Through the summer I joined a puppet workshop conducted by Dadi Pudumjee at the Aurobindo Society. Except for a teacher from Navakriti, the other participants were children. But I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I took it up because through the year we have been doing our own little puppet shows at home with soft toys and odds and ends.
We had also built a tree puppet for Navakriti and also a puppet for little Avani's birthday. We have also been going to Ishara's puppet festival for three years now and Lakshmi is absolutely fascinated. Once a turkish puppeteer allowed her to play an accordion. A German puppet show had snow falling and plants growing around a cottage. Then we went backstage and took a look at their fox and the cottage. The puppets itself were small but with just so little it looked so grand and entrancing.
But I guess the interest in puppets got started because of Leigh ho! Leigh ho! in Sound of Music. We have seen that atleast a 100 times. Oh! I forgot we saw Puran Singh's traditional puppets at the Meghdoot Theatre in Sangeet Natak Academy. Puran Singh is a traditional puppeteer who had been training the next generation of traditional puppeteers from the Shadipur Depot and was funded by the academy. Lakshmi had been absolutely fascinated when we went to see his students perform.
The Rajasthani puppets that they had made could pick up their skirts and dance! When Puran Singh's 5-year-old grandson came and did his show she went up and hugged him and he showed her his puppet. After that after every puppet show we go behind the screen and take a look at the puppets. Another Turkish puppet show had two puppeteers dressed like mime artists and they were manipulating a table top puppet who was a writer and he was trying to write fairy tale and was getting stuck. That fairy tale was shown as a shadow puppet show along side. That was absolutely riveting. I can still remember the shadow puppet ship.
Now we were going to build our own puppets. In the first class Dadi took a pair of shoes and animated them. That was so funny. They really looked like characters. After that I have started looking at every shoe and started naming them and thinking of their expressions. He then animated bags. He asked the kids what the story was after he played out and we realised it could mean different things for different people. Just draping a scarf around something could change everything.
In another class he showed us different kinds of puppets. There was one table top puppet which three of them were manipulating together. What co-ordination!
The first puppet we made was a soft puppet with a sock. We slit the toe side of the sock and made it a throat. We pasted red for the mouth and tongue, stuck ping pong balls for eyes, wool for hair. I made mine with two plaits to make it look like Lakshmi and Shanaiya, an eight-year-old who was in the class and in the same table as me.
The second puppet we made was a stick puppet with thermocol. All of us had to draw a character and bring it to class. I was excited. We were going to make a sculpture! I had always wondered how someone could look at a stone or a piece of metal and imagine what they were going to do...
Here I would at least get a glimpse of the process. We were to draw the front, the side ...at home. I drew just the front of a woman. But it turned out that all of us were making some version of a female character and Dadi wanted us to think differently...
I then decided to make a bird. An eagle, because that is always what Lakshmi wants to be. Little Soham decided to make horse because he goes riding -- I was on the same table as him. I tried drawing the bird with a little help from Sanchita Didi. We tried drawing Soham's horse on a rectangular block. But the block was not long enough. So he decided to turn it into a bull because it reminded him of the Gaur he had seen on a jungle visit.
It was so much fun, cutting the thermocol, sandpapering it, pasting layers and layers of paper. Lakshmi came along everyday and sat through the class for two hours just watching. She did not talk till break time, just sat in pin drop silence. She was just watching everyone sitting in one chair. Somehow, the work atmosphere seemed to have got to her. She also made things quietly out of waste thermocol lying around. A computer one day is what I remember now...
But at home she was always cutting thermocol and sandpapering...we have been through a wide range...the latest being a Piano...She knows the process -- draw on the thermocol, cut it nearly into shape, sand paper for smoothness, stick odds and ends, put a stick through and paint...(that is her process)
I learnt so much from Soham. Whenever I was tempted to paste large pieces of paper, I would see him carefully pasting small pieces and then be reminded to do it carefully. I just made the body of the bird in my rectangular block. I then made a face with another small rectangle, a curved beak, large eyes.
Both Shameen and Yadu Bhaiyya, who were mostly with us when we were making the puppet just increased the scope of the puppets. At no time did they short cut something to make their lives easier. Shameem bhaiyya asked me to put a spring between the head and the body so that the bird would nod...
I started falling in love with the puppet. We drove in a bamboo rod...and painted it. I had the choice of making it goofy or real...I preferred real...so we painted it a shade of yellowish brown and then speckled it black for feathers...We were to add wings in the last class which was postponed.
I had to leave it to others to finish my puppet and also missed the show. I really wished the workshop went longer. Though I loved the process of making a puppet I would have loved to have practiced for a show.
For example I realised that in a puppet show you can be seen, but as long as you are looking at the puppet your audience will look at the puppet. Three people, all fully visible were manipulating a much smaller table top puppet and we were not looking at these people but were looking at the puppet instead! Also that we were to be minimal in the way we moved the puppet...
I would love to be part of the process of not just making a puppet but also learning how to manipulate one...the language...
No comments:
Post a Comment