More Adult Classes at Puppet Showplace!

PUPPET BUILDING 101
with Brad Shur, Artist in Residence

8 sessions, March 3 - April 28 

(No class April 21)
Mondays, 6:30-9pm
Members save 10% on registration!

REGISTRATION INFO

A wise man once said there is no greater joy on earth than working with one’s hands. Get busy with yours by designing and building your own puppet with the guidance of artist Brad Shur, and bring your puppet to life from the very first design. Class starts soon, sign-up today! 

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Brad has been professionally involved in puppetry for almost 15 years. He began as a performer with the Providence puppet and mask company Big Nazo while studying film and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has worked in various capacities with Wood & Strings Theatre (Tennessee), and Vermont PuppetTree, and as a builder has designed and fabricated puppets for American Idol, Dollywood, and other theaters and performers from Austin, Texas to Boston, Massachusetts.

Brad Shur, Artist in Residence

All of the puppets Brad uses in his performances come from his workshop, where he builds them by hand from wood, paper, plastic, foam and fabric.

Learn about Brad's touring performances.

Adult students working on their puppets at Puppet Showplace Theatre. For more pictures of Brad’s adult class last year check out our flickr photos here.

ABOUT THE CLASS: 

Puppets are moving sculptures carefully crafted to be brought to life. Engineering and design play crucial roles in shaping a puppet character's personality and movement abilities. In "Puppet Building 101" participants will create their own original sculpted rod puppet from scratch. To begin, class members will learn how to turn their ideas into drawn designs, ready to be produced. From there, participants will sculpt plasticine, apply paper mache, pattern and sew fabric, and apply other materials to turn their designs into fully functional, performance-ready works of art! Although the puppet made in class will be a rod puppet, the skills and techniques used are applicable to many types of puppet construction.

This is an intro-level class. Lessons are cumulative so consistent attendance is important. Participants will be expected to work on projects outside of class time.

Get creative, and bring your original puppet design to life!

Find more info about upcoming spring and summer classes at Puppet Showplace ON-LINE

Behind the Scenes of Adult Classes at Puppet Showplace

Adventures in Puppetry: Part Two
by Guest Blogger Holly Hartman

For Part One, click here.

It is Monday night at the Puppet Showplace Theatre,  I am at the third class of Jonathan Little’s  “Furry Monsters 101,” and I don’t know when I have last laughed this much. I have forgotten about my long day at the office and the sardine subway ride that capped it and have succumbed to the hilarity of playing with monster puppets.

Class Three: Where Is My Head?

Last week we saw ourselves—or rather, our puppets—on the screen of a video monitor for the first time. Like an infant, I was riveted by my own image (in this case, I was a shaggy orange creature with a bow tie). This week we’re sharing the camera in small groups. Our puppets’ movements onscreen are slow, absurd. I’m reminded of how it takes practice for young children to learn where their limbs are in space.

Many of our puppets look like dopey pets: mouths ajar, heads cocked, too clumsy to heed Jonathan as he urges us to move the puppets together and make them look at the camera. My golf-ball-like eyes can’t find the camera; my furry neck cranes in the wrong direction, as if the puppet is captivated by a faraway song. (Note: the students who’ve taken the class before--one is on his fourth enrollment--are a testimony to the benefits of practice. But most of us newbies are pretty klutzy.)



Things a Director Would Never Say to a Human Actor, Yet Prove Helpful When Spoken About a Puppet:

“Your neck looks broken. Hey Chris, would you go un-break his neck?”

“Oops, let me adjust your eyeballs.”

“Next time, remember to open your mouth when you sing.”

More Lucid in Gibberish

Seeing our puppets in groups is also a lesson in how tricky it is to establish spatial relationships among them, in part because we are manipulating them overhead. Many of our puppets end up talking nose-to-nose (or nose-to-where-a-nose-might-be), or leaning away from each other, or failing to make eye contact. As a group, they don’t look very socialized.

We sing “Frere Jacques” with simple choreography that nonetheless goes astray as often as not. (Some of us are self-conscious. “But it’s a puppet,” Jonathan counsels. “It wants to sing and dance.”) Then we try an exercise in which we pair off and have a conversation in gibberish: one puppet speaks nonsense words, the second riffs off of that, and so on. This becomes interesting fast. When the two puppeteers are attuned to each other, a relationship between their puppets begins to arise.

I find it oddly liberating to speak in a nonexistent language. With words cut off from meaning, it’s easier to play with voice and gesture. Plus I like the surrealism of it. At times I brush up against what for me is the most gratifying part of the creative process, when my cognitive mind fades away; and at those times I cannot quite tell whether I am playing with the puppet or the puppet is playing with me.

