PLEASE NOTE: I could have talked about the puppet shows that were created as educational programs. I covered littering prevention (Keep Providence Clean), sexual abuse prevention (RI Children’s Trust Fund), drug abuse, value of education, food groups, accepting our bodies(Harvard Community Health Plan), and many more. We made puppets with over 25,000 children and adults. Most of these occurred n classroom workshops. I could have spent the whole session on those workshops, but in the end, Judith O’Hare and I decided on this theme: Puppets in Therapeutic Settings.  This was a terrible mistake.  I believe that Judith O’Hare and Matthew Bernier did not like my presentation, and I am sure that if I had just chosen to talk about the workshops for non special needs children would have been accepted with much less controversy.  Puppet Workshop averaged a hundred workshops a year, over 500 pure shows, and many, many projects.

There are two drafts of the write-up that I wrote. The first draft starts with a Note from Judith O’Hare. Here is the first draft written and sent to one person: Judith O’Hare on August 17, 2014

Marc: I read your paper and made some comments ; You have a lot to say, but you only have 20 minutes to say it. Make a couple of clearly stated points with an introduction and conclusion. It is fine to tell people they can get more in your other workshop, but for this presentation it should be a clearly stated point/s that we can discuss. Is your main point that when children/teen create a puppet there are several points you like them to consider and these points are important because they show something about the creator and this is therapeutic in what ways??? You can’t say all that you know, but what you do say needs to be cohesive and give the audience something to react to and talk about. Does this seem clear? Check over your article and especially use spell check to fix spelling… we are so lucky to have the help of the computer…”</h2><h2>     Does this seem clear?  Check over your article and especially use spell check to fix spelling… we are so lucky to have the help of the computer…”  (There a chance that Judith’s comments are included, because I could not see them as separate notes)

Puppets in Therapeutic Settings
by Marc W. Kohler

“…In the 1970’s there began to be a noticeable, theoretical division in the ranks of art therapists. Those who practiced “art as therapy” emphasized the innate healing power of making art. Those therapists who considered their practice “art psychotherapy” used art as a healing tool within the framework of verbal psychotherapy…” Art Therapy — History & Philosophy http://www.healthandhealingny.org/complement/art_history.asp

The question that I am asking and want to answer today is where in the field of Art Therapy do puppets fit, and if they do, are they in the category of the “healing power” of art or to the category of a process which helps understanding the patient’s interior life. I can say the Puppet Therapy as I have practiced it fits into both categories, and even gives the participant a therapeutic experience. In fact, if and when the work that was done to support the Diagnostic Drawing Series (DDS), the Ulman Personality Assessment Procedure (UPAP), and the Levick Emotional and Cognitive Art Therapy Assessment (LECATA) are done on puppetry, then I believe that puppets will become a serious part of all therapeutic situations for patients of all ages.

So, I am advocating that the puppet made in this system and with the necessary methods and techniques that I suggest is a therapy on its own. The process requires that the I visit with the patient population to discover how the patients make and and express decisions. This can be verbally, with blinks of the eyelids or any other method that suits them best. I also find out how the patient can hold, move and manipulate a puppet. Then, I design the puppet.. The puppet can be a simple hand puppet, a hand puppet on a rod, a foam head placed on a patient’s wrist (since she hand no use of her fingers), rods with “plastic” (i.e. Aliplast) handles, or just cutouts from construction paper or file folders. For hand capable and verbally capable chide . ten and adults, I use the Puffit hand puppet which serves as a puppet that can be made in about 20 minutes. (Puppet assembling #40570A at http://www.google.com/patents/US4010570)

Once the puppet is created, I ask five questions
for the participant to answer.
Name of the Puppet
Age
Where is the puppet from?
What do they do for their job?
What do they like to eat?
Feeling?

We then have the participants move their puppet, find a voice of the puppet and do exercises which help them control the puppet. I then, put the participants behind a stage which has been designed to meet their needs. It can be a simple as holding the puppets up around a table, a folding stages with or without a scrim, a curtain strung so that it hides their wheel chairs, or other structure which insures that the participant can express themselves through the puppet.

