How To Produce A Great Puppet Show For Your Students

Classroom, Library or Sunday School, puppets are a great tool for teaching and inspiring young minds.

If you want to put on great puppet shows for your Sunday School classes,library or classsroom, the first thing you’ll need to do is dispel a myth, that puppet shows are easy.
They are a little more challenging than most people think! You need to be a little bit of a choreographer and a little bit of a director to make things go well, but practice can bring a great sense of accomplishment and joy over your newly discovered talents.

Our goal is to name challenges and present solutions so that your kids will watch with interest, will come to the think of the characters as their friends, and the shows will seem easy—both to you and your young audience. We’ll present some easy how-tos for the novice puppeteer who wants to make the puppets come alive. We’ll also provide some insights for those who have been puppeteers but might want to add some additional sparkle!

Notes for the novice

Putting on a puppet show sounds easy enough in concept: You simply put the puppets on your hands and recite the lines. You don’t even have to look at the audience if you have stage fright!
While puppeteering is great for shy actors, it is not as easy as it seems! for your little characters to be believable and endearing and carry off a message, you have to take some measures and put in a little practice. Below are some suggestions that will prevent a puppet show from being a distraction and will help make it a real blessing.

1. Limit the people backstage to three. Puppet theatres, small or large,
   have very limited backstage areas. However, to keep children engaged, good puppet shows often require a number of characters to be on stage at once. While professionals can get by with one or possibly two people backstage, unless you have a massive puppet theatre, we suggest you limit backstage people to three. Puppet shows are generally written for three backstage puppeteers: one to handle the star, one to handle the narrator, and one to handle the various smaller parts. Occasionally, the puppeteer handing the star will also have a secondary puppet. Therefore a believable show requires a little “choreography of the hands” to prevent crowding.
2. Plan out your puppets’ exits and entrances. When there are more than two puppets on stage, puppets may have to cross over each other to get off stage again. This can be ironed out with practice and forethought, the same as entrances and exits would be on a stage featuring real actors.
   Kids will notice right away if puppets do something out of character like simply drop off the stage as if there were a hole in the floor. Your believability will fall through the floor with them! Hence, all exits and entrances should be considered part of the performance. If you have to cross over the other puppeteer’s arm, practicing will allow the puppet to make a real exit that isn’t distracting.
3. Some puppet theatres are so simple—say, a curtain with two poles—that puppets can’t really enter or exit. In this case, exits could be done by having them give the impression that they are walking down a flight of stairs to get off the stage.
4. Try to write or produce puppet shows so that characters have only a few crossovers. Those that enter last generally exit first, and so forth. However, for the few moments where puppets must cross, you’ll be working with an arm crossed around a fellow puppeteer. As long as you are both aware, it shouldrun smoothly.
5. Try to memorize scripts or if that isn’t possible, hide the evidence.
   The rattling of papers back stage can be very distracting—especially if a hand with a puppet drops off the staging area to turn the page! However, for classroom performances of an informal variety, memorization can be too much. One suggestion is to print your script out in the smallest typeface everyone can read and post lines with thumbtacks or scotch tape backstage, in places where they can be seen most easily by the puppeteer reciting the lines. If memorization is not realistic, at least knowing the lines that precede yours may work out well. If your puppet theater sits on a table, you can leave yourself some room on the table backstage to lay out lines.
6. Stay conscious of your hands. One way to surely remind your students that these puppets aren’t real friends is to have one “collapse on stage” as the saying goes. This means that the puppeteer has become fixated on either her other hand or on a challenge backstage; hence the puppet onstage either flops over or falls drastically out of character. Being a good puppeteer is a little like being a ventriloquist. We’ve all seen how the ventriloquist’s puppet will respond to everything the ventriloquist says as well as reciting his own lines. The best make it look so easy! With puppeteering, it can be both easy and fun, provided practice goes into it!
7. Some say the best way to learn to work your hands is to practice at the edge of a table first, where you can see the puppets moving. Especially if you are working two puppets at once, practice making one respond to the other while the other is talking. It’s more than just a matter of jiggling the one that is speaking. Responses come in many forms. First, try to get through a whole page using two different voices while eliciting two sets of actions. It’s fun, and practice will keep both puppets enchanting for those watching.
   
8. Know which hand holds your puppet, and keep it that way while practicing as well as performing. Understand stage left and stage right, the same as if you were in a stage performance:
   Stage left is often abbreviated SL, and it is the puppeteer’s left, not the
   audience’s left. Stage right is often SR, and it is the puppeteer’s right. Mark your script accordingly.
9. You can make it even easier than that. Have all the puppets enter and exit from stage right (SR) unless marked otherwise. Plan entrances and exits that are easy for the puppeteers with only a few cross-overs with another puppeteer.
   The stance of puppeteers should be as follows:
   • the puppeteer with the narrator on the left;
   • the puppeteer with the star in the middle;
   • the puppeteer with the other walk-on characters on the right.
   • If puppeteers are working two characters at once, they should practice crossing over for entrances and exits.
10. Practice various emotions that your puppets need to show. Remember that puppets have no facial expressions. Yet children can get so caught up in their situations that they don’t care. The magic comes with how you work the puppet’s little body, and as arms are usually worked by one hand only, good body movement takes a little practice. Here are some suggestions on showing emotions from a master puppeteer.
11. Arm rods can add a lot to making your puppets life-like. You can use one arm rod and move the arm on the side your free hand is. The arm can cause thehand to make gestures or raise props. Many puppeteers use rods on both arms of the puppet, manipulating both rods with one hand. other times, two puppeteers will handle rods, each manipulating one rod. Live arm puppets, where the puppeteer’s free arm becomes the hand of the puppet are also great and allow much more movement and action.

