Remember those kindergarten days when you’d grab a paper bag, or maybe your dad’s old sock, slap on some yarn, pipe cleaner and a few buttons, crouch down behind your couch and voilà – you had a fantastic puppet show?

Blair Thomas’ The Ox-herder’s Tale is nothing like that. But there are puppets.

Thomas’ piece revolves around 10 paintings depicting the ancient Buddhist folk tale and is acted out by life-sized puppets, which silent, masked actors move around the stage. But to call the director’s newest production, commissioned by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, simply a “puppet show” tells nothing of the rich visuals, creative music and complex spiritual themes that pervade the performance.

“Puppetry for me is an endless world of the possible,” Thomas says. “It’s a wonderful place where one can imagine the world concrete in an art form that mixes music and words and images and movement all together, and that’s really exciting. I don’t have to compromise.”

The Ox-herder’s Tale, performed by Thomas’ Chicago-based company, is being shown as a part of a day-long celebration on Friday of puppeteer and university alumnus Jim Henson. Along with putting on the production, Thomas is serving as the theatre department’s Jim Henson Inaugural Artist-in-Residence, meaning he’s staying at the university through the spring semester to teach classes.

Thomas’ classes on puppetry have students studying the life of slave-trader-turned-abolitionist-minister John Newton, which his students will turn into a performance in the spring.

“So far it’s been very good,” Thomas says. “I find that the students are very enthusiastic and inquisitive, and they have a lot of skill and resources to bring to the work.”

One of Thomas’ students, Eric Van Wyk, has already been greatly influenced by Thomas and puppetry.

When Thomas visited the university in March 2005 to workshop The Ox-herder’s Tale with students, Van Wyk, now a third-year graduate student in scenic design, was inspired to delve further into puppetry. That summer, he and another student, Betsy Rosen, studied puppetry with a Vermont theater group, and in the fall they put on their own production, Dis/Appearing, based on the Billy Collins poem “Walking Across the Atlantic.” This summer, the two took their show to festivals in Washington and New York.

“On its most basic level, it’s taking objects and giving them life,” Van Wyk says of puppetry. “When you start to do that it allows for not only the puppeteer but also the audience to imagine a very wonderful world. … For me it’s a very interesting form of visual storytelling.”

Van Wyk says students can get a lot out of The Ox-herder’s Tale.

“I think something that Blair does really well that students will be interested in is a very holistic form of art,” he says. “He’s very mindful of the visual, the audio, as well as text. You have all these things that are coming together to form a really poignant image.”

Van Wyk explains the production is about the individual’s struggle with big life issues.

“In a nutshell it’s about transformation,” he says. “It’s also about a level of understanding that everyone can connect to.”

Thomas has high hopes for this production’s spiritual power.

“I’m interested in being able to maybe point the direction toward people deepening their own spiritual life,” he says. “That’s what I hope people walk away with.”

Thomas is no stranger to cultivating one’s spiritual life – he once spent six months living in a Zen Buddhist temple practicing meditation and serving the community.

Thomas says he’s interested in how this ancient Buddhist parable translates to our contemporary society – a question he explores in his blog on the CSPAC website.

“There needs to be a reason someone would get the notion to cultivate themselves spiritually,” he writes. “Where does that hunger come from? What is the trigger? When is it that you actually hear something so clearly it’s as if everything else is slightly muffled?”

Contact reporter Rebecca Wise at wisedbk@gmail.com.