Here we see the therapeutic aspects of the puppet. It is a Gestalt experience, but unlike the Top Dog-Underdog interviews practiced in Gestalt therapy. It is a Person/Puppet conversation. The puppet creator in completely in the role of “Top Dog”—also called the Superego. The puppet is not the “underdog, but it is what I call a direct “projection” of the thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, possibilities, and self image of the creator. That projection and all the subsequent communication with the puppet give the participant a chance to exercise these aspects of their personalities. A second therapeutic use of puppets this way is that the “performance” requires behaviors that the participant may not even be able to perform. A child who had not spoken in the school, growled when she brought her puppet up—it was the first time that the staff had ever heard her verbalize anything other than a scream. In another case of a woman who made a puppet of her maid, could not, in fact find ANY words for the puppet to say. She had no idea what the womb felt or thought.

So, in the puppets world, the creator experiences the freedom of their creation which meets with the demands of theater—puppets have to greet each other, they have to listen to each other, and the performance demands behaviors from the participants. For instance, the puppet performed by a child with a severe stutter, did not stutter when performed.
We continue using the puppet by asking if the puppet has any problems—this leads to creating short plays. Then, depending on the capabilities (Likes and dislikes), life lines (The Age of the puppet shows the year they were born, and in one occasion a child’s puppet was going to die at 18 years old, and by the end of the workshop, the puppet was going to live to 60!), and a family tree which actually lay the basis for stories and novels!
So, that is what I am going to cover today. I will have a Handbook for this work available for you to follow-up these ideas when you return to your homes. If you have any questions for me, just contact me:

Marc Kohler
P.O.Box 16095
Rumford, RI 02916
401-441-2129
marcwkohler@aol.com
marcwkohler.com

Here s the final draft that I passed out at the talk in September

Some Ideas and Suggestions

for Puppetry with Special Needs Individuals and Groups

Write-up for 2014 Presentation at Homecoming Festival  Professional Day 

By 

Marc W. Kohler

105 Newman Ave. 913S

Rumford, Rhode Island 02916

Email: marcwkohler@aol.com

Web Site: marcwkohler.com

Youtube Channel: Marc Kohler 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxc7VNJV-KkVNhCvIrQLzwA

—-Includes 25 puppet shows and The Puppet Making Workshop 

Mailing Address:  P.O. Box 16095

Rumford, Rhode Island 02916

Cell: 401-442129

Home:  401-438-4921

Prepared as a support to a presentation for the Professional Day for the Teaching Artist and Therapist held as a Special Day at the Puppet Homecoming Festival sponsored by the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Regions of the Puppeteers of America Sept. 5-7, 2014

Copyright Marc W. Kohler August 2014

NOTE:

This is really a handbook for using puppets with special needs individuals and groups.  I decided to title it Ideas and Suggestions, because “Handbook” has the sense of a final draft, and this is not a final draft.  It is a working draft.  I have included all of my contact information here, and there is a form at the end of this write-up.   Please use it, so you can send your comments criticisms, questions, and suggestions to me.  Especially, typos and grammar!!

Introduction:

I started doing puppet shows as a child, and spent the summer of 1965, at 17, working as an assistant to Alan Cook at one of his puppet displays in Palo Alto, California.  In 1972, I founded The Puppet Workshop as a non-profit educational puppet theater.  It’s goals were to produce original educational live puppet shows, teach the art of puppetry, and to explore new uses of puppetry in the arts, education, therapy, and commercial uses.  The Puppet Workshop stopped operating in 1994.

From 1984 to 1993, three members of the Puppet Workshop served as a resident puppet therapists at agencies and schools in Rhode Island through a program titled Supplemental Independent EducationI Plan(SIEP), a program of the Providence School Department.   We visited agencies where children from the Providence School were placed.  We were encouraged to reach as many children at each location whether or not they were from the Providence School Department.  We also worked for local mental health centers and other locations serving teen and adult special needs populations.  In one example, I worked with every school-aged child in the Meeting Street School population over  a period of five years.  We also visited Groden Center locations, CITE, Eleanor Slater Hospital Zambarano Unit,  and other special needs schools.   This gave the me experiences that I will discuss in this paper. I worked with autistic children. children with Cerebral Palsy, children with autism, teen prison inmates, adult special needs groups, and other groups and individuals.  For six years, a group of patients with schizophrenia visited our studio weekly. In addition to these special needs groups and individuals, the Puppet Workshop reached over 25,000 children and adults with our Puppet Happening from 1977 to 1994.

