Puppetry

Puppetry

Could puppets help us to share what we like and love? By making our own puppets we wanted to find out if we could share our stories in different ways: through the way our puppets looked, how they moved and by listing to what they might like to say.

Amelia De-Felice has come up with the idea to invite puppets to a disco. She has invented a brilliant way of making puppets from newspapers, which can be decorated with colourful tape, stickers, feathers and paper. The puppets were beautiful, here are some examples: (more to follow soon!)

Puppetry

Puppetry Mob

Could puppets help us to share what we like and love? By making our own puppets we wanted to find out if we could share our stories in

different ways: through the way our puppets looked, how they moved and by listing to what they might like to say.

Amelia De-Felice has come up with the idea to invite puppets to a disco. She has invented a brilliant way of making puppets from newspapers, which can be decorated with colourful tape, stickers, feathers and paper. The puppets were beautiful, here are some examples: (more to follow soon!)

During the disco we experimented with how the puppets can start telling stories. We practiced how they can move to music and in special places such as the moon. Our puppets met with each other, danced together or practiced some of their karate skills. At the end of the disco we all felt very tired and we pretended we went to sleep while listening to some calm music.

Some of the young collaborators were asked to draw what they thought about the workshop. These are some of their drawings of their favourite things:

Select to read more:

 

The students really liked making the puppets and some were inspired to make more complicated puppets with strings. Some children really enjoyed thinking about the sessions and had lots of fun sharing their ideas with me. For example one of the boys mentioned he really liked the disco lights and then enjoyed coming up with tricky colours like turquoise and white to see if I had the right colouring pens (which I did!). He called out: “I’m really good at this!”

During the disco some of the teaching staff expressed their surprise about how calm the students were at the end of the session. We all pretended we had gone to sleep and laid next to our puppets. During this moment one of the girls said she loved her puppet. I said that I thought her puppet loved her too at which point she said “aaaaahhhh” and gave her puppet a hug. After the session the students continued to interact with their puppets. One of the teachers reported that one of the children used the puppet to talk about the difficulties he had with changes in his personal life. His puppet was exactly the same as him and therefore went through the same experiences. By explaining what his puppet felt about the changes he was able to express his own feelings as well. Some of the children took their puppets home were one young collaborator explained he was a puppeteer, showing his “puppet in a puppet theatre on the stage”. When I asked another young person if their puppets still enjoyed dancing at his house, he said: “no, he does backflips!”

Amelia and myself also learned a lot about organising and bringing these workshops to special schools. To make the activity accessible for everyone we pre-made some of the elements of the puppet so it was easier to assemble (for example Amelia made some arms and bodies in preparation). We also had the opportunity to show some of the work during a symposium on puppetry at Bath Spa University. Here we were able to share ideas with other practitioners by making and playing with the newspaper puppets and looking at some of the discussions we had with the young collaborators during and after the workshops.

We will continue to work on the ideas and outcomes of the workshops and will post more information as soon as possible.