Playing Pinocchio! - Week Six

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Playing Pinocchio! - Week Six... by Suzanne Kendall


Don't tell Maud (the muppet I made 3 weeks ago)... but today's class made her look a little unsophisticated! Hard to believe I know! And that is because we worked with marionettes - defined as puppets on strings. Rather complex little creatures..


The session was taken by Tinka Slavicek - a puppeteer and puppet maker. For more info about Tinka and classes she runs at Little Angel Theatre, see: http://bit.ly/2stfOCh And she brought some of her friends along too...








After a demonstration on how some of the marionettes worked, we were lucky enough to spend an hour or so playing with them ourselves.

I dashed straight to the more-or-less life-size marionette of the little girl, seen here in the top picture. Talk about jumping into the deep-end! She had a lot of strings and was quite complicated to use as well as being very heavy! My right arm was killing me after only a few minutes of trying to operate her. Clearly strength and stamina are required by marionettists!
 Then I had a go with some of the smaller, less complex models. A little easier but I can now appreciate that operating a marionette requires knowledge and familiarity of the particular model and plenty of practice!

 In this respect I look forward to meeting Pinocchio and getting to know and work with him...
 

  
We finished off by making our own very basic marionette. Please don't tell Maud I've been making other puppets - she's the only puppet in my life! 

 Apart from Pinocchio that is...! ;)

Suzie x





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