As a result of doing these workshops, I created a system of making puppets with children and adults where they make and perform a puppet in about 90 minutes.  When I would wok with special needs groups, the system was basically the same, except that the length of time or the workshops or the number of visits varied a great deal.  I call this system the Kohler Puppetry Method. (KPM) I hope that it is original.  Now, what is in this “system”.

What Do I mean by : “Puppet Therapy”:

The term “puppet therapist” or “puppet therapy” are not accurate by today’s definitions.  Thirty years ago, the terms were used as a convenience, even though we did not provide any actual art therapy as it is defined today.  Here are some lines form the Wikipedia definition:

“…This…underscores the art therapy process in two ways. In most cases, a skilled professional attends to the individual who is making the art. This person’s guidance is key to the therapeutic process. This supportive relationship is necessary to guide the art-making experience and to help the individual find meaning through it along the way. It helps the individual trust themselves more.

The other important aspect is the attendance of the individual to his or her own personal process of making art and to giving the art product personal meaning—i.e., finding a story, description, or meaning for the art. Very few therapies depend as much on the active participation of the individual (p. 24).” In art therapy, the art therapist facilitates the person’s exploration of both materials and narratives about art products created during a session…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_therapy

You see, in the puppet making and performing that I evolved, the participants reveal parts of their personalities, their hopes and fears. I did not follow up the process with a discussion about how the participants felt or how they could relate the experience to their personal feelings or thoughts.   So, I would label my work as “meta-therapy.”   The process was therapeutic without follow-up, for the puppet making and performing allowed changes to take place. Hopefully, someday, there will be the assessment to make puppet therapy a relied upon resource for therapists all around the world.  That is the goal of this paper—to give you the information so you can use these ideas in your careers as puppeteers.  If enough of us do this, then, maybe, just maybe, we can have a more formal standing in the Art Therapy community.

Why is KPM therapeutic?

“…the healthiest form of projection is Art…”   Fritz Perls – Gestalt Therapist

 

I interpret Perls’ words to mean that the making of art is the best way for a person to “get out”of themselves feelings that they have “inside” of themselves.  Freud used the term “projection” as  behavior within ourselves that we use as a defense. An example of this would be for a person to complain about people being rude, while being rude themselves.

When Perls used the term, though, he was suggesting the free expression of feelings “onto” the piece of art.  In the core of Gestalt Therapy is the “two-chair” therapy with a “top dog” on one chair and “under dog” on the other.  Fritz would listen to a person’s dream/story, pick two of the last physical objects in the dream, and then he assign each of two chairs to be those objects. He would then have the two subject begin a discussion between the two characters.  In most cases, one chair “character” would evolve into the “Top Dog” and the other chair becomes the “Under Dog.”  The subject then moves back and forth, discussion a specific  issue in the subject’s life. Perls would side coach the discussion, and through this process, the subject would resolve personal patient would move from one chair to the other seeking a resolution between these two sides of their personality.  If a resolution is not produced, Perls would end the session placing the subject “Stuck”.   “Stuckedness” is something we all experience. The basic idea is that Gestalt therapy emphasizes the here and now, bringing conflict to closings.

In the Kohler Puppetry Method, there are two “chairs”, but they are not opposites at all.  They are the person making and performing the puppet and the puppet.  The puppet is solidly attached to the person, and the relationship  between them is not hostile.  Rather, it is supportive and evolutionary.  Each need the other.   The puppet evolves as a character as the person makes decisions for it, or him, or her, and expresses.   The puppet therapist (in my “old” definition)cis the audience along with others pif they are part of the process. That one-person or small group of audience members causes what I would call the “performance imperative”.   The puppet of a stutterer will not stutter.  The quiet child’s “Washington” puppet will be a man in charge, and a voice child care growl—making a sound that the staff members had never heard .  All they had heard before that moment was yelling, and this “growling” gave her a whole new resource for communicating—her “puppet voice!”  In an adult  workshop where they were making puppets around the idea of local arts council concerns made a puppet of her maid.  When the puppet came out on stage, the participant could not utter one word for the puppet, so the puppet made a bow, and left the stage.  As I mentioned above, these moments are PIM’s—Performance Imperative Moments.

These experiences actually happen from the moment that the puppet appears on a stage, and the participant experiences  and “owns” the power to create, with confidence, a full personality that is appreciated and applauded.  That is the therapeutic nature of my work.  As the puppets are used over periods of time, moments like this can happen over and over again.   In an extended two part puppet making and performing workshop with 6th graders, one boy made a puppet that according to its “lifeline” (A tool of KPM) was going to die when he was 18.  During the second workshop, the boy chained that to “he’s going to die of old age”.  This is magic, and it is real and it is worth learning, and using.  

