Japaneses Bunkraku is a beautiful and elaborate art form. Puppet masters study for many years to be able to operate the puppets' movements and gestures. It usually takes 3 people to operate one puppet. I liked this lesson because it is so different from other forms of theatre. It also is very different from my students' concept of what puppetry is. I went over with them how this type of puppetry is different from an American puppet show. I showed them pictures of the elaborate painting and costumes of the puppets.
Obviously we could not make our own Bunraku puppets, but I did find this template online to make simple marionette puppets. My students really loved making these. I tried to encourage them to think of it as a character rather than drawing themselves. After making the puppets, I put them into groups to come up with a little story of how their puppet would interact with other puppets. The only rule is that their puppets can not fight one another. (All the boys would just have their puppets attack each other otherwise). I wanted to have them practice talking and moving through the puppet. It wasn't themselves that was acting, but it was their puppet. Rather than have them just hold the puppet and talk, I tried to challenge them to make the puppet move and interact with the other puppets. They would forget to make sure their puppet was facing the audience a few times, but they did ok for the amount of time I gave them. It was interesting to see the differences in the boys and girls story lines. In the group with all girls, their story could have gone on forever about everywhere they went and everything they did if I didn't eventually cut them off. I was lucky if the boys' story was 30 sec. My conclusion of this dynamic is due to girls playing with dolls and coming up with similar scenarios. Oh gender roles at play so early in life.
Here are a few pictures of their puppets.
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