Tuesday's and Thursday's lesson was spent creating a puppet made out of newpaper and masking tape in preparation for Friday’s workshop with the 3 Ouroboros actresses. We managed to create a pretty good puppet (which we rushed at the end). I think we did a good job in making a puppet that we were able to manipulate well.

Friday the 3 puppeteers came in, we started by learning each other’s names with a warm up exercise. We stood around in a circle and said our names to a clapping beat; we then said it in a different voice and then went on to add an action. This helped create the ensemble feel and make us feel more comfortable with the 3 actresses. We then watched the Ted Talk Video about Handspring Puppet Theatre. On this Ted Talk we were shown a puppet of a hyena and we were explained about the movement and manipulation of all puppets. The video then went on to talk about War Horse and a horse puppet was shown on stage. It was so life like and the characteristic of a horse was portrayed amazingly by the movement of ears, the legs and even the breaths and sounds.

 I learnt that you have to understand the body of an animal or human to be able to manipulate a puppet which is an animal or a human.

Before working with our puppet ‘Monty’ we worked on ‘eyeline’. Eyeline is the second most important thing when it comes to puppetry. We used teddy bears and each had an actress pointing where to look and we would have to make the teddy react to where the actress was and move to that point. At first I found this hard but then when I put my eye near to where the teddy’s eyes were it was much easier for me to get the Eyeline right. I realised how important eyeline is and if it is off it can change the whole thing the puppet is looking at so maybe changing the story.

After this we started working with ‘Monty’. I was the right hand puppeteer, Lydia was the foot puppeteer and Axel was head puppeteer. I think I had the easiest role to do, because Axel had to speak and remember to control the eyeline and keep the puppet alive. Lydia seemed extremely uncomfortable in the positions she had to do. My role was to only love the right hand according to to left and what axel was doing. Even though I thought my role was easy it was quite tricky to be coordinated with Axel and what the 3 puppeteers said ‘you have to die in order for the puppet to live’ is very much true.

We spent a long time focussing on our puppets movement; we were all focussing but sometimes forgot even if the puppet id lying down it is breathing. We also learnt that we have to think about our own actions so that we can portray the correct actions of the puppet in order for it to be realistic. If we did not do the actions properly it would not be as effective.

After we worked on the movement of ‘Monty’ we all created a short piece to perform to years 2 and 4. We wanted to make our little piece funny because we thought it would keep the children intrigued and it would be more successful than if we did something serious. We had the idea of using lazzi which we learnt when we studied Commedia last year. We thought that ‘Monty’ could have his own puppet show and that things could go wrong. We decided on him making a pancake and then making him drop it which would be slapstick and then we got a volunteer from the audience to have a go at flipping a pancake. Of course this pancake was not real but it was still enjoyable and didn’t stop the flow of our piece. We got lots of laughs off the children which was our aim. During the performance I thought that we succeeded with the way we worked together and manipulated the puppet.

After the performance we helped the year 4’s and 2’s make puppets for themselves, we helped them create the puppets and explained to them how to move the heads and body parts. I saw that the children understood about the movement of the head and I saw a lot of them manipulating the heads.

It was so amazing to have 3 professionals with us, I think it will help us with future work and their experience and knowledge helped us a lot with our own puppet ‘Monty’. It was very exciting to work with the young children again and I am excited to possibly work with primary again this time on our own showing the things we have learnt from the 3 puppeteers