What do I recommend to do before you use these ideas in a residency?

I first suggest that anyone who is considering doing puppets in therapeutic situations (not therapy) under the KPM system join the national organization The Association of Teaching Artists at http://www.teachingartists.com.  They have contacts throughout the United States, offer workshops in how to approach schools to provide services, and in all ways will help you get started to do residencies in schools, community centers, and many other groups in your neighborhood.  There is a definite art and science to working as an artist in these institutions—this group has a real handle on how to help maneuver the morass that it can be.

Now, Interview, Study, and Plan:

Once you know your way around an institution of community center, you should meet the participants.  This is especially true for special needs students who may have limitations in movement, speech, hearing, and other physical dimensions which will help you design the puppets that you are going to you.  Every situation requires that you should learn as much as you can about the nature of the disability, and how it impacts how the participants make and express decisions.  Autism spectrum students offer wide ranges of communication methods and movement styles.  Children with spinal bifid a can speak with very adult word structures.  I have found that special needs teens and adults than I have worked with have had no physical limitations or speech limitations, so there you have to concentrate the etiology of the diseases, and become acquaint with what cam happen.  Much to her embarrassment,  a participant had an epilepsy attack during a program, and the staff and I were able to hankie it.  I did spend about with years working over night for several group homes in Rhode Island.

As I mentioned above, the puppet must be made as quickly as possible—no more than twenty minutes.  There are cases where pointing at a voice board or the blinking of eyes can allow for more time spent making the puppet.Process is the audience, even as small as one observer.  In that moment, the puppet must speak—the process demands that the puppet speak for themselves. Therein lies the therapeutic power of the exchange.  The puppet can be ANYTHING that the maker wants it to be.  So, not only is the relationship circular in the theAlso, if you place shy participants on stage or “just sitting behind the stage” most WILL speak. The speaking puppet feeds right “back” to the puppeteer, and the power of that  transaction gives the performer the experience of “godlike”power. 

That power is released when, after compelling the making of their puppets, I ask the puppet maker decides six questions about their puppet.  The puppet making should not be longer than twenty minutes.

1. Puppet’s Name

2. Age

3. Where is the puppet from?

4. What does the puppet like to eat?

5.  What is the puppet feeling?

When I introduced the making of the puppet, I go out of my way to excite and interest the participant or participants.  This is extremely important when working with teens and adults.  The excitement has to be at a level that creates interest and enthusiasm for the puppet making project. This “positive” excitement creates an environment where there are no wrong answers.    I use a short puppet play to start the workshop.  If you want to see a version of it, go to Youtube Channel: Marc Kohler.  It is tiled PUPPET MAKING WORKSHOP WITH THE PUPPET WORKSHOP.  It is the third video on the page, and the URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8FyCDEvxlo.  The show is preceded by a short play done by children who have made puppets in one of my workshops.

I believe that the “excitement” comes from the general enthusiasm that I use in performing.   Then, there is a transformation of a puppet called the Stagehand.  He is nothing more than a glove with eyes, and was created by Alan Cook.  Also, I should note that my Mr. Punch has none of the character traits of the British Mr. Punch.  He has always been a modern man—yes, ever so slightly selfish like his English twin, but only for the purposes of the particular play that we have written for him.

Punch wants to show the audience how to make the puppet that they are going to make.  So, he asks the Stagehand if he wants to be a puppet?  Of course he does!!! Then Punch tells him that he needs to “take his clothes off.”  Reluctantly, Stagehand lets Punch remove the glove from my hand.  Here, my hand becomes alive—“Hand” is truly embarrassed and scared that he is naked in front of an audience.  His suffering varies by my consideration of the nature and age of the audience.  He can be raucous, calm or noodled.   A male hand is stimulating, and almost scandalous.  Here, I am walking a line that I am confident will work.  No one has ever complained that I showed a naked hand during a show.  I have been using this routine to open and excite workshop audiences for over forty years.  In playing the hand, I am deeply indebted to the work of Burr Tillstrom on the That was the Week That Was television show.

