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It was hard to establish good puppetry practice with the
actors as far as manipulation and movement of the puppets that they had made
or were using. The acting and drama sessions were assimilated and techniques
were absorbed and used fairly well considering that the school has no formal
drama education, but puppetry is a subtle art. To breathe life into the inanimate,
to get it to animate and be plausible on stage requires a lot of dedication,
concentration and some ability to project emotions through the wood, paper,
cloth or rubber character. The pressure to complete the process of making
puppets and props and produce a show for the festival reduced the amount of
concentrated focus on the finer points of puppetry. Having said that a few
individuals showed a real ability to concentrate on this particular aspect
in performance.
One explanation for the difficulty of understanding the
power of puppetry for the participants was that puppets seem to work best
with an audience and even then it is harder for the puppeteer who is often
hidden from view to feel a contact with that audience. The audience is often
so quiet and absorbed in the puppet’s movement and scale that this concentration
is perceived from behind the set as disinterest. They did however at times
catch glimpses of how well the puppetry was received during performance and
then they responded by improving technique.