Class Four: Think Less, Skit More

I thought we were going to start our fourth class with more camera work, but Jonathan greets us by saying that last week he could see us thinking too hard. So instead we’ll begin with vocal and movement practice, then write skits and perform them onstage, then rewrite them and perform them on camera. Well! Is that all for the first hour?!

Soon we have broken into groups to write and rehearse our skits while Chris and Jonathan make the rounds to check on our progress. I feel grateful at how formal instruction accelerates learning, especially when Chris advises us on manipulating our puppets (“When you open the mouth all the way on that one it looks crazy, see?”).

Instructor, Jon Little

The skits end up being pretty hilarious. There’s an operatic saga of family dysfunction, complete with Wagner-length high notes; a Shakespearean trio trying to throw off a gypsy curse; and a tale of infidelity in the American West that features a make-out scene so heated the furry lovers have to pause for a breath. All of this, out of thin air.

Puppet Party

Coordinating my puppet’s jaw, arm, and body movements while I am talking remains a challenge. “Holly, your puppet is on roller skates,” Jonathan says after I glide my blue monster across the stage, having forgotten to give it the natural side-to-side motion of walking. (Which would have been okay if roller skates had featured in the scene.) Some puppets appear to be victims of quicksand, sinking out of the camera frame over time.

Before long, nine puppets are on camera at once. It turns out that much consolidation is possible when we angle our bodies sideways (I recall Jonathan telling us in the first class that “puppetry is the art of working in someone’s armpit”). But onscreen, the puppets don’t look crowded. In fact, they look pretty relaxed and happy as they mingle, sharing puppet observations on party clothes and nachos.

As my rudimentary skills increase, so does my appreciation for the video monitor as a teaching tool. In a nutshell: you can see where you are going wrong and fix it, then and there. Crookneck-squash neck, fixed. Zombie arms, fixed. For someone new to performance, this is like magic.

What the Puppet Wants

I took the class partly in the hope of demystifying puppetry for myself, at least a little bit. In this I have both somewhat succeeded and happily failed.

As to the success: In four whirlwind classes, I have been introduced to the skills necessary to operate hand-and-rod puppets (those icons of my circa 1975 worship of all things Muppet). I now have a novice’s sense of how to make this kind of puppet speak, move, and interact. I see that it takes a tremendous amount of practice to make these actions appear realistic, and that it’s a tremendous amount of fun.

Yet there’s something about puppetry that resists demystification. In skilled hands, a puppet in motion has a life of its own--with its own disposition, its own demands, and the capacity to outwit its puppeteer--and I am happy to say that this aspect of puppetry remains mysterious to me.

UPCOMING FALL CLASSES:
Click Here  for a full list of upcoming classes.

Introduction to Puppetry Arts

Instructor: Brad Shur, Artist in Residence
Four sessions, September 16 - October 7
Monday nights, 6:30 to 8:30 pm

What makes a great puppet show? Participants will be introduced to the exciting and multifaceted world of puppetry through hands-on exploration of the materials and performance methods used by professional puppeteers. Participants will survey basic puppetry construction methods, build their own puppets, and learn the basic techniques for making puppets come to life.

Mask and Physical Theatre Intensive
Instructor: Avital Peleg
Four sessions, September 18 - October 9
Wednesday nights, 6:30 to 9:00 pm

This workshop invites participants to immerse themselves in the physical and visual world of mask theatre, discovering the power of their own poetic body through a non-verbal approach to acting. Participants will focus on in-depth and detail-oriented physical performance with full-face white neutral masks. Beginning with solo scenes, adding objects, and building towards duo and ensemble work, participants will heighten their awareness of timing, breath, spatial composition, and audience perception.

Introduction to Shadow Puppetry
Instructor: Brad Shur, Artist in Residence
Four sessions, October 1 - October 22
Tuesdays, 6:30 to 8:30 pm

Shadow puppetry is a centuries-old art form that is constantly evolving to incorporate new materials and technologies. In "Introduction to Shadow Puppetry," students will learn the history of shadow performance and encounter examples of the exciting work being developed by today's shadow puppeteers. Through building and performance exercises, the class will explore diverse styles of shadow puppets ranging from simple hand shadows to elaborate cut-out figures with moving parts. 

