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Published in UINMA Union Internationale De La Marrionnette Puppetry International magazine Fall and Winter 2017 Issue #42
Puffets performing
Puppets for Education and Therapy
A child makes a puppet in a workshop. The job that the puppet has is “throwing rocks” The puppet discusses other likes and dislikes. When the workshop is done, the teacher explains to me that the child does not speak in class, and that other students help them communicate. After that day, the child speaks in class. In another workshop, a child makes a George Washington puppet. After the workshop, the teacher lets them keep their puppet on their hand. When“George” speaks, he has a profound and confident voice.
The teacher told me later that a very shy child was shy no longer, and that the “power” of George had given the child great confidence. A special needs child, Tommy, makes a puppet of a Red Sox pitcher, Dennis Eckersley. I ask, “Did Dennis have any problems?” Tommy says, “Yes, he could not pitch today.” I ask “Who is going to pitch for him.” Tommy says “I will.”
These are but a few of the thousands of experiences that I have seen inusing my method of puppetry—something, I call The Kohler Puppetry Method TKPM). It started in 1966, when I made a puppet with a burlap tube, stuffed with felt, and the body was just a folded piece of cloth. Over the years, burlap became a very strong tube of cardboard stuffed with foam rubber, and the body became a body designed by Alan Cook—with whom I had worked in the summer of 1965. The final impetus for the creation of what I called the Puffet was a request from the RI State Council on the Arts to design a puppet that could be made quickly on the street for arts events. Since then, I and the artists of The
Puppet Workshop have helped over 25,000 of these puppets to be created with children, adults, special needs children and adults, and about 5,000 were sold directly to schools with teacher workshops.
The system is based on two things: an easy to make hand puppet that takes no more then 20 to 30 minutes, and having no preconceived notions about the character of the puppet. In this way, the physical objects used in decorating the head give a great deal of freedom of choice, so that it starts a “trip” for the puppet maker and puppet. I call it a “trip”, because it is after the puppet is made that the puppet and puppet maker join in deciding the nature of the puppet character. We are not making puppets to fit into an already extant stories or plays. Then, I ask six questions: Puppets name? Age? Where is the puppet from? What does the puppet do for their job? What does the puppet like to eat? What is the puppet feeling?
I add others as the workshop continues, and there are actually many questions which help the puppet makers create puppet biographies, life histories, family trees, and personalities which will lead to acting with their puppets. This technique gives the students the opportunity to perform, writing with actual scripts, and finding the puppets life answers.
The puppet maker uses whatever is laid out to make the puppet, and they “talk” with the puppet to learn from the puppet about the puppet. Together, the puppet and the puppet maker, carry out a discussion not too dissimilar from the classic Gestalt discussions established by Fritz Pearls years and years ago. Fritz used this technique to have patients have talk between the “top dog” and “bottom dog”. This discussion with the puppets has no such dogs, but they do show up. On student made a George Washington puppet. When the student talked for George, Gorge became a strong voiced puppet, and the teacher could see that the “power” of George was moving from the puppet to the student. You may be surprised by this observation. Children who stutter, do not stuuer with their puppets.
So, these puppet-student talks like making a freind.like a friend discovering and
creating a new friend, and this new friend will say much about the puppet maker.
they puppet will express hopes, fears, dreams, confidence or the lack of
confidence, or whatever the puppet helps the puppet maker to express. Puppets
created by makers who stutter do not stutter. A puppet can jump, run, and scale
the highest mountains while the puppet maker sits in a wheelchair. Parts of the
puppet maker’s personalities and personal feelings appear in the puppet. The
attachment is strong and committed. I once asked a class to rename their
puppets and create new characters for them—they vehemently refused.
There are other examples that will surprise you, for adults express
themselves just as deeply as children. At a workshop for community arts
leaders, a puppet maker made a puppet of her maid, who had refused to use any
of the tickets to arts society events that the maker had given her. When the
maker went backstage and she moved onto the play board, she could not talk.
Afterwards the maker said that they could not even conceive of what the puppet
would say. At a puppet conference, a maker wrote that the puppet was a clown
in the circus—once on stage, the “clown” became the Ringmaster!!
We move in a world which has many levels of understanding and conceptions. A
puppet made this way gives us a safe environment to express ourselves without
any judgement or criticism. The puppet is completely emotionally “owned” by the
maker, and they cannot be wrong. They do not even have to remember what
answers they made about the puppet before it appears on stage. There is not
enough space here to include all the details which take place in this system.
There is room to suggest what the goals would be of my system. The first goal is
to provide a reliable, usable, inexpensive puppet and system to use for
educational and therapeutic situations. The second goal is to give puppetry a
product about which we, as a community, can be proud of and valued fro its
contribution to education and therapeutic programs. My last goal is to return the
hand puppet to its important role in society. We have experienced an
overwhelming influence of moving mouth puppets on our craft. Making this
system available to the public will put puppets right back into our educational and
Therapeutic landscape.
Here are the links and resources you can see to learn about the Kohler Puppetry Method.
Videos:
I have written a short book about the method that I use at:
There is a talk about it that I gave at the 2015 Puppeteers of America
Regional festival:
There are two videos of the workshop in action:
Here is a video of puppet shows from single session and multiple session
workshops:
These ideas work well with Special Needs people, too: