Puppetry: How to Do It

Meryvn Millar

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788500722
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Actuación y audiciones

A practical, accessible and inspiring guide to using puppetry in theatre – the perfect entry point for anyone looking to use puppets in their productions, to explore what puppets can do, or to develop their puppetry skills.

Written by an experienced theatre and puppetry director, Mervyn Millar's Puppetry: How to Do It focuses on the performer and the craft of bringing any puppet to life. No puppet-making is required to use this book: starting just with simple objects, it lays out the skills required to unlock a puppet's limitless potential for expression and connection with an audience.

Inside you'll discover fifty practical, easy-to-follow exercises – for use in a group or on your own – to develop elements of the craft, build confidence and help you improve your puppetry through play and improvisation. Also included are sections on different types of puppet, thinking about how the puppeteer is presented on stage and how to direct and devise puppet performances.

Ideal for actors and performers, for directors and designers, and for teachers and students of all ages and levels of experience, this book will demystify the art of puppetry, and help you become more confident and creative with all kinds of puppets and objects on stage.

'This is a superb guide to puppet manipulation by one of the world's most experienced puppetry directors and teachers at a time when many actors are seeing puppetry as the twenty-first century's evocative and powerful new performance medium' - Basil Jones, Handspring Puppet Company

'This book captures Mervyn's playful and accessible process for working with actors to develop their puppetry skills – it's like having him in the room' - Lucy Skilbeck, Director of Actor Training at RADA

'Mervyn Millar has a unique perspective on the meteoric rise of puppetry in British theatre having witnessed it from the inside. He was resident at the Puppet Centre Trust at BAC when Improbable Theatre were exploding theatrical form in 70 Hill Lane and Animo. He was studying with Handspring when they created the exquisite and game-changing giraffe puppet in Tall Horse. He was present from the earliest experiments at the National Theatre Studio in which puppetry and "poor theatre" were combined to create the performance language of War Horse. There is no one better placed to reveal the techniques of puppetry which made these changes and these shows possible.' - Tom Morris, Artistic Director of Bristol Old Vic, and Co-director of War Horse

'Based on the workshops he developed for training performers for War Horse, Mervyn has written this book to share his craft… the exercises are clear and easily reproducible for many different types of participants… a wonderful gift to the field of puppetry. I hope that it will be used widely to introduce adventurous spirits to this dynamic art form' - Cheryl Henson, President of the Jim Henson Foundation, from her Foreword

Puppetry – the act of pretending that an object is alive – is natural and instinctive. We take an object, move it as if it’s alive, and provide it with thoughts and a voice. The object – behaving like a person, or an animal – lives through experiences that we don’t, and might respond in ways we never would. Everyone does it as a child (and every parent does it too). The puppet is a safe way for us to experience thrills, adventures, romances and deaths by proxy. What we do in theatre is a refined version, and targeted at an audience, but the desire to imagine life in an object, and to help someone else imagine life in that object, is not hard to find.

Part One

Hands

Let’s start out with an exercise.

This works well with a group – any size will do as long as there is enough space in the room. Everyone should do it, no one should be watching. (You can also do it alone.)

1a. Hand Animals

◦ Do a little warm-up just to stretch out, wake up and get rid of tension.

◦ Sit on the floor with enough space around you that you can move your arms around without hitting the next person.

◦ Relax.

◦ Lay one hand on the floor.

◦ Ignoring what the other people around you are doing, play a little with moving different parts of your hands. One finger, two fingers… move them about. Rest.

◦ Stretch your hand out. Relax it again.

◦ Breathe. Just be aware of the breath in your back and ribs. Let your breath be slightly audible, so that someone next to you would be able to hear it.

◦ Let the hand ‘breathe’, so that it’s making a little movement in sympathy with your breath.

◦ The hands are asleep, and this is the sound of their breathing.