Behind-the-Scenes of Furry Monsters 101

Adventures in Puppetry: Part One

by Guest Blogger Holly Hartman

Holly Hartman

I’m a few minutes early for class, and instructor Jonathan Little, the puppeteer and fabricator behind Little’s Creatures, is chatting with students about puppetry. He tells us where he buys the fur he uses in building his own monster puppets, why medical-grade foam is a good choice for puppet hands, how he fixes a puppet’s eyes and arms in place. I learn why all the Muppets are a bit cross-eyed and what makes Kermit’s head especially difficult to construct.

This serendipitous conversation (among others) is one of the pleasures of a class I’m taking at Puppet Showplace Theatre: “Furry Monsters 101,” an introduction to Muppet-style hand-and-rod puppets. One of the things that impresses me about Puppet Showplace is how it supports puppetry not just as a theater venue but also with workshops and courses like this, offering the public a chance to work with seasoned teaching artists.

I’m a longtime fan of Puppet Showplace and a current volunteer, but this is my first class. Seeing puppet shows here has gotten me curious about what it would be like to try my own hand (literally) at puppetry. It’s an art with many forms, but all, in my view, seem to involve some alchemy by which a puppeteer brings an object to life. How does this happen?

Class One: Inhale, Exhale

In our first class, Jonathan tells us that one of the surest ways to hook an audience is by letting them see your puppet breathe. He demonstrates with a lifted hand: an inhale, wrist shifting upward; an exhale, fingers subtly releasing the puppet’s breath. I am transfixed—it’s a creature! But no—it’s a hand.

Jon Little hand makes all of the puppets for Furry Monsters 101

 This suspension of disbelief is part of what fascinates me about puppetry. Jonathan’s brother Chris, also a puppeteer, is helping out with this class, and during our introductions he describes watching Puppet Showplace artist emeritus Paul Vincent Davis animate a milk carton—it became “the happiest milk carton in the world,” then the saddest. Puppetry, Chris says, involves the ability to imbue objects with energy.

We make our hands into puppet mouth shapes and practice making them breathe, sigh, sneeze, sniff, snore. Like infants, our hands then progress from sounds to words. The technique involves one precise flap of the thumb per syllable—downward, the way the human jaw moves in speech. We sing the alphabet, slowly. My thumb sags in confusion when we reach the impossibly multisyllabic letter W.

Finally, we try lip-synching to music. Time flies when your puppet hands are having fun. Suddenly it’s 9:00 p.m., class is over, and around the room students’ hands are rocking out to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Practice Makes Puppetry

For homework, I practice lip-synching with my hand. It’s hard. It’s fun. The occasional moment of fluidity is a thrill. My puppet hand has an affinity for the songs of Leonard Cohen—slow, simple lyrics punctuated by danceable instrumentals and the odd long word. Hal-le-lu-jah.

Class Two: Hands in Puppets

In the second class, when we start using hand-and-rod puppets, lip-synching feels different, strange. Each puppet is a new experience. I feel awkward maneuvering the tiny mouth of the first one I try, and enjoy posing the jointed neck of the second. Each student performs a scripted monologue, and when my turn comes I keep flapping my hand upward, causing what Jonathan calls, during the critique, “a bit of flip-top head.” Whoops.

Like everything else we’ve done in this very immersive class, the critique is fun and illuminating. I like seeing what qualities each person brings to their puppet performance. Some puppet characters are kinetic, others droll. Talking about what we saw that worked—and what didn’t—is invaluable.

Lights, Camera…

Next, we take our first steps—or, rather, make our puppets take their first steps—in front of the camera and video monitor. It’s harder than I would’ve guessed, both because it’s tricky to keep your puppet moseying along on its fictional floor level without slumping, and because on a video monitor, left and right are reversed. When you stroll your puppet onscreen from stage right, its furry face appears on the monitor at stage left. Surprise!

Also surprising: I love working with the monitor. It’s magic to see the puppet isolated in the world of the television screen, moving within its own reality, the puppeteer nowhere seen. I think I could watch that furry monster explore its onscreen world for hours, or at least until my arm went numb from holding it overhead. I feel like the kid who does not want to stop playing with a new toy.

As I leave the theatre, I am a little stunned at how much I’ve gotten to try in the last two hours. For someone who grew up with Sesame Street, it’s a heady feeling. And we have two more classes to go… I’ll be back in a couple weeks with a final report!

Monster Mondays are Moving In

Summer 2013 Adult Class

By: Joanna McDonough, Deitch Leadership Intern 

We have all heard it, that familiar falsetto voice that can usually be heard talking to a pet goldfish, or a man named Mr. Noodles, or Mr. Noodle's brother, coincidentally also named Mr. Noodles. Some of us were even lucky enough to take part in many giggles with this furry red friend in childhood, when he exclaimed "That tickles!" every time he was hugged. Yes, I am talking about Elmo my favorite Muppet character from Sesame Street and yes, my Tickle Me Elmo still has batteries in it.

