Broken Puppet 3: training for applied puppetry in healthcare

Applied puppetry is an area of work I’ve become increasingly interested in since starting my career as a puppeteer. The benefits of puppetry are being explored in a variety of areas, from healthcare and disability to community projects. I recently went to the Broken Puppet 3 symposium, which looked at training the applied puppetry practitioner.

Taking part in a dramatherapy workshop

This year’s event took place at Newman University in Birmingham, and brought together performers, academics, healthcare practitioners and other professionals working in the field. The programme included research papers and presentations, practical workshops and sharing of professional practice, including a performance of Love vs Trauma by Raven Kaliana, director of Puppet (R)Evolution Theatre Company. Raven also delivered one of the two keynote speeches, the other presented by Professor Ross Prior of the University of Wolverhampton.

The Broken Puppet symposia are a series of events exploring puppetry in relation to disability and health. Last year I attended Broken Puppet 2 at Bath Spa University, which focused on puppetry and disability performance.  

Professor Ross Prior’s keynote speech

It was an interesting two days of sparking new ideas and developing existing ones. At times my brain hurt from trying to grasp various concepts, at others it felt inspired and invigorated. And I co-facilitated my first conference workshop! As Associate Artist of Vertebra Theatre I worked with Artistic Director of Vertebra Theatre and dramatherapist Mayra Stergiou to deliver a workshop on ‘Engaging the unspeakable through intergenerational puppetry’, which included a presentation on our show Dark Matter and a practical session where participants devised memories with puppets.

My highlights of the symposium included:

• discovering Dr Matt Smith’s (University of Portsmouth) project Puppet City which ‘interrogates the use of play as a participatory tool for urban design’, encouraging members of the community to re-imagine their urban landscape
• Professor Ross Prior’s thoughts on seeing art as a process, not an end product, and how art can be the mode of enquiry in research and we don’t need to make excuses for it being so
• Dr Emma Fisher (Bath Spa University) highlighting the need to make puppetry training more inclusive, which will in turn make the industry more inclusive
• Dramatherapist Amy Franczak’s practical workshop where we made a puppet to resemble a part of our body that hurt or was uncomfortable. I made a sock puppet of my gut (I have IBS), and the feelings of protection towards it that were unearthed took me by surprise

Devising in our Vertebra Theatre workshop

Devising in our Vertebra Theatre workshop

As I left Newman and headed back down to Cornwall, I was tired from two packed days but feeling inspired, and looking forward to giving myself a few days for all the new ideas to sink in!

Broken Puppet 2: exploring puppetry and disability

I went along to my second puppetry conference recently, Broken Puppet 2: A Symposium on Puppetry and Disability Performance. Held at Bath Spa University over a weekend, the event gathered together performers, health practitioners, academics and theatre-makers to explore the ways puppetry and disability intersect.

Puppetry with trauma victims workshop

This was the second in the ongoing ‘Broken Puppet’ series of symposia, the first being held at Cork Puppetry Festival in Ireland last year. While the Cork event focused mainly on puppetry, disability and therapy, the Bath Spa event focused on puppetry and disability in performance.

It was a wonderful two days of discussion, exploration, inspiration and ideas. With keynote talks by community performance artist and disability culture activist Professor Petra Kuppers and puppetry artist and writer Corina Duyn, we were treated to two very engaging and generous speakers and artists. Panel events presented various artists’ work in the areas of applied puppetry and health, disability and puppetry in performance, and puppetry and other(ed) identities. It was fascinating finding out about the different ways of working for each artist or practitioner, and their work filled my head with ideas that by the end of the weekend were jostling for space.

There was a choice of panel events and ‘labs’ on each day, the latter so named as the idea was to provide a safe space to experiment and put forward provocations to discuss and explore, without requiring a specific outcome. On Saturday my friend and fellow puppeteer Katie Williams and I made puppets in a disabled puppet-building lab led by Green Ginger’s Chris Pirie, and performers Nikki Charlesworth and Emma Fisher (Artistic Director of Beyond the Bark).

I taped some action man legs on to a small limbless artist’s mannequin. The idea was to create a puppet with these beautiful strong-looking legs that were actually useless to the puppet (I taped them on to the shoulders, so in effect in the ‘wrong’ place). I’ve seen people close to me struggle with terrible arthritis in the hip joint that has left their legs extremely weak and unable to bear weight, and I wanted to explore this through the puppet. I discovered how it moved with this bodily make-up (very slowly, by swinging the legs and using the momentum to rock itself forward little by little). When we shared our puppet with the rest of the group I was aware that my demonstration of its movement was painstakingly slow, but I didn’t want to rush it – this struggle to move and progress physically through space is a very real situation for so many people.

Along with the various labs on offer there was also a workshop exploring the use of puppetry as a dramatherapy medium with trauma victims, with Daniel Stolfi of The Awesome Puppet Company. This was very practical and I relished playing and following ideas to see where they led with a group of creative strangers. Split into three groups, the workshop participants created short explorations to share with everyone. Witnessing the intense focus and a kind of reverence with which everyone treated the work and subject matter was a very special experience.

At the end of the weekend we sat in a circle and shared a little bit about ourselves and any projects we’re working on, so it was fresh in everyone’s minds. It is always very humbling to be amongst so many creative minds and ideas and passion, and I can already see some potential collaborations arising from this gathering.

The symposium was hosted by Bath Spa University’s Arts and Social Change Research Group in conjunction with the UNIMA Research Commission and Puppet Place.