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 --- Personal replies to: "Agit Prop Central" <dhell-AT-ozemail.com.au> --- List replies to: puptcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- Admin commands to: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
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