What Puppets Do For Us

From a teaching puppetry in higher education seminar. available at: http://www.palatine.ac.uk/events/viewdoc/136/

'What Puppets Do For Us !': The Impact of Puppetry and Object Manipulation on the Training of Theatre Practitioners, Specifically Designers

Jessica Bowles, Central School of Speech and Drama

Weblink: http://www.cssd.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/puppetry.htm

At a recent international meeting of theatre scenographers and educators, empathy, understanding and collaboration with the performers was increasingly seen as fundamental to the training of designers. Towards this end, puppetry and object manipulation (even if they weren't called that) are being used as teaching tools in a number of school in the UK and internationally.

The introduction of puppetry to scenography courses is related to another development in the professional sector. Audience's abilities to read the visual is increasingly sophisticated and particular interest in shown in all scales of theatre in the very 'liveness' of theatrical

experiences (including improvisational and site specific work). The transformative potential of the object /puppet works particularly well in this theatre 'out of frames,' with its ability to create close magic with an audience. Theatre practitioners increasingly wish to create their own work, not be dependent on the commissioning power of the bigger theatres and institutions, and therefore the existing the training in 'specialisms' are being challenged as being too narrow an approach to embrace work created by devising companies. Designers are thus increasingly called upon to be puppeteers as well.

An object can be both metaphor and metonym. The designer, director and performer (and indeed all contributors to the making of performance) can play with that in creating performance. We need to prepare students for this by giving them exposure and playtime to explore the possibilities of puppet and object theatre in a safe educational environment.