PIP PIP
PARADE!
WITH
SHOESTRING 
THEATER

Hip Hip Hooray, it’s PiP PiP Parade!

Join us for during the opening weekend of PiP 2026 for a parade featuring giant puppets and masks, tall stilt-walkers, wild drummers, and huge assemblages of color, costume, and sound!

Portland’s own Shoestring Theater will lead the merry procession down Washington Ave and through our Kennedy Park neighborhood! Our friends in the Ideal Maine Social Aid & Sanctuary Band will join the parade along with festival artists and community members.

Immediately following the parade, join us at Mayo Street Arts for a short puppet show by Stop Puppeting Yourself Puppet Company!

The parade will start at the Root Cellar (94 Washington Avenue) and will continue along Oxford Street to Mayo Street Arts (10 Mayo Street)

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Parade Volunteers are invited to be part of the pageantry and help bring Shoestring Theater’s puppets to life as puppeteers-for-the-day.

No experience is required. Volunteers should be adults at least 5’5” with the strength and enthusiasm to walk the 30 minute parade route. Teams of three will work together with wooden rods to keep each puppet aloft.

Strong funny bones and can-do attitude recommended!

For more information on volunteering, please email pip@mayostreetarts.org.

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The Shoestring Theater has been at the heart of Portland’s art scene for over forty years. From their bird’s eye view atop stilts, they witnessed the gradual change in the personality of Portland’s Old Port as they kicked off the Old Port Festival parade for decades.

They have also celebrated generations of Halloween costumes with their signature West End Halloween parade. Shoestring Theater has filled Congress Square with laughs and gasps with their hand-puppet Punch & Judy show. They continue to wow audiences at King Friday’s Dungeon Puppet Slam hosted by Mayo Street Arts as part of Heather Henson’s Puppet Slam Network.

The Ideal Maine Social Aid & Sanctuary Band is a Portland, Maine based community activist band in the New Orleans street band tradition, embracing a broad range of diverse music. Their performances bring joy and danceable grooves to public displays of celebration, advocacy, and solidarity. The Ideal Maine Band supports progressive movements and believe that through music and song, we can fight apathy and work together toward peace and social justice for all.

Stop Puppeting Yourself Puppet Co. is a Portland-based puppetry collective born out of the puppetry practice of Elliot Nye alongside numerous friends and collaborators. The ensemble typically works with direct operated puppetry and object theater met with experimentation, onstage sound and lighting design, embodied performance, and camera/video technology.

Stop Puppeting Yourself Puppet Co. have been longtime participants in the King Friday’s Dungeon Puppet Slam at Mayo Street Arts. They recently premiered their first full-length performance, “John Toot and the Great Metastization,” which is touring this summer to Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

RAIN DATE: Sunday, September 20 at 4:00 PM