File spoon-archives/puptcrit.archive/puptcrit_1999/puptcrit.9908, message 366


From: "Agit Prop Central" <dhell-AT-ozemail.com.au>
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 23:46:25 +0000
Subject: PUPT: Children: masked & puppets


I doing a few things at the moment. I love to experiment and to see 
what gives. And one of my projects is teaching "drama" to kids. I 
take two sessions per week in a local elementary school. 

Last semester I had mainly 10-12 year olds and I could do lots of 
work improvising and developing scenes but now I've got early and  
middle elementary  children and I find that they don't have the same 
narrative skills as older children. 

I've always used masks with kids and this semester started to teach 
ventriloquism and employ hand puppets. Now all the students in one of 
 my sessions have made sock puppets. So when I go to the school  
children start poking their little friends at me and making with the 
ventriloquism. (Ventriloquism was, I thought,, a sneaky way to get 
them to practice clearer speech without boring them).

My problem is -- for I have a problem -- is where to go from here. If 
I set up a puppet program at the school I'm trying to work out how to 
intergrate that with my other aims -- which were geared to getting 
children to confidently perform in front of others. The puppet 
process is a bit different -- indeed it is even different from 
performing  masked.  I didn't expect this. Puppetry came  naturally 
out of what we were doing and for some children it becomes 
a feature of our classes they can identify with much more strongly 
than other forms of make believe.

So while I've had to quickly learn as much as I can about puppetry 
(and loving it!) and to start making puppets, it is my guess that 
next semester I will have to set up  ongoing puppet workshops and a 
bona fide puppet theatre at the school. 

I'm open to suggestions as to how I should do this as I'm keen to 
learn from the experience of others and read as much as I can find 
relevant to puppetry and young children. I'm wondering what sort of 
structure should I give to such a program. I don't want it simply to 
be an exercise in crafts.  

 I guess, even in my overall approach to theatre,, I'll tend toward a 
combination of puppetry and masked performances relying a lot on 
improvisation.

And whereas masks are sometimes liberating for the youngsters' 
imagination I've found puppetry can do that too -- and for these 
early and middle level kids  their identifiucation with the role of 
the puppet is much stronger than their ability to explore the 
potential of the mask.

Dave Riley
Brisbane AUSTRALIA




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