Nowadays he is on European television every week, has appeared on screen in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, and takes major international folk festivals in his stride.

What makes this 41-year-old Californian so unusual? The answer is that Dana, who performs under the stage name 'Grego', has created metre-high puppets that not only mime playing music - they play it for real as well.

The effect is extraordinary, comic, and - in a strange way - beautiful. Each puppet is a complete band in its own right, playing European dance music, dating from the late Middle Ages to the present day.

'One big thing in my favour is that I'm not TV,' Dana said in an interview earlier this month.

'I'm alive, I'm real.' Sometimes his audiences believe that the puppets are real as well. One occasion he will never forget is when a little girl came up to him and tried to feed a puppet shaped like a cat, which was beating a drum with its tail.

'Both my hands were visible playing a flute and I operated the cat's tail with a pedal. Some people just couldn't believe it wasn't doing it itself.

'The theme of all my shows is puppets that produce music. They're miniature multimedia shows,' Dana explained.

Dana looks like someone magically transferred to 1990s Asia of the 1990s from the late 1960s San Francisco: he has a long red beard, and a wardrobe specialising in bright cotton patchwork trousers and cheesecloth shirts.

But there is little that is laid back about the music, which is surprisingly sophisticated.

His main puppet is called Maja, whose main claim to fame is being the world's smallest one-[person] band. Dana, however, thinks of the puppet in terms that are more mythological than mathematical.

'In dictionaries of mythologies you can find deities to represent more or less everything. But try to find one that represents the spirit of harmonious co-operation.

'And if you think about a world that has gods and goddesses for love, war and sex, but doesn't have one for co-operation, well, I think then we're likely to be in trouble. So I made one,' he said.

Maya in Hindu mythology is the world of the senses, regarded as illusory. Dana's similarly-named Maja is also an illusion, in the sense she does not play all the instruments she appears to.

'She actually plays an apple-shaped fiddle and a harp, cymbals and a pan-pipe. She seems to play the harp and fiddle, but in actual fact I'm playing them,' said Dana, explaining that the trick is done with a complicated series of levers that are manipulated secretly without him having to move his hands.

'I have both hands visible and busy - but the levers enable me to work these effects relatively easily during a performance.

The body of the puppet itself is built on to a medieval psaltery - a form of bowed harp, he said. 'As I bow and pluck this harp with my hands the puppet uses its eight hands - yes, eight - to mimic the production of these sounds.

Also very popular has been Junior - an ugly baby puppet who sits on Dana's shoulder and bangs the gong on the top of the percussion stick.

Dana's current stage show evolved from something much simpler.

'My first puppet was called Sakura. She was brand new when I performed in Hong Kong - the Fringe Festival was her and Junior's first gig. She grew into Maja. She had only two arms, played the fiddle and was a sideline to Junior. Now Junior is a sort of sideline to Maja. It's a case of the creation leading the way and the performer doing his best to follow.' Dana, who has been playing music since he was 11, began, like so many others, with the guitar. Nowadays it is medieval psalteries and 500 year old court music from plus his own pieces.

For 12 years he worked for a Californian company that staged historical theme festivals.

He multi-tasked as folk-dancer, musician, carpenter, prop technician, director and teacher. Eventually he felt he wanted to see the world, so he distilled these functions into a one-person show that could be fitted into a suitcase.

'It's been a perpetual motion machine ever since,' he says. 'Japanese enthusiasts often ask me what my dream is. Well, I'd very much like to make recordings of some of my original compositions.'