Hello! My name is Joanna. I am 18 years old and an intern at the Puppet Showplace Theatre in Brookline, and I am proud to say that like many of you, I love Elmo. Interestingly enough however, until today I did not know anything about the mechanics behind the puppet that resides on Sesame Street.

It is sad to think that despite my knowledge of every song composed by him, I had no idea who the puppeteers who made Elmo come alive were, or who even created the character. As it turns out, the character was created in the 1970s and first performed by Caroll Spinney and Jerry Nelson then later by Kevin Clash. These puppeteers were responsible for Elmo's portrayal, providing his audience with the lifelike movements of the puppet's arms and legs.

How do they do it, you ask?

The techniques used by artists and performers such as Kevin Clash to create believable puppet characters may seem out of reach to master, but there is good news for aspiring performers and Muppet fans alike.

The Puppet Showplace Theatre is bringing back a class due to popular demand called Furry Monsters 101 which will be starting up in July.

REGISTER ONLINE

'Furry Monsters 101' spring class 2012 show off Little Creature monsters

 What happens in the class?   

The class, taught by Jonathan Little of Little's Creatures, will focus on the proper manipulation of Muppet-style hand and rod puppets featured on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Avenue Q. Jonathan will teach the class how to make these puppet characters appear as living, breathing beings with their own thoughts, desires, and motivations; some of the basics he will include are breathing, lip-synch, focus, and body positioning.

The sessions for Furry Monsters 101 run July 15 - Aug 5 on Monday nights from 6:30 to 9:00 pm. The registration price by July 1st is $150 and after July 1st it will be  $175.
And don't forget PST members save 10% on registration! CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Even though it is only my third day here at the Puppet Showplace Theatre, I can already tell that the programs this organization has planned for the summer will be great ways to beat the heat and enjoy the arts, for both children and adults. I hope to see you this summer in the theatre!

Shadow Puppetry Class for Adults!

Advanced Shadow Puppetry Workshop
Five sessions, May 6 - June 3
Monday nights | 6:30 - 8:30 pm

REGISTER

We invite you to advance your skills with us! Unleash the storytelling powers of darkness and light! Learn to build and perform a complete shadow puppet show in this rigorous and supportive class.

Image from "Trash: A Love Story" designed by Matthew Woellert, a PST shadow puppetry class alum

ABOUT THE CLASS

Participants will explore advanced mechanisms and building techniques using hinges, rivets, springs and slides crafted from durable materials to create professional quality shadow puppets. Then participants will focus on performance skills and visual storytelling to create an original short piece.

This is an advanced-level class: "Introduction to Shadow Puppetry" or equivalent experience is highly highly recommended.  If you have questions, please contact bshur@puppetshowplace.org.

SHADOW PUPPETRY

Shadow Puppets

Shadow puppetry began 1000’s of years ago in China and India. Now it is regarded as the oldest form of puppetry in the entire world! Traditional shadow puppets are flat and made out of leather in which holes are punched out in order to imply features and clothing. Contemporary ones can be made combining a multitude of materials including: paper, plastic, wood, found objects, scarves, almost anything really! Puppeteer’s use flat articulated figures in order to give the appearance of three-dimensional moving objects with the assistance of light.  




YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Artist in Residence Brad Shur

This workshop is led by PST’s own Artist in Residence Brad Shur. Brad performs almost every month at PST as well as teaches classes and workshops to students aged 3 to adult. For nearly 15 years he has been professionally involved in puppetry since he began as a performer with the Providence puppet and Mask Company Big Nazo. He has worked in various capacities with Wood & Strings Theatre (Tennessee), and Vermont PuppetTree, and as a builder has designed and fabricated puppets for American Idol, Dollywood, and other theaters and performers from Austin, Texas to Boston, Massachusetts. 





SEE BRADS SHADOWS IN ACTION!

Have you seen Brad's newest production at PST? In January of 2013, Puppet Showplace Theatre presented the world premier performance of "Yankee Peddler: Songs and Stories of Old New England" created and performed by Brad Shur, and musician, Chris Monti.  This exciting adventure through local New England Folklore features incredibly beautiful and intricate shadow puppets made by Brad Shur, and live folk music performed by Chris Monti.

If you missed the January performances, you can see "Yankee Peddler" on our stage this Spring: May, 23  through 26.