On October 24 I got the opportunity to hang out at the Puppetmongers studio - this time to take a 3 day masterclass with Peter Balkwill of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop from Calgary. We were 10 students with diverse backgrounds, but all with a keen interest in puppetry.
We were lead through different Suzuki movement exercises which created a heightened sense of awareness of our bodies and the space around us. Lots of walking exercises concentrating on group awareness. We used masks to explore impulse articulation, playing with rising and falling tension and the break in between. We created simple puppets in pairs out of newspaper and masking tape, and worked collaboratively with the other groups to put a story together.
I think what I got the most out of was the simplifying of movements. There can be a lot of clutter when we're trying to convey an idea through physical movement, and it's the most effective when the movement is simple and clean.
We had discussions on the definition of a puppet, (strange how hard that is when you get right down to it), how groups work together, what our roles often are in group collaboration, and how to write effective grant proposals for puppet productions.In the end we all performed our short puppet pieces for the group - often to a background of random and unexpected music. On Friday the rest of the Old Trout team came and had a Forum about their creative process, scripting and design of their recent production, Famous Puppet Death Scenes. This is an amazing show, and the workshop was fantastic - three days showed us just the beginning of what was possible in collaborative puppet theatre.
