Voice of the Show

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Three... by Suzanne Kendall Today, after a couple of weeks of watching demonstrations and listening to talks about puppetry, our puppetry class became practical. I must admit to feeling a little nervous when I was told we would be making muppets! For all intents and purposes we are defining muppets as moving mouth puppets. Many people think that Jim Henson invented the term by blending together the words 'marionette' and 'puppet' but there is some controversy about this... nevertheless, back to muppet making: I might have been a board-treader at school but was never particularly arty or crafty. Art classes were all very well but design technology terrified me - all those glue guns, scalpels   and cutting machines! Today there were glue guns. And scalpels. And electric bread knives!! There was also foam. A lot of foam! The stuff of which muppets are made... Ordinarily you'd start with a block of foam which you would cut and carve...

And so our journey begins for Pinocchio 2017! We sent our brilliant actor Suzanne Kendall on a six week Puppetry Foundation Course at The Little Angel Theatre, here's her first report..... Playing Pinocchio! Week One... My first session on the puppetry foundation course was absolutely fascinating and made me appreciate what a real art form puppetry is! We looked at why and how puppetry works and were introduced to the idea of puppetry as a communication medium. We examined how the performer treats the object/puppet and how that effects the way the audience perceives it. Oliver Smart (the course tutor) emptied a big bag of puppets onto a table and demonstrated a whole range of them. It was so skilled and entertaining! The strange thing was that the performer completely disappeared and even though you knew they were still there and you could clearly see them operating the puppet, you switched them off. The puppets became more real and life-like than the performe...