You can see his Berlin Wall piece at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRvarruS9g

Once Mr. Punch has calmed the hand down, he instructs the hand to stand with pouted finger up, pointer here, and tall man there.  Mr. Punch asks the audience to do the same—no matter what kind of audience I have—they all have to put they future puppet hands in the air.  Here, the audience identities with the hand on stage.  They are naked in the air, and I believe that is stimulating, too.  They are being brought into the “puppet world” that I am building for them.  Mr. Punch or my hand never mention that all the hands are naked, but I am sure that there is something happening in this moment.  I am sure that if I made my hand a female, this routine would be offensive to some viewers.  Gender issues are extremely important for four audiences today.  Puppetry has its own set of gender issues, but that jus for another paper.

Next, Mr. Punch puts a cloth body over the hand.  This is a standard puppet making body which has evolved over the years into a pattern that we use with all ages.  Suddenly, though, the hand, now a covered up hand cannot see!!  He is blind!!  He needs a head the audience screams or mentions politely.  Punch then puts a blank tube on the head finger, and the hand ties to say that he cannot talk, that he has not nose, that he had=s no mouth—but the worlds are blurred for he has NO WAY to be articulate.  He has gone from being a gloved hand to become a “puppet” embryo.  And, this is not an exaggeration.  The puppet on stage, which has become the audience’s friend, has now entered a new world in a new form.  It is a birthing process done with delight and glee.   AND, most importantly, the audience has an emotional attachment to ht sufferings of the hand on stage—just as they will transfer positive and protective feelings onto their own hand when it “becomes” a puppet.  So, the love  and affection that they have for the Stagehand are the feelings that they will have for their own puppets, and they show how a puppet  can produce transference easily, quickly, and profoundly.  Anthony Palumbo in an article in The Puppeteers of America Journal wrote that Piaget thought that babies distinguish the mother from the “objects” in their world by seeing the face of their mother.  Palumbo proposed that our attachment to puppets was the same, in that we “make” the puppet come alive through looking at the face.  This was written in the early nineties, and I would add that any successfully done anthropomorphic movement or sound from a puppet will set in motion the same powerful identification and transference.  

Now, in the play, Punch brings out a head for the covered hand which is a bit “scary”—not really scary, but Punch and the Stagehand think so.  The hand screams a bit, Mr. Punch gets scared, and he pulls the head off of the puppet.  This demonstrates to the audience in an unstated way, that if the puppet does “release” or “discover” any real anger, rage, or “scary” feelings, Mr. Punch—ie, the person controlling the puppet can relieve the situation.  This is a way of saying that the person will be protected from the projected feelings revealed by the puppet.  It does not guarantee that the audience, though, will be protected.   In one adult workshop, a participant in a workshop for a local arts board, created a black puppet, and used the opportunity to chastise the audience the racism of their “lily white” population.  The puppet was angry and eloquent—an interesting moment of reflection for everyone in the room.

Finally, Punch brings our=t an acceptable head, but puts it on the hands of the nee puppet. “Mr. Punch, I come to you with my head in my hands.” He pleads.  Punch moves the head to the neck finger, but puts it on backwards.  The new puppets that he can only watch reruns!!  Punch twists the head around.  These two acts demonstrate how the puppet head fits onto the body for the participants, and it shows that mistakes will be made in the process, but mistakes can be corrected.Th participants have entered “world of the puppet”, where both the puppet and the performer will in a protected environment.  The new puppet is elated, and cheers as he exits the stage, and Mr. Punch asks “Are there any hands out the who want to become puppets?”

Then we make puppets.

Here is where you are prepared to provide the materials, glue, paper, and al that is needed to make the puppets.  With physically able special needs groups, the distribution of materials is the same as with able groups.  All supplies are distributed equally.  In my case, I use the Puffit*—a puppet that I invented in 1977 and hold a patent on.     

For physically challenged participants, you will have to invent a puppet that they can control.  You might have to use voice boards for the participants to communicate what kind of eyes, nose, hair and the rest of aspects of the puppet.  In many cases, the children were limited both by physical disabilities, mental situations, and voice difficulties.   I would make up a “set” of features from which they can pick their favorites.  In most cases, I use the Puffit and then change how the Puffit is manipulated.  

