Puppetry Arts Field Trip

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. 

 

Indonesian Shadow Puppet Making Project

Student made shadow puppets for Aesop's fable of the crow and the fox

Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world. There are 300 hundred ethnicities, 700 languages, and 120 volcanoes on the many islands that make up the country of Indonesia. And the animal species are varied, with Asian animals (such as tigers and elephants) on the western islands, and Australian animals (koalas and komodo dragons) on the eastern islands. Because my students are blind or visually impaired, I brought in the spices (such as cloves and nutmeg) for students to smell. These were important Indonesian spices that put them on the map in terms of trade. I brought in a model of the kind of boat people would have used to row from one island to another. And I made an Indonesian flag (red stripe and white stripe) to discuss the importance of symbolism in flags. 

The cow jumped over the moon!

Day 2 of the lesson was when I introduced my students to puppetry. Shadow puppets have been part of the culture of Indonesia for about 1,000 years. I knew that my students would have a chance to see and touch Indonesian shadow puppets at Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts, so I thought it would be a perfect way for us to tie in performing arts with cultural arts and prepare my students for our upcoming field trip.

Every student picked an animal or character. Some made characters from a nursery rhyme or fable, others just came up with their own animal or person to draw on a cheap piece of white paper. Then they cut out the the shape on black paper. Some body parts had paper clasps as hinges or joints for moving parts.

A few students  used cut holes as windows for stained glass by coloring laminating plastic with sharpies and than taping it to the puppet. 

Other students used paint pens to decorate their shadow puppets. Indonesian shadow puppets are all about the silhouette, with intricate holes cut to make a lacey shapes. But the puppets, often made of buffalo skin,  also had/have elaborate patterns painted onto them that will never been seen during a performance.

I used an old silk screen as a screen for the puppet theatre, for students to try their hand at puppetry.

 

Paper Bag Puppets

 

While my high schoolers could spend a week, with each student making enough shadow puppets to cast a small show, my elementary school students didn't have that kind of time...or skill set. We started simple, with paper bags. two dots on a bag is technically all you need for a puppet. I limited my students to green paper bags as the starting point and some students wanted to make animals like lizards and frogs, others wanted to make monsters or aliens. One made Elphaba from Wicked, another made a little green man with a bow tie and mustache. It's a short and simple assignment that has to do with making choices, finding resources, cutting and pasting. Ultimately, it's a project that shows how creativity is possible by having your own ideas and making those ideas tangible.

Lots of Dots: Aboriginal Inspired Dot Paintings

Did you know that there are more kangaroos than there are people in Australia? It was fun to study Australian history and culture with my students before making Aboriginal-inspired dot paintings. These paintings use symbols to represent things such as bodies of water or gatherings of people. Often they include handprints or or animal shapes. 

Dark paper made for a nice value contrast with bright or light colors, which is helpful for my students with low vision, and the acrylic dots made from the backs of pencils dipped in paint became tactile bumps once the paint dried. This project can be done in a period or two of art class, which meant there was plenty of time for discussion of symbolism in art, and how important it is to appreciate cultures other than our own.

 

Mosaics Project

We began our Art class unit about art around the world by studying Ancient Roman mosaics. Long before Italy was a country with Rome as a capital, it was part of a huge empire, extending into Africa and Great Britain. And the mosaics with intricate images made of thousands of tiny colored glass and ceramic tiles, like pixels. There were complex boarder patterns, intricate scenes from daily life. a wide range of value would give the illusion of space to images of people, animals, and still life objects. 

 My students chose from a variety of colored tiles in my room, put on a pair of safety glasses, and then took a hammer to the tile to break it into smaller pieces. Our classroom has an outdoor patio, where we could attack the tiles on bricks without having to worry about a big indoor mess. 

Students each drew a simple image onto a piece of wood, and then glued their tiles down with hot glue or hot glue. It helps to start with the big pieces and then fit smaller pieces into the remaining spaces. I bought a bag of sand grout, and half the bag ended up being enough for 15 mosaics of various sizes. We mixed a cup or two at a time, covering the top with a square of mat board, trying to "squeegee" it into all the cracks. After it sits long enough to harden, the excess on the top can wiped and polished up with a rag. Everyone was so excited to see how their projects turned out. 

 

Cloud 9: Making Clouds from Paper Lanterns

I never imagined how easy it would be to make home-made clouds that look like the real thing.

You can make one in a couple of hours. I used a hot glue gun with large hot glue sticks, and attached about 4 round paper lanterns together. You can cut small holes on either side if you want them to fit together a little more snuggly and have a large whole between each chamber so that you can easily string lights inside the entire cloud. But I like to keep them a little less like one blob and more like separate billows of the same cloud. I was able to poke my finger through the sides after they were glued. Use lots of glue in a circle about the circumference of an apple, and then old them together until the glue cools.

Then I put more circles of hot glue on one lantern on a time and held a handful of Poly-fil against the glue spots. bit by bit, you cover the cloud, going back to check on bald spots. I also used quilt batting to cover the wholes in the bottom and some of the cracks before adding Poly-fil stuffing to the top of the batting. The stuffing sticks better to the paper lantern than the batting though. Just kind of pull it over the holes to hide the fact that these are really lanterns. I made sure that the hanging loops were at the top, and plan on using fishing line to hang it from the ceiling for our Enchantment Under the Stars prom. I have some LED lights to help them glow pink or purple. The more varied the sizes of lanterns the better. Keep the small ones on top and sides. 

It takes about 10 large glue sticks and a little more than half a pound of Polyfil for one cloud. I made about six and still half half of my 13.5 box of stuffing left. (It was $35 a box).

Whether you are decorating a bedroom, or for baby shower or bridal shower. These clouds can create a really special ambiance that makes you feel like you are on cloud 9!

 

Painting a Night Sky Back Drop

We've got some fun events coming up at my school. A spring concert, and a prom, with the theme: Enchantment under the stars. A starry & cloudy night sky killed two birds with one stone, just like last year when the prom theme was Enchanted Forrest, and the spring program was Into the Woods. I love working smarter, so I can work harder on other projects. We started with a blue background, starting with the darkest blue at the top, and adding lighter blue to the paint pan, until it was a sky blue at the bottom. A couple of my students got a kick out of giving our stars of the silver screen (from our Hooray for Hollywood prom) some wacky features during the process.

As soon as that dried, I had two more students add the stars. The more the better. They wanted to space them all evenly, so I had to remind them to think in clusters and make some bigger than the others. Most of the stars were 6-8 feet off the ground so we tilted the sets down on a chair to make it more accessible.

When it comes to making clouds, it's easy to over-do it. Start with darker values. Just subtly shift the value from the background. And I used a brush that was about 4 inches wide to start.  Then I started adding lighter colors until there was some areas of white, usually around the edges and tops of clouds using a one inch brush. It would make more sense to have a moon reflecting light back onto the clouds, but I'm saving a big moon for another photo op. I like to use an almost dry brush and scrub it on in circular motions so that it doesn't come off as a flat, coloring-book-style cloud. It didn't take long, and it is gratifying to knock out what is essentially a 32 foot mural in a day.