Paper Puppets: Creativity for all

Puppetry has firmly established itself on educational syllabi across the UK – from being a design role to undertake, a BTEC option, studying Handspring as a practitioner, through to whole degree courses. Students will often experience puppetry within a production that isn't labelled as a puppetry show – from the classics to pantomime – and need to have an understanding of the genre to make informed analytical, as well as practical, decisions.

From hand puppets to rod puppets, shadow puppetry, marionettes and more, puppetry is very much in the theatrical vocabulary, with The Lion King, War Horse and Life of Pi in recent years helping to pave the way for mainstream inclusion of the form. With numerous texts and resources now available for teachers and students, many companies exist to provide educational workshops.

Bringing paper to life

Paper Puppets travel across the UK delivering theatre workshops focusing on puppetry. Stephen Love, one of its founder members, talks passionately about the power of storytelling through puppetry, as it ‘returns participants to being children, as children play with objects, turning one thing into another using their imaginations’. This primal connection with transformation is what, Love believes, keeps puppetry alive and evolving. Object and fabric manipulation is therefore one of the company's signature workshop exercises along with creating paper people from brown paper and putting them through assault courses, dance offs and creating short scenes.

Love, an actor who has worked on War Horse, explained that his company embraces bunraku, a form of Japanese puppet theatre. While in Japanese theatrical traditions, a puppeteer may spend up to thirty years training to operate these, the Paper Puppets workshops can allow someone who has never had any experience with the art form to be undertaking a two-minute scene by the end of a three-hour workshop.

The company is keen to impress that ‘puppetry is for everyone’, and Love states that their workshops are inclusive, sustainable and cost effective. After training at East 15, Love launched the company in 2019, aiming for their workshops to bring groups of people together. Bunraku's underlying philosophy is an inclusive one, as it is about working collaboratively to create a multiple person operated puppet. Teamwork is key, rather than the participants all learning, say, hand puppetry in a solo context. While bunraku gives the workshop a structure, it is a jumping off point and Love's team ensure that the work can be applicable to all styles of theatre and storytelling, and can used especially in supporting the devising strands of the curriculum.

Competencies and curriculum

The company have two main offerings – its bespoke educational programme for Year 7 to university students, alongside its community programme. Stephen Love is one of four multi-disciplinary practitioners running these, working alongside Daisy Porter, Lucas Button and Rupert-Lawrence Worth. They ensure their work is mapped onto any curriculum and tailored to support the development of softer, interpersonal skills and competencies such as teamwork, movement, and confidence. The company positions its offer as a theatre workshop, rather than purely puppetry, as the work ‘combines character, voice and emotion, as well as delivering Q and A's where questions come up about the theatre industry, casting and setting up a theatre company’. Paper Puppets also prides itself on providing wrap-around materials including follow up resources, and recordings of the end of workshop performances.

Contemporary puppetry

Puppetry may be centuries old, and while its fundamental mechanics remain the same, it is now being used in conjunction with recorded media. Love worked as a consultant on Netflix's Behind Her Eyes whereby puppetry was employed in the live environment and then augmented as a CGI special effect. This ensured that the world was created with key light emanating from the puppet (the end effect was a travelling wispish light) with fluid movements allowed for later verisimilitude recreated by the VFX teams. Love pointed out that the puppetry involved in the making of Jurassic World Dominion (2022) enabled the actors to work more realistically with the animals ‘as opposed to playing opposite a ping pong or tennis ball.’ The Paper Puppets team are keen promote the blurring of roles and mediums, with puppeteers working across and with other disciplines such as VFX, MoCap, animation and Creature Departments in both live and recorded sectors.

Paper Puppet's aim is that if more people can be exposed at a younger age to puppetry, then individuals can be aware of careers within the field, future training opportunities, and the potential for puppetry to be used in theatre overall.

One of the pressures that Paper Puppets finds is that time and finance can restrain a school from booking them. Continuing the theme of inclusivity and access, Love stresses that by reaching out and beginning a conversation with the company, he believes they can always make something work.

paperpuppets.co.uk