In the case of weak hands:  Put the puppet on a dowel, so it becomes a rod-puppet.  I made “handles” for the stick from heat reactive plastic that centers use to make supports and casts.  This is for children who cannot rotate their wrists.  I have brought a DVD of samples of these puppets.  Every situation requires different puppets—different by weight, size, shape, and even color.  We attached inverted five quart buckets to dowels, attached them to wheel chairs, and the children performed by moving in their wheelchairs with the puppets over their heads.  A curtain hid the wheelchairs, so the audience saw these puppets move above the curtain. The audience loved the performance.  

For a child with rigid wrists, I made a foam rubber head attached to a short tube.  The tube went to the back of the head.  So, I line the cardboard with foam, so that it could slip onto their hand.  She could move the puppet with her arm on stage.

When you begin your work, I will be available to for advice.  On my web site, I have a page titled Puppetry Ideas for Puppeteers. (marcwkohler.com).  There are stage design stage plans there now.

When the puppets are completed, I ask the participants to write the answer to those six questions:

1. Puppet’s Name

2. Age

3. Where is the puppet from?

4. What is the puppet’s job?

5. What does the puppet like to eat?

6.  What is the puppet feeling?

I collect the “Bios”, and we enter into the Performing section of the program.  In most cases, I will go through series of movement and sound with the puppets on their hands while siting in a circle—i will skip this step for teen and adult groups.  They are ready and eager to get their puppets on stage.

1. Movement: Fingers, Wrist, and Elbows. (FWE) You could add Arms!!

2. Sounds;

a.  Sounds that the puppet makes

i  walking on concrete, mud, through tall grass, etc.

b.  Sounds of what the puppet does’

i. sawing, sewing, washing dishes, hammering,

riding motorcycles, space ships, etc.

c, Environmental Sounds:

i. Places: Circus, zoo, jungle, etc.

d. Environmental Music

i  Wedding, dance, funeral, etc.

e. Character Music

What music would you hear before the puppet

comes on stage.

After reviewing  all of these, I ask, “Which is the most important: The Performers or the Audience?”  I keep asking several times, until a child guess the right answer or I announce the right answer: BOTH! “You have to be a good audience and good performers”.

In most child special needs situations, you will have few children, and the “stage” can be the table around which you are working.  I have a video of my my work with children from Meeting Street School, and I will be playing it during my presentation on Sunday at 9:45 AM.

The children, teens, adults then take their puppets behind a stage, and I interview each of the puppets.  This paper, today, does not include the nature of the questions of the interview, and KPM includes a thorough interview techniques which include a set of questions, side coaching suggestions, and how to explore the puppets alone and working together.  After these first interviews, KPM uses the ideas in the bios and interviews to develop story writing, character development, family trees, lifelines,  and plays!

THE SIX QUESTIONS

I want to conclude this Part One with a discussion of the meaning of the six questions, and why they provide a basis to therapeutic explorations for using puppets in therapeutic situations.  If the participants cannot write, we write of them.  The participants put the puppet on their hands, on their sticks, on their wrists, or whatever way they see and feel the puppet move and react.  Now, to the questions:

1. Puppet’s Name  This question is profound for the participant.  Sometimes, it gives them such trouble that I suggest that they skip it, and come back to it after they either questions are answered.    I suggest that if they are having trouble they can hold the puppet up to their ear, and the puppet will whisper their name to them. 

Younger children and special needs children will often name the puppet their own name.  This fine, and when they get the puppet on stage, they will also often take on another name.  There is no requirement that a participant remember why they have written down, nor are they beholden to stay with their  written answers.  You see, once the puppet is in action, the synergy between the performer and the puppet alters the personality of the puppet, and I suggest that the personality of the performer—a transformation that started when they picked the color of the puppet head.  

As I said earlier children with Spina Bifida tend to sound older then they are, for they have excellent mimicry skills.  “Sue” named her puppet “Sue”.  With some prompting, she decided that the puppet was named “Jane”.   Jane and to drop beyond the scrim on occasion to ask Sue, what she should say.  Jane could not run or jump, for Sue could not run or jump. By the end of the interview process, Jane was running all over the stage.  When we were done, I asked her if she wanted to take Jane back to her classroom, and Sue said no.  By the time I had rolled up the scrim, Sue told me that she had decided to take Sue Puppet back to the classroom!

