A massive vortex of black and white fabric swirls onstage. A gong swells. Papier-mâché depictions of the early elements spin off the whirlwind. We have just witnessed the birth of the universe. In another scene, a moving panorama unrolls the life cycle of a salmon from egg to larvae and finally to mature fish, all to the march of the drums and the pulse of the synthesizer.

To the kids sitting utterly transfixed in the front row, this is a formative experience, one well-known to Hudson Valley locals who remember seeing their first Arm-of-the-Sea show as a child. This year, the cycle continues with the company now embarking on its 43rd season touring its repertoire of mask-and-puppet shows in and around the Hudson Valley.

The shows include “Dirt: The Secret Life of Soil,” which highlights the interactions between plants, fungi, and microbes and features a 12-foot-tall puppet named Mama Water. (“Dirt” will be performed this Saturday, May 10 from 11:45 a.m.-12:45 p.m. at the Kingston Earth Fair at T.R. Gallo Waterfront Park in Downtown Kingston.) Another is “Riparian Rhapsody,” which explores the complicated history of land acquisition, deforestation and regeneration in the Catskill region (this one has a singing bear). Arm-of-the-Sea premieres a new work this July at its home base, the Tidewater Center in Saugerties, performing for five consecutive Waterfront Wednesdays. There it will also host a performing arts camp for two weeks in the summer.

The throughline of local history, science and the natural world in these productions is thanks to the company's founders, the husband-and-wife team of Patrick Wadden and Marlena Marallo. Wadden writes the scripts, creates the sets, directs the productions, and books the performance season, while Marallo sculpts and paints most of the imagery, creating the vibrant, hand-crafted look of the shows. The couple met on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater in the 1980s, a sailing vessel that plies the Hudson River to raise awareness about pollution, founded in part by famed folk singer Pete Seeger.

Wadden, a spry 72-year-old native Minnesotan, attributes his environmental activism to his growing up during the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. “The war in Southeast Asia had galvanized a lot of young people … a friend and I were the organizers of the first Earth Day at our school.” He became interested in natural history and poetry, thanks to a neighboring college library, counting Dylan Thomas and Robert Bly as early influences. He enrolled in college to study humanities and sciences but never got his degree, choosing instead to travel the country, hitchhiking and riding the freight trains. He worked in a cannery in Alaska, a boat building factory, taught at a Montessori school, “worked at Greenpeace for a short spell” until he ended up on the East Coast. He was pulled into the orbit of the Clearwater, where he met Marallo, who would become his partner and collaborator.

On the Clearwater, Wadden recalls “sailing up and down the Hudson River and Long Island Sound for years trying to get people's attention about various environmental and social things, mostly utilizing folk music. In many places we would show up and there would be immigrants, some of whom didn't speak English … I had the idea of using a medium that could reach wider numbers of people from different walks of life.”

He found his medium when he attended a Bread and Puppet show in Vermont. “I went to their annual Domestic Resurrection Circus. There’d be a hundred people performing, a 20-member band, and sometimes there’d be tens of thousands of people that showed up … I thought, we should try something like that.”

The first puppets Wadden and Marallo made were crude and “brutally heavy,” using chicken wire as the armature and fitted with papier- mâché from clay molds. Pete Seeger’s partner, Toshi Seeger, offered them the use of a boatshed on the Hudson in New Hamburg. “We were all these young artists and activists … we just made stuff, and created our first characters, including Mr. Avarice, and Ma and Pa Hudson.”

Marallo studied at Purchase College under Uruguayan-American printmaker Antonio Frasconi and draws upon Japanese printmaking styles. Her fingerprints are all over the shows. You can see them in the delightfully distorted proportions of characters' hands and deeply furrowed faces, like a woodcut sprung to life.

I visited Wadden at the Tidewater Center on the edge of the Esopus Creek, where he was gluing painted trees onto a paper backing for an upcoming show. He lamented the change of performance programming in the region. “We used to do a hundred performances a year in schools. Now there's not much. There's no support for it.” Which is perhaps why, beyond the touring shows, the Tidewater Center will be the company’s enduring legacy: a 3,000-square-foot tent structure nestled within the massive walls of a former coal bin, itself part of the water-powered paper mill that operated there. With support from the Hudson River Estuary Program and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the company hopes to revitalize the waterfront where the Tidewater sits, turning the ruins into a cultural hub for the arts, environmental education and local history.

As he dolloped another helping of glue onto the painted trees, Wadden, who still performs with the troupe and often loads the touring bus solo, noted, “it's a very labor-intensive art form. The art is free; we get paid for the schlep.”

“It's something you can't get from a screen,” he said. “Something gets lost there. It's a form of storytelling that hits you in a different place … we are very much an anachronism, on purpose.” He directed my attention to the brush in his hand, coated with wet paste. “Here's the papier-mâché goop right here. This is what holds it all together.” He handed me the brush. “At this moment, I'd like to hand the baton to you.”

Besides the Kingston Earth Fair show this Saturday, the troupe has a few dates in Westchester County set for the coming weeks. For more information, visit: https://www.armofthesea.org/