◦ The sleeping hands are a little bit restless. Maybe some of them are murmuring a bit. They are dreaming about… gloves? Other hands? Let your hand roll over and move a little in its sleep.

◦ The hands are waking up. Perhaps they yawn. Let your hand wake up. Keep the breathing. See if your hand can move a little in one direction or another. See what happens when your hand wants to move up onto your leg, and back down again. Feel how it moves a bit differently.

◦ Let your hand look around the room. It can’t see the other hands or the people, but it can see everything else: marks on the floor, things on the wall, plug sockets, chairs, bags, shoes. See what your hand is interested in. Let the hand mutter to itself. Keep your breath audible.

◦ Let the hand stay in contact with the ground – it has weight, which it has to push to lift itself or move itself.

◦ Let the hand try to move over to the thing it finds most interesting. See how it pulls or pushes itself along, so that it’s just muscles in the hand that are moving it. Try making the journey easier by jumping or sliding some of the way. When you get to the interesting thing, let the hand have a look at it. By now you will have found out where the hand’s ‘eyes’ are. Let the hand smell the interesting thing, or blow on it.

◦ Have another look around. Mutter. See something else interesting. Start to move over there.

This is a fun and useful warm-up that works with everyone from schoolchildren to very experienced puppeteers. I learnt it from Rachel Riggs of Dynamic New Animation. It introduces some of the key concepts we’ll be working with. The hands will have been moving in a whole variety of different ways – some dragging, some scampering, some stepping. It’s possible for them to fly, of course, but at this stage it’s probably more useful if you ask them to keep contact with the ground.

Breath is crucial. Breath relates thought and mood to the body. Breath affects every movement we make and is affected by what we think and feel. It’s very difficult for the puppeteer to remember to keep embodying breath, so it’s worth reminding them periodically. You will find yourself saying quite a lot: ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Almost all of the exercises will need the puppeteers to stay in touch with their breath.

Weight is important too. What you will find with the hand is that one needs to use effort to move the weight of the hand. The hand, when we pretend it is a little creature, needs to move itself. So the hand has weight, and it needs to push from within against its own weight to move. Because our hand has muscles inside it, it’s easy (and obvious) to use only those muscles to move it – rather than using your shoulder or arm to move the hand. If you go straight to animating an object, you have to imagine the energy coming from inside it – so having moved your hand first helps you understand what will be the key to object manipulation. Locating the breath inside the hand means that even the smallest of the movements originate there.

1a (variation). Weight

◦ Try the exercise again (or while you are setting up 1b) and ask the participants to make the hand twice as heavy. Mention that moving something so heavy takes effort. You will hopefully find that the hands are breathing more heavily, huffing and puffing to shift themselves. Encourage it.

◦ Invite the hands to be lighter than they really are too. Breath stays important here, too, but it’s a chance to concentrate on balance. Encourage the hands to move lightly and with perfect elegant balance. Then ask them to imagine a light breeze blowing through the space that sometimes affects them.

◦ Bring the weight back to normal again. You might want to repeat these phases to reinforce the different ways of moving.

Most people naturally end up (whether the hand is light or heavy) breathing in – inhaling – as the hand lifts itself to take a ‘step’; and exhaling as the weight of the hand comes down onto the ground. This is a useful thing to connect with – even though it’s not a rule – for example, in a dash, you might take a number of steps in the space of a single exhalation. But you’d breathe in when you stopped.

Playing the hands as being heavy is quite satisfying. Playing them as light is much harder – and because you are so sensitive at the tips of your fingers, your puppeteers may become more conscious of playing some very precise physical impulses.

It’s good to refer to the hands as ‘animals’ or ‘creatures’. Lots of puppets are animals, and they are a great way to learn about puppetry. The animal is much less self-censored in how it relates its emotion to its movement. If the animal hears a threat, it tenses up, or runs. When it’s sleepy, it shows it all over its body. The attitude is completely physicalised. Socialised humans have learnt to suppress a lot of this – but as puppeteers, we want to be in touch with subconscious body language. What we get from starting with the breath is a way of locating whatever the impulse is, and a timing for delivering it to the body. By allowing our characters to be ‘animal’ we allow ourselves to explore this relationship simply and directly.

