Stoytelling and Puppet Making
A magic carpet can be anything as long as you use your imagination. If you believe in it, it will be real. A click of your finger will bring a magic carpet to life. There are all sorts of patterns on magic
A seven year old girl
What produces “glow”?
What did that artist on the reservation in Canada mean when she said “the youth were just glowing?” If you had been there, you would have been able to see for yourself and, like some of the simplest aspects of being human, it is ineffable – the complexity of words undoes the simplicity of the moment. It happens in a moment and if you are not there then…well, you are not there. Still, being of the type who looks for clues and builds suspicions, this is what I suspect might be happening. Could it be a concoction of the following?
Preparing the ground
When we go into a school, we are looking to let everyone know that our visit is going to make something special. With this in mind we change the space. The school hall is described by a headteacher:
“When the children arrive in the hall that first morning and meet the team they wonder; why there is a carpet in the middle of the hall and how they should approach it. The hall looks different. Sumptuous fabrics of red, green velvet and gold are flowing onto the carpet from the puppet stage at the front of the hall.”
Making the space is one element that creates expectation and is part of preparing the ground. When the group arrive in the hall, they need to meet us and understand the challenge of what we are inviting them to do – namely, for all 200 plus of them to make a huge puppet show that brings a world creation myth to life. This show will not be rubbish, it will be magnificent and it will be theirs. This message is conveyed through a telling of the story, a puppetry demonstration and them, not us, naming everything they will have to do to realise the challenge. By the time they leave the hall there is a collective excitement and a emerging common purpose. They know that they are going to be creative together and they trust us to guide them through that process.
“So, in the “telling” phase the carpet is a place where a story is listened to and Tony and the team tell the skeleton of the tale. They talk about the culture, the land, the place. The children absorb and as a collective they collate their memories of the story and list the animals and key parts of the tale. “
Making something of ourselves
My old friend the poet John Moat, co-founder of Arvon, said when I first interviewed him about what happens in an arts workshop, “…the big contribution that we can make to anything is making ourselves.” He went on, “…we sometimes talk about individual imagination. I think that’s misleading because suddenly there’s all sorts of hubris, all sorts of inflation of the personality that can get caught up in this, my imagination. Actually, if you see children working in one of your workshops, you realize that the imagination is this limitless, indefinable store of endless invention, which is the common source of all imaginative product. As individuals we have intercourse with that limitless store in a funny way and out of that experience, we have the gnosis of making something.”
I suspect John’s description is accurate. After the initial introduction the children come back to the hall for half-day workshops so that each can make their own puppet. Puppets that they have identified from the story introduction on the magic carpet and that, in turn, we have ensured are age appropriate to their class. This process is described by the headteacher, “In the “making” phase, the children work at tables slathered in masking tape. The children sit on the carpet and come back to the carpet time and time again; for instruction; to review progress, to make adjustments, to move their puppets and retell their part of the story – they only see their part. And it is at the making stage that the puppets come alive and are given their eyes.”
I could spend pages describing what goes on in those workshops. There is so much happening and most of it is invisible in the twin processes of making the puppets (the art) and the self-realisation (the group process). What is happening is that each young person is making a reflection of themselves in the puppet. This is unavoidable. Everything we put our hands to create will inevitably carry our signature. The other visible aspect is that each child is taking simple materials and turning them into an animatable being that exceeds their expectations. This process is happening in a hall alongside others so each person is simultaneously an agent and a witness of creative endeavour that takes the whole group from sticks and card to thirty or so creatures that they made.
Teachers have often finished a session by saying something like, “well that was fun and now we have to do some real work.” That is not how I see it. One day I decided to test this assertion by asking a class of nine and ten-year olds whether they thought what they had just done was fun or more than fun. From the carpet, every hand shot in the air. The first girl I chose said that making her penguin was more than fun because whilst she made it there were all sorts of stories about her puppet coming into her head.
Next a boy said that it was more than fun because he may not make any more puppets but he was learning he could make things and now he would make lots more things. The invisible and the visible parts of the process identified. Both identifications are about the lack of separation between self-realisation and learning something new. The story, inner and outer, had a relevance that will sustain in the memory of those who had that first hand experience. Another younger child once asked me, “is the world inside or outside us?” Of course, it is at once both and the best learning engages with both.
Our partner headteacher, whom we have worked with across twenty plus years in several schools across the UK, named what she witnessed the children doing like this:
“In educational terms, we call this the zone of proximal development; the distance between what a child can do without help and what a child can achieve with support (Vygotsky). Children, through social interaction and working with experts, start to make sense and solve problems independently. We can advance teaching and learning by giving children experiences that are within that zone. Getting the challenge just right is the skill of the teacher.”
The story makers
The first time we got a large group of children to bring a creation myth to life I left the school amazed by several things. I could hardly believe the quality the children brought to the puppet theatre they created in such a short time. They threw themselves into the task and their motivation to make something special grew as the week went by. Parents came in and asked, “what did you do to my child? They never come home from school so excited.” And, “she won’t stop talking about it.” And I saw it for myself.
At the end of their performance, there was a luminosity about the children about their creation.
One thing that occurred to me was the resonance between the story and what the children were doing. In this instance, they had brought to life a West African creation myth called Nyame and the Sky Spirits. Nyame, the sky god, loves to make things and he creates the world. He takes nothing and makes something very amazing. Hadn’t the children we worked with just done exactly the same thing? And if I needed confirmation about that resonance, I got that confirmation from an 8-year-old girl:
“We’re creating something in the same way the Sky God did, we’re moulding little people; only the Sky God used mud and we’re using newspaper.”
That comment was a real eye-opener. I had always viewed creation myths as being about the grand creation of earth, its creatures and humans but, as that child pointed out or, as Samuel Beckett said, “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day”.
Any act of conjuring something new into existence is a manifest creation myth. There was nothing and then there was something.
Those children, and thousands since, experienced exactly that. With no idea of what was going to happen, they had made their own creatures, brought them to life and received standing ovations from audiences. All in one week of school.
Perhaps the most common creation are stories. Stories of the everyday, about others, about the world – we story our lives. We are story makers.
The power of with
They say a story has three apples – one for the teller, one for the listener and one for the story itself. Stories are, by nature, collective affairs. A story in your head is still a story but to bring it to life, the story needs sharing. The way I see and prepare a participatory is as a living story. The participants create their own story across the workshop. Each of them has their own story which unfolds. In the case of our puppet residencies, this unfolding runs from the introduction to a myth and a challenge to making the puppets, to crafting a show and finally, to performing that show. Although, each person has their own story of how this was for them, those individuals, in the imaginative experience of collective creativity, amplify each other. This amplification builds across the week until the common purpose of the group is all poured into performing together. In all this, the team and I are their story guides. At each stage we facilitate. Literally, we break each task down into appropriate and manageable steps so that the big event they are making becomes realisable. And so, when it is realised, there is something of the revelation about it. An aspect of self, of with-ness is evident and the humans, who are the agents of that revelation, glow.
In the words of a teacher:
It’s an epic experience, bigger than a puppet show, there is more going on! It created a golden memory for the children. There was unadulterated happiness.” A parent: “I was on the door this morning welcoming the children as normal, the comments and hugs I got from other parents and children and the “we won” statements, expressions of joy and love for our school you could not have believed.” A child: “It made me more than happy.”
The Accidental Puppeteer