Puppets for The People
Join Theatre artist and RDT Jessica Litwak for this fun, creative and therapeutic puppet-making workshop. Learn how to build a puppet using simple materials and bring it to life. This unique form of puppet building allows participants to freely and deeply expresses themselves with hands, heart, body and voice.
These playful puppet-building workshops have been done in conflict zones in and with traumatized populations in Palestine, India, Lebanon, in Europe and all over the U.S. The workshops have also been extraordinarily effective for training drama therapists, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners, theatre artists and human rights workers. The process is both playful and rigorous and the experience has proven to bring about degrees of healing and change. First, a warm up and a guided meditation, that serves to provide the participants with a context for the day. Each person discovers what sort of being s/he wants to create. Some examples, a family member or friend, an imaginary figure, a heroic person, a joker, a villain or a victim, an oppressor, oppressed, bystander, or ally, animal or alien or human. Then we build the “brain” of the puppet; workshop participants use objects, pens, paint, and paper to draw and/or write, and this creation becomes the actual core of the puppet head or “brain”. After building this inner life for the puppet, the heads and faces are formed around the brain with newspaper, we find the face in the paper, and hold and mold the face with masking tape. Then we cover the masking tape with glue. We let the puppet dry for twenty minutes while the participants write the story of the puppet. Then the puppets faces are decorated. Finally the participants become puppeteers, and rehearse moving through space with their creations and perform small pieces with their new creations.
This puppet workshop developed out of my search for cultural competence. I wanted the people I was working with in zones of conflict to be free to express oppression, rage, sorrow, and desire without having to communicate in my languages- including the language of theatre, movement or voice. I discovered that building the puppets allowed each participant to make something deeply and uniquely his/her own. It is my goal to be humble in my life and work- culturally, artistically, intellectual and otherwise, to create sacred zones of respect and community. Each participant’s experience, heritage, beliefs and abilities will be celebrated.