Do you speak puppetry

Projection on the Puppet

I worked in a �small class� in an elementary school in Israel. This was a class for fourth grade children with learning difficulties. In one of my sessions with them, I was working individually with the students with the �no face� puppets. I invited Sivan to play with me and the puppets after three other children had already had a turn. She was almost nonverbal in class and rarely participated in classroom activities. She put a puppet on and it immediately informed me that it was very sad and angry. It was angry because I didn�t invite Sivan to be first. It also told me that it was sad to come to school because everyone at school beats it up. The puppet she selected was green. It had no visual attributes that could establish whether it was male or female, human or nonhuman, or fancy or simple. The puppet didn't resemble anyone or anything, so it could be anyone the puppeteer needed it to be. Because the puppet was visually neutral, Sivan could project her subconscious feelings onto it. This symbolic characteristic opens possibilities for identification and interpretation by the puppeteer and by the audience. This trait allows the puppet to see, know and portray life experiences of its puppeteer and of its audience concurrently, producing identification with the puppet and its story.

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