Introducing the key concepts of puppetry

We take an object, move it as if it's alive, and provide it with thoughts and a voice. Everyone does it as a child. What we do in theatre is a refined version, and targeted at an audience, but the desire to imagine life in an object, and to help someone else imagine life in that object, is not hard to find.

It's actually not difficult to go from being a complete beginner to quite a good puppeteer, though getting good takes time and experience. Here I'll share a fun and useful exercise – one I've used with students and performers in my own workshops – which introduces some key concepts of puppetry.

For this exercise you don't need anything other than your hand.

Exercise: Hand Animals

• Sit on the floor with enough space around you.
• Relax.
• Lay one hand on the floor.
• Play a little with moving different parts of your hands. One finger, two fingers… Move them about. Rest.
• Stretch your hand out. Relax it.
• Breathe. Be aware of the breath in your back and ribs. Let your breath be slightly audible, so that someone next to you would be able to hear it.
• Let the hand ‘breathe’, so that it's making a little movement in sympathy with your breath.
• The hands are asleep, and this is the sound of their breathing.
• The sleeping hands are a little bit restless. Maybe some of them are murmuring. They are dreaming about… gloves? Other hands? Let your hand roll over and move a little in its sleep.
• The hands are waking up. Perhaps they yawn. Let your hand wake up. Keep the breathing. See if your hand can move a little in one direction or another. See what happens when your hand wants to move up onto your leg, and back down again. Feel how it moves a bit differently.
• Let your hand look around the room. It can't see the other hands or the people, but it can see everything else: marks on the floor, things on the wall, plug sockets, chairs, bags, shoes. See what your hand is interested in. Let the hand mutter to itself. Keep your breath audible.
• Let the hand stay in contact with the ground – it has weight, which it has to push to lift itself or move itself.
• Let the hand try to move over to the thing it finds most interesting. See how it pulls or pushes itself along, so that it's just muscles in the hand that are moving it. Try making the journey easier by jumping or sliding some of the way. When you get to the interesting thing, let the hand have a look at it. By now you will have found out where the hand's ‘eyes’ are. Let the hand smell the interesting thing, or blow on it.
• Have another look around. Mutter. See something else interesting. Start to move over there.

The hands will have been moving in a whole variety of different ways – some dragging, some scampering, some stepping. It's possible for them to fly, of course, but at this stage it's more useful to keep them in contact with the ground.

Breath is crucial. It relates thought and mood to the body. It affects every movement we make and is affected by what we think and feel. It's difficult for students to remember to keep embodying breath, so it's worth reminding them periodically.

Weight is important too. What you will find is that one needs to use effort to move the weight of the hand. When we pretend the hand is a little creature, it needs to move itself. It needs to push from within against its own weight to move. Because our hand has muscles inside it, it's easy (and obvious) to use only those muscles to move it – rather than using your shoulder or arm to move the hand. If you go straight to animating an object, you have to imagine the energy coming from inside it – so having moved your hand first helps you understand the key to object manipulation. Locating the breath inside the hand means that even the smallest of the movements originate there.

Simple exercises help to build confidence for larger puppetry work

Exercise variation: weight

• Try the exercise again and ask the participants to make the hand twice as heavy. Mention that moving something heavy takes effort. You will hopefully find that the hands are breathing more heavily, huffing and puffing to shift themselves. Encourage it.
• Invite the hands to be lighter than they really are too. Breath stays important here, too, but it's a chance to concentrate on balance. Encourage the hands to move lightly and with perfect elegant balance. Then ask them to imagine a light breeze that sometimes affects them.
• Bring the weight back to normal again. You might want to repeat these phases to reinforce the different ways of moving.

Most people naturally end up inhaling as the hand lifts itself to take a ‘step’, and exhaling as the weight of the hand comes down. This is a useful thing to connect with – even though it's not a rule. For example, in a dash, you might take a number of steps in the space of a single exhalation. But you'd breathe in when you stopped.

Playing the hands as heavy is quite satisfying. Playing them as light is much harder – and because you are so sensitive at the tips of your fingers, your students may become more conscious of playing some very precise physical impulses.

It's good to refer to the hands as ‘animals’ or ‘creatures’. Lots of puppets are animals, and they are a great way to learn about puppetry. The animal is much less self-censored in how it relates its emotion to its movement. If the animal hears a threat, it tenses up, or runs. When it's sleepy, it shows it all over its body. The attitude is completely physicalised. Socialised humans have learnt to suppress a lot of this – as puppeteers, we want to be in touch with subconscious body language. What we get from starting with the breath is a way of locating whatever the impulse is, and a timing for delivering it to the body. By allowing our characters to be ‘animal’ we allow ourselves to explore this relationship simply and directly.

Keeping in touch with the animal (rather than imitating a specific animal) is useful in all sorts of ways. ‘Human’ characters look at things. ‘Animal’ characters stoop and stretch, sniff and blow to investigate. It's immediately more interesting in terms of its movement. So, as this exercise is intended to get our minds into the simple act of animating a small body, it's useful for you as the leader to congratulate the diversity and weirdness of the hand animals. Encourage your group to be different from each other – they will be more excited by seeing varied instincts brought to vivid life.

Is your hand a puppet? Well, it is alive already, but it's not alive on its own in the way you just pretended it was. It's not important to make a formal definition of a puppet at this point. What's great about starting with the hands is that you can feel the transfer of weight when the fingers push or pull or reach to move the character around. And you are inside the sensation of how the breath animates the whole creature.

Good puppetry is easier with confidence, but building confidence requires time, and benefits from repetition, support, and, when learning, a sense of not being scrutinised or assessed until you are ready. It will be useful if you are able to give your students the impression that they are free to make mistakes. The more they try, the more likely they are to find something they enjoy.