Leo Petersen

Leo Petersen, also called "Lejo", is a Dutch puppeteer who makes his own segments for Sesamstraat, the Dutch co-production of Sesame Street. He does his non-verbal shorts by using his bare hands and wooden eyes for puppets and his shorts have often been seen on the show starting in 2003. Leo's main character on Sesamstraat is a "finger puppet" known as Mano. Petersen's characters are similar to the puppets shown and performed on Oobi, each character is a bare hand with wooden eyes (with a couple exceptions). He must have had some practice when it came to being Mano since the character looks and works differently then the Oobi-style puppets were. He also appeared in the Sesamstraat special Open Huis in Sesamstraat, which featured the main puppeteers such as Renee Menschaar, Judith Broersen, Catherine van Woerden, and Bert Plagman. In addition to those performers, Leo Petersen got to meet Kevin Clash who provided the puppetry of Elmo for that special. He must have felt extremely excited to work with a legendary Muppet performer from the actual Sesame Street. Outside of his Sesamstraat performances, he's got his own one-man show called Handywork which involves his hands. Some of the other puppeteers who got their one-person shows include John Pattison, Paul Zaloom, and Frank Meschkuleit. I wonder how Leo manages to work Mano without any difficulties for it would be hard to use two fingers as the head and two more as the hands. Someone probably gave Petersen some training to perform bare-hand puppets with that method. How long did he perform shorts on the series for? He probably stopped before or after production ceased. Leo Petersen, you've done so well being Mano and other bare-hand puppet characters in your shorts on Sesamstraat and its special. I hope you're still at work performing your shows and whatnot. And until you run into one of the Sesamstraat performers again, don't stop performing. Interesting puppetry technique Leo. Well "hand-led" Petersen!