"Be a Hero"
This was our bunraku inspired play that we performed to an audience of year 2 and 4 classes of our school that also attended the workshop and short performance which three puppeteers from the Handspring Puppet Company. The point of the performance was to be entertaining and educational which links to Brecht's Epic Theatre of a play being educational.
Our play was educational as it taught the audience what was right and wrong about food and water waste and also about recycling. We tried to aim the play towards them by using language that they would be able to relate to and understand, including excitement such as a super hero, lots of movement like dancing with music and also audience interaction where some children came up on stage to help place a badge on the puppet and also join in with speech and dancing.
We got taught the concept of "BERPI" from the three girls from the handspring puppet company. There were advantages and disadvantages to the way we used and succeeded in berpie during our performance:
BREATH- during a performance, the puppet should be breathing at all time, it should never be still. As I was the foot puppeteer, for me the breath job is much easier but it can also still be difficult. You cannot move the feet too much because it is unrealistic unlike making the chest just breath naturally. So the feet can be confusing when and if you should keep them moving when on the stop to make the "breath aspect more true".
EYELINE- this is another aspect that has to be constant during a puppet performance. The puppet needs to have direct eyeline with the audience and other props on the stage. If a puppet isn't looking at its book properly then the realism of the puppet will disappear and the audience will remember it is just a puppet. As I was foot puppeteer, I could not control the eyeline but I did still understood the tactic and kept the keep in line with the eyeline to make sure the body of the puppet is correct.
RHYTHM- Bekki, Axel and I all had to work together to get the rhythm of the puppet correct. A moment in the play the puppet had to have good rhythm was our little dance scene when Nick the puppet became a hero. I choreographed a little easy dance number for the puppet but it was a little too hard on the beats to the music to move the puppet in a realistic way so "can't remember who it was" came up with a more simple solution which was good and we all understood it. This meant that our puppet was more in rhythm to the music and also in time with eachother.
PHYSICS- We all worked together to move the puppet correctly but sometimes during the performance we weren't perfect in making the puppet move very realistic but i think that this was partly our fault and partly the puppets fault as it was difficult to move.
INSPIRATION- in berpi, this doesn't mean the inspiration for the play but it means the inspiration in a prop. The puppet has to see something and be inspired to use it, show emotion in its face by the way it moves it has to have emotion.
After the performance, the audience reactions were good and i felt that we did get our message across and entertained the kids. This was our aim but i think that we could have definitely performed with the puppet much better. We could have created a better puppet and practised more. Even though we struggled and it should take us 30 years to learn how to control a puppet properly, I think we learnt a lot of theory but our techniques need to be put to practice and we need to have had a better puppet like the one in handspring puppet company.
As this is my final blog " kinda" i might write another one after the TPPP, I think that this two year theatre class has showed me a lot of things! It showed me what hard work really can be haha physically(zen work) and mentally (RI, IPP.....omg)
I realised how much I actually liked learning about theatre practices and all the different parts of theatre that I want to carry on in the future but it has also built my confidence in acting which will be good for uni.
Also we had a lot of laughs throughout the two years :D:D
