Practical Guide to Puppetry (eBook)

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS PUPPETRY?

‘I dream about puppets all night. I see strings on people.’ (Trey Parker)

PUPPETRY IS NOT A SINGLE THING

A little man walks around on a table top complaining about his life, a cast of characters dance in a miniature theatre, a giant Wizard grows mightily into the air in a sports stadium, the shadow of an old lady changes into a bird, a pair of glove puppets fight, a miniature person watching TV is swallowed alive by their sofa, a detective multiplies into five tiny detectives, a firebird flies over the heads of the audience in a concert hall, a pair of red shoes walk up the wall in a dark caravan, two balloons ‘vogue’ to a contemporary soundtrack, a giant ‘Gulliver’ travels into a town on a barge…. Seeing these things is magical. They are puppetry.

There are many types of puppetry and hundreds of different puppets. There are giant puppets and tiny puppets. There are puppets that require lots of people to operate them and puppets that can be operated on one finger. Some puppets are beautifully sculpted or painted, while others may be traditional and rather crude in style. Simple everyday objects, which are not actually puppets at all, can be used by puppeteers to take the shape of living things. Some puppets are controlled by strings, rods, gloves, shadows or remote control, or a combination of all of these, or none of these.

Some puppets work in miniature, others on a giant scale. They appear in theatres, on the street, on specially built stages, in stadiums, at the beach. Sometimes they are part of telling a story. At others they are a special effect. Some are specially invented for a particular show, while others may be part of a tradition that is hundreds of years old.

What all puppets have in common is that the protagonist in the scene – the character that the audience is watching – is played by a something that is not alive: a specialized object; a puppet. It only looks like it is alive because it is being moved by a puppeteer. Puppeteers, working behind the scenes, make everything happen.

However, the fact is that none of these things have happened at all. It just looked like they happened.

PUPPETRY IS AN ILLUSION

Puppetry is a kind of magic trick. The puppeteer brings life to an object that the observer knows is not alive. As with magic, the excitement for the people in the audience lies in whether the puppeteer can convince them with their skill. Can they make them see the puppet come alive? Can they make them believe it is alive? The trick is everything. Just as we know that there is no such thing as magic – it is a trick – we are all too aware that a puppet is not actually alive. But….

Where magic is about ‘misdirection’, puppetry is about ‘direction’. While the magician tries to make the observer look away, so that they can do the trick without being seen, the puppeteer encourages the audience to look at the puppet and to see the trick. Puppetry is a magic trick done in plain sight.

When a magician pulls a live rabbit out of a seemingly empty hat, or a puppeteer makes fur move so that it looks like a living animal, the event happens in the imagination of the audience. Watching a magic act, the audience sees a non-existent rabbit magically come into existence, apparently out of nothing. Watching a puppeteer, the audience imagines that the fur is moving on its own and is able to overlook the fact that it is the puppeteer who is doing it.

Puppetry is the art of moving something with your hands so that it looks like it is moving on its own – like it is alive.

DUPLICATION

There is a difference between what the puppeteer does and what the audience sees. In puppetry, everything is duplicated. There is the puppet’s world and the puppeteer’s world. There is the puppet’s head and hands and feet, and the puppeteer’s head and hands and feet. There is the puppet’s action and the character’s action, and the puppeteer’s action. There is what the puppet does, what that looks like, and what it means. And there is what the audience sees and what the audience understands from what it sees.

It would be wrong to say that the puppeteer ‘does the movement of the puppet’; they do not. There is a difference between the movement that the puppet does, and the movement that the puppeteer does to make the puppet do that movement. The puppeteer makes the puppet move using their hands. When the puppeteer moves their hand holding the puppet’s head, what the audience sees is the puppet move its head.

Consider a glove puppet picking something up. It bends over, it reaches out for the item, and it picks it up. At least, that is what it appears to do and that is what the audience understands it to have done. What actually happened, of course, is that the puppeteer made the puppet appear to bend over by flexing their hand. The puppeteer then moved the puppet in such a way that it appeared to reach out, then moved it again so that the puppet appeared to pick up the item in its arms. Actually, it was the puppeteer who picked it up in their hand.

Furthermore, different puppets would do it in different ways. A string puppet picks something up using a string rigged to pull into its hand. A three-person table-top puppet picks something up using the puppeteer’s hand. In a shadow show, the item might be controlled on another stick, or the puppet might be swapped with another puppet that is already holding it, and so on.

What the puppeteer does, what the puppet does and what the audience sees are all different.

THE VIEW OF THE AUDIENCE

What this all comes down to is that there are two points of view in puppetry: the view from in front and the view from behind. The audience sees the puppet from in front and the puppeteer sees it from behind. The puppet has no point of view.

If the show is to be understood, it is the view of the audience – the view from in front – that matters. What the audience imagines the puppet is doing when they watch the show is what the puppet is doing. If they do not understand what the puppeteer wants them to see, and if they do not see what the puppets do, then to all intents and purposes it might as well never have happened.

Throughout this book, the audience – that is, the person watching from in front of the puppet –is the arbiter of ‘what happened’. What the puppet thought and did is what the audience believes it thought and did. What the audience sees and hears, and what they interpret from that, is what happened. There is no other view.

The only ‘truth’ in puppetry is what happens in the imagination of the audience.

PUPPETS ARE OBJECTS THAT PERFORM

A puppet of a dog walks on stage and the audience gasps. It looks just like a real dog, they say. It is more real than a real dog.

Notice that they do not say that they think it is a real dog. They are not fooled by it. They don’t make that mistake. But they do say that it is even more real than a real dog.

It is more real than a real dog because it is acting. In other words, it is not behaving like a real dog at all, but like an acting dog. It is like a dog that has learned its lines and rehearsed beforehand. A real dog would bark at the audience, wag its tail, come and go as it wanted, lift a leg on the stage, and so on. A puppet dog does not do this. It is there to serve the story. It moves in sympathy with the storytelling, it learns and repeats the role, it listens and thinks and moves as the director directed it. It might even talk. It gives a written performance, like a dog actor.

Although, of course, it is not the dog that does it; it is the puppeteers.

SEEING THE PUPPETEER’S WORK

Although they do not realize it, the audience is really there to watch the puppeteers, not the puppets. As soon as someone sees a puppet, they know that there is someone behind it – or above or below. The puppeteers may or may not show their faces, or even appear on stage, but the audience knows they are there. The observer may or may not talk about the puppeteers – they may only talk about the puppet – but they know that the puppet did not do it on its own.

Without a puppeteer, a puppet is an incomplete object. Whether it is lying in a box or hanging on a hook, its joints will be floppy and its body will not hold it up. It may not have legs or hands; it may be just a pile of rags and a lifeless head. Without the puppeteer, the puppet cannot even stand up. It is only half there. The puppet becomes complete only when the puppeteer picks it up and brings it to life.

The puppet takes the physical space of a character in the show. The puppet is what the audience watches, but it is the puppeteer who learns the role and who makes the puppet do the performance. Equally, it is the puppeteer who is nervous before the show and who may be inspired in the performance.

And it is the puppeteer’s work that the audience comes to see, mediated through the puppet.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE PUPPETEER

When a puppet ‘comes alive’, in fact it does not change at all. It is the puppeteer who changes.

When a puppeteer brings a puppet on stage in a box, they are a person with a box. If the audience does not know what is in the box, they do not know whether the person is a puppeteer or not. They cannot say any more at this point.

If the puppeteer goes on to...