Disabled children of all abilities will often name their puppets for movie stars, national sport stars,super heroes, and television characters.  This is fine, too, I find it helpful to encourage children with the suggestion that we do not know what a superhero might like to eat or where they came from, so I suggest using the puppet as “Spiderman’s Brother.”  In one case, with a child from Meeting Street with Cerebral Palsy named his puppet “Dennis Eckersley.”   When I asked if Dennis had any problems, Tom said yes,and jot was that Dennis was not well an could not pitch that day.  So, Tom would have to pitch for him!  Here is powerful example of transference as the power of Eckersley was transferred to Tom.

2. Age. The age of the puppet gives the puppet lots of underpinnings thad the creator does not realize when they do it.  It gives us a birth year, and that is the first question to be asked when building the puppets lifeline.  Age, too, speaks to many aspects of character and participants understanding of the age continuum. Is the puppet young, old, or middle aged?  It is not important what the age is.  What is important is how far the participant can remove themselves from the puppet.  Same aged puppets tend to be tied to their creator for details of their lives, but over time—sometimes just minutes, the puppet takes on a new age of its own.  Again, no participant is tied to any of their first answers to these questions. 

3. Where is the puppet from?  Again, a very important question, for where they come from determines lots about their lives.  They might come from the participant home, or Candyland, Mars,or Rhode Island!!  Alien puppets come up and di not know how to speak English.  One showed from heaven.  This is a gateway question to the “world” or even “worlds” of our new puppets.  Every answer possesses messages for the participant that look forward and backward.  Forward to what it could become, and backward to give it a life history.  Place of origin is a deep issue for us as people, much less for our puppet counterparts.  For young children and the children in my workshops at Meeting Street, place of origin was usually their homes.  This is fine, and as we work with the children, that place will become a positive place to find answers other than those in the “real” world.  It is the entry into the world of the puppet that the participant[ant will project and deal with issues that are within them. 

4. What does the puppet like to eat?

As I mentioned  earlier, consuming food is an integral part of Gestalt therapy.  How we chew our food relates to how we “chew” on reality.  Fast eaters like me, are rushing away or towards things al of the time.  In this question, though, I am just prancing on the edge of this large concept.  “What they eat?”  is different from “How thy chew?”  Still, food voices are one of the key reflections of how the participant feels about themselves.  Average participants’ puppets will eat spaghetti, pizza, and peanut butter.  Abused participants’ puppets will eat garbage.  Troubled puppets will eat rocks.  I am not sure, but my guess is that puppets that eat people have angry creators.  During the interviews, I ask “How many pizzas do you eat a day?’  This allow the creator to explore outlandish ideas—maybe ten, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand!!  And in this response, they are expanding the puppets range of emotional depth.  The more the puppet eats, the bigger their attitude toward dealing with the world around them improves.  

5.  What is the puppet feeling?   This is a question that I added after doing this work of about twenty years. i was reluctant to put the “Feeling” question up front, so that the feelings of the participants could “come through” the other answers and the appearance of the puppet.  So,I decided to add this question, for it is key to the therapeutic nature of my work.  It demands that a participant make a decision about the feelings that the puppet has which at some level, they know they will have to demonstrate when they perform their puppet.  As you might guess, participant[ants almost always change this answer several times during a performance.

Conclusions

When I started this paper, I wanted to cover enough of my system of puppetry, and I hoped to give you a thorough description of the process that I have designed.  The cruel master, Time, has gotten the better of me, and tis is where i have to stop.  My conclusion is that I have given you enough to await to pursue these techniques in your careers.  If you do puppetry will measurable increase its presence in the field of art therapy.

*PUFFITS

In 1977, I invented and patented a puppet which we called the Puffet.  From 1977 to 1994, Puppet Workshop averaged 2,000 children and adults a year in workshops, residencies, and special needs workshops.  About 4,000 puffits were sold directly to school departments.  So, about 30,000 Puffits were made.  Support for these programs came from R.I.State Council on Arts in Education Program, the Supplemental Individualized Education Programs of the Providence School Department, and The United Arts Fund of Rhode Island, and many other funding sources.  I thank them all. I have brought Puffit heads and bodies for the conference members to purchase.

Reference: If you would like to hear form a person who engaged The Puppet Workshop to do this Puppet Therapy programs, you can contact Ms. Barbara Durrell-Dickerson. bdickerson46@cox.net

Here are the sites that Puppet Workshop reached:

Trudeau Center

Sargent Rehabilitation Center

Cranston Center

Groden Network

Meeting Street School

R.I. School for the Deaf

CITE

E. S. Hospital Zambarano Unit