• Surprise: Gasping, slapping hands to mouth, and straightening the body until puppet is very alert and erect.
• Happy surprise: Jumping up and down and squealing.
• Unhappy surprise: An erect, tense stance followed by a slouch. Hands can go over the heart.
• Confusing surprise: Turning head from side to side and scratching head as if trying to figure matters out.
• Fear: Jumping a few inches back, chewing a finger, turning head quickly from side to side, slapping the hands over the mouth, or pressing hands against the chest.
• Trembling is best accomplished by the puppeteer shaking a rigid hand, not a limp one, or the puppet’s head will wobble.
• Laughter: Throwing the head back and letting laughter rip; holding the
• stomach while rocking forward and back with belly laughter.
• Giggling: Place a hand over the mouth while rocking less dramatically.
• Anger: Shaking fists, placing hands on hips (takes practice!), leaning
• slightly forward in a menacing way; Stamping a foot can be faked with certain types of puppets by having the puppeteer stomp a foot backstage, and
• having the puppet give a slight bounce.
• Tears: Slouching forward with every “wah! Wah! Wah!” Rubbing tears
• from the eyes, blowing nose into palms, covering the face and crying into an
• arm.
• Sadness: Shaking the head, slumping the head forward, arms down. Be a
• little delicate in the way you handle sadness if the cause is a serious matter.
• Throwing back his head and bawling so loud the other puppet holds his ears
• is a way to use sadness with a little comedy.

12. Practice speaking in a voice not your own. Puppets often sound like the
singing Chipmunks or the Munchkins in Wizard of Oz. However, they don’t need to have “little” voices. Many of the puppets on Sesame Street had booming voices. The trick with puppets is making the voices distinctive, especially when you are playing two parts at once! Practice making one voice very high and the other kind of raspy. Make one squeaky and one basso.
Have fun with it. One of the joys of acting is bringing your own signature voice to the stage. It is not different with puppeteering. But once you get that voice and feel comfortable with a certain spirit arising from your puppet, practice keeping him or her in character throughout all lines.

13. Use Music properly. With so much available in music today, it is easy for puppet shows to include music and production numbers. However, we caution you to fade music in and fade music out with some practice runs. It can be very amateurish to simply push the “stop” button when the puppet is finished.

Have a Great Time While Practicing and Performing!

Of course , the most important thing about becoming a puppet master is keeping it fun! It is an art form that requires practice, much like dancing or playing an instrument.

Be willing to give puppeteering a whirl; don’t wait to be perfect—just be practiced! You will find that the rewards are great. You’ll use the occasion to be the actress you always wanted to be. You’ll discover coordination you didn’t know you had and voices  from within that are fun to share.

Most importantly, you’ll be leaving children with  new friends who help them believe new messages and values and character or whatever message you are sharing.

Notes for the Advanced or “Ambitious” Puppeteer

One of the joys of being a puppeteer is hearing little voices gasp or laugh or react to your creation. Advanced puppeteering means definitely infusing the little puppets with enough character that children will forget that he’s being worked by hands. There are many advanced tricks to keeping those puppets in character, and here are some examples:

• One puppeteer worked alone and needed a third puppet to come on stage. She worked in a line where one puppet fell asleep on stage, and she worked her hand out of him and slipped on the third puppet. “Don’t be afraid to use your teeth backstage!” she says. “Puppeteers should think of themselves like one-man bands. If you need to, your feet, knees, elbows and mouths can all work like stagehands or musicians. I used to have one puppet keep talking while I was using my mouth to put on a third puppet!”
• Other puppeteers have made music a part of their production by using a harmonica mouth holder, which is a metal bar that is curved and fits around the neck and leans the harmonica toward the mouth. These can be purchased in most music stores for around $10, and as some songs are simple, such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” you may want to try it for fun!
• One puppeteer used a sponge roller, a small piece of fabric to cover it, and some Velcro to give her puppet an accordion. She played the harmonica and the puppet appeared to be playing the song!
• Another puppeteer hung spoons above his knees, and when needed, made “magic” sounds by running his knees along the row.

Ambitious puppeteers may want their puppets to carry things in their hands—but they’re aware of the limitations of tying up a puppet’s arms, which are so important to him. One option is to apply Velcro to the palms of the puppet. A water bottle, whistle, whip, popgun, etc. will stay there without him losing his ability to show emotions.

The best puppeteers are the best actors, and acting is where puppet shows go from good to great. The best puppeteers breathe the breath of life into a puppet by giving him a very dimensional persona, much like a screen actor becoming dimensional in his acting part. Once these personas are figured out and infused, your puppet shows will be memorable to kids long after the performance is over and perhaps for a lifetime!