Blame the CBC. The long-running children’s show Mr. Dressup conditioned Canadian viewers to regard large items of luggage as a limitless source of wonder, but while actor Ernie Coombs’s Tickle Trunk was primarily a container of costumes, the Big Box of Life that Peter Balkwill is about to ship to Vancouver is a darker entity, and a more mysterious one, too.

Neither he nor his keyboard-playing collaborator Lisa Cay Miller can quite say what’s going to happen when his Trunk Puppet troupe and her NOW ensemble get together to present a groundbreaking fusion of improvised music and puppetry—but both are obviously tickled by the options available to them.

For Balkwill, co–artistic director of Alberta’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop, performing with improvising musicians fits perfectly with the light-on-its-feet aesthetic he’s been developing with his Trunk Puppet spinoff. The idea is to condense a whole show’s worth of puppets and props into the aforementioned Big Box, which apparently serves as set, stage, and storage unit.

“I guess you could call it an experiment,” Balkwill says, on the line from the company’s Calgary headquarters. “Part of the mandate was to create a set that had limitless possibilities, but that was also infinitely easier to move around. So where most of our shows travel in a five-ton truck, this travels in a cube truck.

“And then Lisa had seen a couple of our bigger shows, and was wondering if there was a possibility of colliding what the NOW Society does with what the Old Trout Puppet Workshop does,” he continues. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this crazy trunk that’s easy to move around, so we can get it out to Vancouver easily enough.’ And then, as we chatted, we discovered that it was possible that we could apply her template of improvisation to the template of the trunk. So we’re bringing out some pieces that are loosely structured, but we won’t determine where they’re going to go until they go somewhere.”

In a separate telephone interview, Miller says that this open-ended spirit is likely to migrate off the stage and into other areas of the theatre. “The way that Peter is able to communicate complex human experiences through short vignettes of puppetry is just incredible,” she notes. “So there’ll be a lot of that, and there’ll also be a lot of interaction, a lot of humour, and a lot of fluidity. The puppeteers might go up and change the lighting, or they might serve a drink before the show starts, and us musicians might move around.”

Exploration, Balkwill stresses, is key. “The whole nature of Trunk Puppet,” he notes, “is an exploration of puppetry and the exuberance that a puppeteer might invest in while puppeteering—the joy of bringing something to life.”

By that, one suspects, Balkwill means more than just giving an elaborately carved mannequin or even a simple umbrella its own personality. Trunk Puppet’s Calgary debut apparently added fresh energy to an already-vital puppeteering scene.

“I was getting reports that people were going home and doing puppet shows in their basements,” he says, laughing. “So that’s the mandate here. It’s not to go home and wish that you could do it; it’s to go home and realize that we all have that artist inside ourselves.”

Trunk Puppet NOW plays Renegade Theatre on Friday and Saturday (December 4 and 5), with Saturday’s family-friendly matinee sold-out. For more information, visit the Now Society website.