Living in Georgia means getting to be close to the largest puppet museums in North America. The Center for Puppetry Arts has 4,000 puppets, and the biggest collection of Jim Henson's masterpieces on earth.
Every 3 or 4 years I like to do some puppet making projects incorporating global cultures or performing arts and literature. This year my lesson spanned both as we were studying shadow puppets that have been in Chinese and Indonesian cultures for over 1,000 years.
Most of the performances at the center are geared towards younger audiences, with Dr. Suess or
Very Hungry Caterpillar type shows. But I found one that was definitely geared towards my high school students:
Tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The sets were versitile, with doorways turned ship masts, stairways turned catecombs, paintings that became see-through, and table tops that became floor boards for hiding dead bodies. The puppets were also versitile: eyes popped out, or glowed from within. Faces changed, and corpses dismantled. The stories are pretty gruesome, but it's classic literature and my students loved every minute of smoke machines and folly artistry. I liked that it was as much about the language as the performance, so even my blind students could enjoy it with minimal audio description. See...another layer of literature incorporated into my art lesson.
There were lots of hands on opportunities. Half of the museum takes you through history and around the world, as the parts of the gallery are divided by continent. Our tour guide let students pass around at least 10 different kind of puppets, from African stick puppets, to Japanese Bunraku puppets, to Italian marionettes.
And the Jim Henson side of the museum, allowed students to try out what it might be like to be on a puppeteer on a TV show,
Movies and TV shows have used puppets to entertain masses, so it was fun to see the actual pieces used in the Lion King, Ghost Busters, Gumbi, Pinochio, and more!
It has been a couple decades, but I remember vividly the 3 field trips I took throughout my high school experience, two of which were with my art class. I count on my students looking back on the 4 Art field trips we took this year alone. This was the first year some of them have been to any sort of museum. I hope it is the start of a life long journey for them to explore the world and never stop learning about the Arts.
