Do you speak puppetry

Puppetry as an Alternative Form of Communication

In the past several years, I have been working in a puppetry project at a center for recovering alcohol and drug addicts. I work with a social worker; together we lead a parent/child puppetry group for recovering addicts or their spouses and their children. The parents and children work together to create puppets, to write stories about their puppets, and to perform the stories with their puppets for an invited audience. My co leader and I concentrate on the puppetry, on the family dynamics, and on the stories which often become statements about real life expressed in the narrative form. For example, a mother and her son created a story about a mother and her son. The mother wanted to operate the child puppet. Her son adamantly refused and told her, �You need to be the mother!� This statement applied to their real life as well as to their puppet story.

At the conclusion of each puppetry group, after the puppet shows, my co leader and I met with each individual parent to access their process and discoveries from the puppetry experience. In one such meeting, a father told us that he got to see his daughter through a different light, the light of creativity. He felt a pride about her that he had never felt before. In another meeting, a mother told us that puppetry class was one of the most important events of her week because in it, she learned how to play with her children.

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