Week #4 Let's dance to Joy Division

Here is a playlist for you to feast on Click

This past week we had 3 days where we learned how to make puppets for the play and how to use puppets, a couple came to school and they taught us. We started by first learning about the different puppets of the different cultures in the world; I learned some things about Bunraku during the presentation. We then went to the theatre where we saw two plays with puppets, a long one that we just saw half of that was about a woman and her dog and a short one that was about Ian Curtis the lead singer of Joy Division. After this we learned how to make our own puppets from scratch and we are still working on them currently.

                I really enjoy making puppets because it is a really “free” type of art, when making a puppet you can do many different things and make it as personal as you can. What I mean by personal is that when you are making a puppet you feel like you are just doing the puppet and not thinking about how to do it, so you actually make original puppets and you don’t need much skills to do it(you do need some tough). But right now we have just made hand puppets and not really many puppets like the one we saw on the Joy Division show that was a puppet with no strings and where the actors using it were seen. I would like to find a way of using this type of puppet in the play but on a bigger scale if possible.

                This past week I also changed from helping with the costumes and masks in the play to helping with the puppets and scenery, focusing on the scenery. I hope that I can do a better job in this area than in the other one (even though I was not doing a bad job with the costumes)

                As of now I hope that my puppet ends up looking good and I hope it is on the play even though I think it won’t be used and if it is it won’t be used for what it was originally made I am still hopeful that it will end up looking good enough. But making the puppets makes me thing that maybe puppets are more personal. So my question is, when making a puppet is it really that personal? And if it is, should the person using the puppet be the one making the puppet?