Puppetry

Puppetry

Another part of our research for getting into the idea of children’s theatre is that we had to devise and put on a puppet show. We had two days to do so. On the first day we brought in our own socks and had to create a character for our sock. my group and I decided that we would just start making whatever came to mind and then decide on a plot once the characters are done because we thought that might make the play a bit funny as we are linking the play to the characters we already have. 

Daisy’s puppet was a princess, James was a goofy puppet, Nathans was a ‘Bad man’, Lilys was a dragon and mine was a wimpy super hero. Once we had finished that we started to think of a plot.

We thought of the plot almost straight away. Our first thought was to make it so that each puppet had to save Daisy’s princess puppet from Lily’s dragon puppet but then we thought it was a bit too cliché and so we changed it a little bit. The princess wanted to find her prince charming and whoever defeated the dragon at the end would be, however there was a twist at the end whereby she actually only wants the diamond that the dragon has. Here is the video of our puppet show below.

We got a lot of our ideas from the performance we watch called ‘Polar Bears Go Wild’ as our performance was a quest form and we used a map like system like they did. I think using the puppets has given me more of an idea about how you can get people engaged. Our group are going to try and incorporate a form of puppetry in our final devised play as we felt it worked quite well with the puppets. The only thing that I found is that it is very hard to stay hidden and stay in character as you keep thinking you are yourself as you can’t actually get in to what is going on around you because you cannot see.

Here is the first performance that i was unable to attend with my groups original idea...

Then we did the finale performance which I did perform in...

To improve the performance we would have added in a bit more scripting and learnt it over time as there was a lot of air in the performance and it kept on stop starting. Also I would try and get more into the puppets character as I kept falling in and out of the character. The whole play itself needed consistency and maybe more of a gripping plot line. However if we had extended time I’m sure we would have been able to achieve this.