appalachian civic absurdism. A landlord bull demanded rent money. A bulldozer flattened a makeshift encampment. Animal puppets searched desperately for housing stability. Puppet city and county officials appeared onstage with their hands literally tied until a possum puppet carrying giant scissors arrived and cut them free.

The crowd laughed — and then, gradually, the metaphor settled over the audience.

“We just get to imagine what possible solutions could be,” Milford says.

The performance did not solve Knoxville’s housing crisis, of course. That was never the point. Milford seems far less interested in ideological certainty than in imaginative activation. Cattywampus creates temporary public spaces where people can collectively rehearse possibility instead of despair.

“There’s so much hopelessness right now,” she says quietly. “Sometimes art helps move the blockage aside long enough for us to imagine something else.”

The organization’s North Knoxville headquarters — a modest industrial-feeling space anchored by a crucial loading dock — reflects that blend of improvisation and intention. The space feels less like a formal arts nonprofit than a communal dream factory held together through cardboard dust, volunteer energy, extension cords, caffeine, paint splatters and optimism.

Milford likes that the materials remain accessible.

“We’re making art out of trash half the time,” she says with a laugh.

Cardboard, paper, bamboo, fabric, wire and recycled materials accumulate into impossible forms. An oversized puppet head might emerge from what previously existed as appliance boxes and scrap paper. A river spirit materializes from scrap paper and bamboo ribs. A towering bird waits silently in the corner for its next procession.

Masks in the Cattywampus studio. (Photo by Aimee Rievley/Sparrows Eye Photography.)

Everything can become something else.

The Cattywampus process also democratizes participation. One person can begin a puppet; six people can finish it. “If you’ve got six people papier-mâchéing a head, it goes a lot faster,” Milford says.

One of Cattywampus’ most exuberant outgrowths is the Knox Honkers &

Bangers, the organization’s “hot pink community brass band” — a gloriously raucous assemblage of amateur musicians, dancers, flag twirlers, percussionists and neighborhood eccentrics birthed during Milford’s collaboration with the Big Ears Festival and Yo-Yo Ma’s 2023 “Our Common Nature” programming in Knoxville.

Originally intended as a temporary ensemble, the group rapidly expanded into an ongoing public phenomenon. The Honkers & Bangers feel deeply Milfordian: joyful, handmade, intergenerational, slightly chaotic, emotionally sincere and entirely uninterested in polished perfection.

Milford believes scale alters people psychologically. Something shifts when an ordinary person suddenly occupies public space beside a 20-foot-tall creature with flapping wings and painted eyes. The proportions of everyday life destabilize.

That dynamic becomes especially visible in Cattywampus’ school-based programming. During a recent parade project at Inskip Elementary, students spent weeks creating puppets and performances before marching through their neighborhood streets surrounded by cheering families and classmates.

“These are kids who are often overlooked,” Milford says. “And suddenly they’re in the center of the street. People are watching them. They’re being celebrated.” She pauses. “That shifts something.”

Milford speaks frequently about the ways masks, costumes and towering figures allow shy children, introverts and neurodivergent students to express themselves differently. Participants who might normally shrink from attention often become louder, freer and more expansive once partially hidden inside another identity.

Large-scale puppetry has long existed alongside protest movements and political theater — perhaps most famously through the experimental Bread & Puppet Theater. Milford understands well how absurdity can lower emotional defenses and interrupt confrontation.

“What are you going to do,” she asks with a grin, “get angry at a giant bear?”

At the same time, Milford is deeply intentional about the organization’s internal structure. Cattywampus operates, she says, “at the speed of relationship.”

The phrase surfaces repeatedly in conversation and begins to feel almost scriptural. Milford speaks passionately about collaborative governance, living wages for teaching artists and maintaining what she calls “non-extractive” relationships with volunteers, staff and community partners — relationships that value sustainability and mutual care over burnout and transactional demands.

“The only person who’s allowed to be stressed out by Cattywampus is me,” she says dryly.

Milford remains wary of arts organizations that consume people faster than they sustain them. Cattywampus often feels less like a conventional nonprofit than a hybrid of theater troupe, activist collective, neighborhood block party, folk ritual and temporary village. Or perhaps, more simply, a place where people are permitted to become larger versions of themselves.

On Sunday, May 17, starting at 2 p.m., Cattywampus will stage its ninth annual community parade and block party at Suttree Landing Park. The theme, “Where the Waters Meet,” references both the nearby Tennessee River headwaters and broader questions of ecology, stewardship and interconnectedness.

The parade will include towering puppets, musicians, environmental groups, dancers, stilt walkers, and hundreds of participants moving together along the riverfront.

Among the centerpiece collaborations is a project with the NAWA Daughters, a Cherokee youth group that recently helped advance a “Rights of Nature” resolution recognizing waterways as living entities. Together, they are constructing a “Longperson” puppet embodying the river itself, along with a massive hellbender salamander inspired by the endangered Appalachian species.

The effect, as always with Cattywampus, will likely be equal parts joyful, chaotic, handmade and fabulously surreal.

For a few hours, ordinary civic space will reorganize itself around improbable creatures, improvised music, communal movement and public imagination. People will gather and laugh, and Milford — organizer, activist, artist, teacher, environmentalist, ringmaster, community-builder — will continue doing what she has quietly been doing for years now: creating containers where people can become braver, more visible — and perhaps a little less alone.