Puppets, puppets, puppets. Its all I think about whenever im thinking of the play. It is becoming increasingly apparent that we are not going to be able to produce the amount of puppets that the original play required, not only because of time we are lacking but because we have such a small "workforce" to manufacture them.


So how do we fix this awkward situation? Well, for one we could just reduce the number of puppets in the play and replace some of them for plain actors. But then it would look odd that a very small amount of characters are represented by puppets, it wouldn't look consistent. Another solution could be to simply adapt the play so that only one type of puppet is included, say only pirates, or only peasants, and then rewrite everything. But By far the simplest solution that came up was to find a way to reuse the puppets, so that they served more than one function. So that a pirate in one scene could be dressed to be a merchant in another. Though this will prove difficult in terms of the striking resemblance between one character and another, with the right change of clothes and props it could work.


This wee we also had a workshop with Martin and Maria Laura, the puppeteers that taught us how to make the puppets in the first place. In this workshop they taught us how to maneuver the puppets and what things we should learn before handling them. Something very useful they taught us was that the puppets must keep their axis, as in they must keep their posture, be it straight or crooked, it should remain the same throughout the performance because our posture is not really flexible, and if the puppet suddenly changes the way it stands then the audience loses the illusion. The other important aspect we should always keep into account is the direction or focus in which the puppet is looking at, because this is usually what guides all the movement.


We were put into groups to try and show what we had learnt on some puppets. I had a three-man group to  maneuver only one relatively small puppet. The result was quite catastrophic in the sense that the movement in the puppet seemed segmented and artificial, and not all part of the same impulse. This was due to the fact that there wasn't much coordination between the legs arms and torso because each person in charge of their body part wanted to do different things at different rhythms. We later realized that becuase of this, it is much simpler to control a puppet with less people, for that way the puppet will be fully synchronized.  I realized that in order for the double puppets to work on our play, we would need to either video-tape the puppets in movement and then show it to the actors to see how they can improve or to just get a big miror so they can practice.


Is there a way to fixate a certain expression in the face of a foam puppet without stressing the hand? Since this could be used to differentiate merchants from pirates.