‘Keeping in touch with the animal’ (rather than imitating a specific animal) is useful in all sorts of ways. ‘Human’ characters look at things. ‘Animal’ characters stoop and stretch, sniff and blow to investigate. It’s immediately more interesting in terms of its movement. So, as this exercise is intended to get our minds into the simple act of animating a small body, it’s useful for you as the leader to congratulate the diversity and weirdness of the hand animals. Encourage the group to be different from each other – they will be more excited by seeing varied instincts brought to vivid life.

Is your hand a puppet? Well, it is alive already, but it’s not alive on its own in the way you just pretended it was. It’s not important to me to make a formal definition of a puppet at this point. What’s great about starting with the hands is that you can feel the transfer of weight when the fingers push or pull or reach to move the character around. And you are inside the sensation of how the breath animates the whole creature.

1b. Hand Animals and Moods

Get the hand animals going, as before. If you are working with the same group, some will revisit the same type of hand as last time and some will make a new one – either is fine. This is about enjoying themselves and loosening up the imagination.

◦ The hands are waking up. Make sure they have a big yawn.

◦ They feel terrible: they have a hangover, or they stayed up late watching films. Everything aches a little bit. See if they can get up.

◦ The hands have a little look around, and down at the floor. They still can’t see the other hands or people. They are starting to feel better. They’re breathing more clearly. Let the hands look around the room, and see what interests your hand.

◦ Start to investigate how your hand moves, and head over towards the interesting thing. Make sure the hand has weight, and make sure the hand is using breath to overcome it.

◦ The sun comes out and the hands are happy. Feel how that affects the way your hand is breathing and how it changes the way it moves. Let your hand enjoy its movement.

◦ Keep moving towards the interesting thing. When you’ve investigated it, have another look around for something else to move towards.

◦ Keep experimenting with the way you are moving. Try adding energy and turning a step into a hop.

◦ The hands are frightened. What are they frightened of? See what happens to your hand. Feel how this changes its breathing. But does this make your hand stay still and look around, or move quicker? See how it affects how it holds itself. See how it affects the movement and what it is thinking about. Where is a safe place?

◦ The hands are feeling more calm. Feel the shift in the breath rhythm and in the movement.

You’ll notice that the instructions shift between addressing the whole group, and the individual, quite freely. You’ll need to judge this – but you want to find a balance between focusing the puppeteers on their very personal experience (‘your hand…’) and remind them that they are part of a group and not being scrutinised too much (‘the hands…’). Especially if you are building confidence in a sceptical group, addressing ‘the hands’ can be a very useful mode.

The question ‘What are they frightened of?’ (or ‘What are they happy about?’, etc.) is the beginning of an important relationship with your group. Especially if they are not confident at improvisation, they may mistrust their instincts. Keep the improvisation moving without allowing time to think of a ‘good’ or ‘clever’ answer. Keep emphasising that the first thing they think of is a good instinct to follow.

Let your puppeteers know through these questions that they are free to make stuff up, secretly. They won’t need to say out loud what the answer is. As long as there is an answer, the thought will be detailed, and the resulting movement will be specific – and that’s what’s important. Vague ‘fear’ will lead to dramatic dead ends – a specific fear of sunlight, or chairs (or whatever leaps into the mind of the puppeteer in that moment) will lead to a definite action with a specific quality and direction – and will move the character into a new situation.

It feels odd to introduce emotion apparently arbitrarily (‘The hands are angry… what are they angry about?’) in a psychoanalytic world – but there is a point to the abruptness. The demand for an instant change in movement prompts an instinctive improvisation choice by the puppeteer.³

1c. Hand Animal Encounters

A messy...