From: Gregory Ballora <gregballora-AT-sbcglobal.net>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 10:07:52 -0800
To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] sharing info or trade secrets/Teaching


This thread is close to my heart, since I am doing a lot of teaching right now. I used to want to encourage individuality by teaching what I thought were principles and concepts rather than a specific way to make things. Now I have gone a bit in the other direction. I think it is still critical to teach the concepts, not just what works, but why it works. But as David states, it is great to get people to build a puppet that works. It saves so much frustration. Teaching by rote is not as fashionable these days, but there is a lot to be gained by it. 

I will say though that I have gotten a lot of good out of re-inventing the wheel. My current job teaching up at Cal Arts came about because of a few puppet controls I built for Janie Geiser.  First for a film, and later for a live show, she needed some rod puppet head controls. I looked at what they had, looked at what they wanted, and made a few experiments and gave them some puppets that worked pretty well. After that Ro Saunders said, "Oh, you made a Fedatov control". I had never heard of Fedatov, but I looked him up, and have found info on his control in the Fettig books. And yes I had sort of made a Fedatov control, but not really. What I had worked better for that instance, in that scale, and with those materials. But if I had known of the other control, would I have built a "better wheel"? I am sure David and others will agree that techniques must change when style changes, but the principles remain.

As to sharing trade secrets, there is that stingy part of me that doesn't like to share for free sometimes, since I spent many hours on my own coming up with a few good ideas. But I realized that I am perfectly happy to share it with anyone that comes into my shop or looks at my puppets closely. And I realized that it is not just that I am stingy, but also that I don't like it when people expect my knowledge for free. If they show any kind of commitment to the craft, I am pretty happy to share, and one way of showing that commitment is money, paying for it. And I am all for us artists getting paid. But there are those other ways of showing commitment that are just fine for me also. Mathieu, I can understand you annoyance at the great masters that had students doing much of their work, but I bet the students were just fine with it at the time. They did work in exchange for training. Not a bad way to show commitment. Of course there can be abuses of that system, but, like rote learning, there can be a good place for it also.
My morning's rambles
Greg Ballora

 
On Mar 2, 2010, at 9:18 AM, David J. Syrotiak wrote:

> I think that it's perfectly fine to share information about how to build a puppet in your respective style. Personally, when I teach someone how to build a marionette I insist that they copy our style, pattern and joining techniques so that they end up with a fully functional marionette that works well. By building their first one to our guidelines they learn the "whys" and "hows" of marionette construction by rote. After they have built one in our style the student is then free to alter/change anything they like and build their marionettes they way they envision them. BTW, I use the word "Style" freely here, because most of the techniques we use are an amalgamation of techniques taught/learned by professional puppeteers that came before us. Dad learned the craft from a number of different puppeteers and passed that information on to Peter and I. There is a huge amount of Rufus and Margo Rose, Bil Baird, Sue Hastings, Martin and Olga Stevens and Ruth Waxman in our approach to building. They in turn learned from people like Tony Sarg, William Duncan and Edward Mabley. The sharing of information is important to teach the rudiments of the craft. Where would we be today if we didn't have the combined wisdom of those who came before us? I agree with Hobey on the last point though. After learning the rudiments of the craft it is up to the individual artist to take it where they want to go.





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