Week 5: Drama Workshop 3 "Bringing Puppets to Life"

 

Week 5: Drama Workshop 3 – 11/4/13

                                   

                                         OH! I WISH I CAN GO TO THE BALL!!  

 In this week’s workshop, we thought about how we will bring our critical moment to life with our handmade puppets and improvised script. My group and I considered how the quality of our voices changes depending on the emotion being conveyed by our chosen characters. We also considered how the personality of the character changes according to the many different scenes from our critical moment. During this workshop, we were given the opportunity to create our puppets using the materials: newspapers, net, balloons, textas, and rubber bands. Before we began making our puppets we wrote up a short script to use when performing our Scene. I created and improvised on being the evil, viscous stepmother where I used a newspaper and made a twist in the middle and drew her eyes with a angry face using a black texta, I brought it to life with a certain character depicting the evil stepmother.

                                                                                     
Unfortunately, my improvised puppet wasn’t complete and made to perfection. However, this insightful experience made me realise that puppetry is not just about the purpose and making, it encounters many detailed aspects on: who is the character? Choice of setting? What viewpoint is the puppet looking? What messages are being conveyed to the audience and what are the emotions of the audience? What is being portrayed to the audience?

Overall, It felt like the puppets came to life and that the puppets were in role and focus intent. It was a new experience to take aboard for my future teaching as it made me realise that when using puppets to perform you are performing in a dramatic role. "Part of the never-ending appeal of puppetry lies in the fact that the puppet is the focus of attention, and so the puppeteer feels safe." (Ewing & Simons, 2010, p.53). What really amazed was the amount of critical thinking and decision-making surprised me, which made me consider good aspects add  into my teaching. This has opened several opportunities to incorporate puppets into my teaching.

http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=z08titE6s1A&feature=youtube – This video shows our scene focusing on our critical moment of the fairy tale ‘Cinderella’.

 

 

Ewing, R. & Simons, J. (2010). Beyond the script: Drama in the classroom take 2. Newtown, NSW: Primary English Teaching Association

 This is the script that my Group and I came up with when performing our  critical moment scene of Cinderella.