From plays to puppets and storytelling.

Newspaper Theater: Storytelling with Puppets and Music

 

 

 

This project was inspired by Judith O’Hare and George Latshaw.

Based on techniques taken from Japanese Bunraku puppetry, this project demonstrates how the arts can help teachers and puppeteers reach the different intelligences of students (Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory).  In groups of 4-5, participants will tell a story from a culture unfamiliar to them, manipulate a puppet, and play music that they have specifically orchestrated for the story.

Participants in groups create their own life-sized puppet from newspaper and masking tape—definitely a problem solving challenge.  I provide the stories and musical instruments. My story collection evolved by asking former students to each bring in a one-page story of their choice from a culture unfamiliar to them.

 

The participants choose a story.  Then they build the puppet, decide how to manipulate the puppet they have built (which is the storyteller, not a character from the story), decide who will be the “chanter”—that is, the actual teller or reader—and decide who will be the musicians and what music would best highlight the telling.  Given the usual time constraints, the chanter will most likely read the story, not tell it, but certainly should not memorize it. Telling a story is quite different from memorizing it.

Then they perform their piece for the class or the workshop.

We end with a discussion of k-12 or college classroom applications (for example, second-language learning, validation of students’ own lives as stories, etc.) and with how many of the intelligences have been touched upon.

 For puppeteers, the goal is to learn a new way to use recycled newspapers and create a new kind of puppet show with new musical possibilities. As Cheryl Youmans, a high school science teacher from Spartanburg, SC, said, “The Bunraku performances were more moving than I expected.  The groups actually became their puppets as they told their stories.  You could see expression and movement in the puppeteers as well as in the puppets.  The groups tried to achieve perfection starting with nothing more than newspaper, tape, and a good story.”

We also discuss how many of the Multiple Intelligences are used with this quick and simple project. 

 

 

One goal for teachers is to encourage them to want to take risks:

1) to reach students with intelligences the teacher may not be strong in or

2) to use art forms the teacher may not be comfortable with.  Teachers becoming comfortable with their own creativity in turn become more confident and charismatic.

3) to learn how performance creates community.

 

There is no way the puppet will be “perfect,” and teachers who lack confidence in these arts gain wonderful experience in accepting limitations and in focusing on the process rather than the final product.  The project is also an inexpensive way to create a magical performance.  The expense is in the number and types of instruments that you might want to use. If you have a variety of unusual instruments available, you'll find that they captivate the participants.  I lay all of my instruments out on a long table and they really get the creative juices going in the participants.
But simple rattles and drums will do just fine.

Here is a comment from Amber Pitts, Spartanburg, SC 1st grade teacher:

“[We had to] expand our ideas with puppets.  The puppets we made were not like puppets we were used to seeing or using.  We didn’t have any pictures or real specific details to go by so we had to work together as a team to decide what our puppet should look like and how we would make it.. . . .[We saw] how easy it is to incorporate other cultures into activities that children could also do.  We had a story from one culture and then the Bunraku puppetry that was from Japanese culture. . . .the puppets were able to move and really become a part of the storytelling.”