News
The Curious School of Puppetry
The Curious School of Puppetry: a crash course in being a good collaborator, listening to instincts, and devising visual theatre
by
Fibi Cowley
Seventeen people are crouched on the floor of a chilly church hall. We are putting all of our energy into believing the crumbled piece of brown paper we hold in each of our hands is alive, and soon enough it takes a first breath, and, with trepidation, begins to traverse the room. Some crawl while others glide, and the stranger ones are wafted along by an external current undetectable to our human bodies. Our paper puppets meet one another, and respond spontaneously to their individual encounters. If they touch, they merge, evolving into a new form. One by one, they join, until there are just four creatures in the room. Seventeen people sharing four minds.
I first heard of The Curious School of Puppetry in 2020. I was drawn to puppets, but I knew nothing about them, and found the scarce resources I did find to be totally impenetrable. I was
left with an inkling that I didn’t know what to do with. I later learnt that this kind of “calling” is not uncommon in the field. Curious, at the time, was the only course offering an extended period of full-time study, and unfortunately for me, it did not run again until 2023.
Though there are opportunities to study both design and performance through short courses at the Central School of Speech and Drama (Link) and the Little Angel Theatre (Link), and full time Masters studies at Wimbledon College of Art (link) and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (link), what Curious offers is a distinct style of teaching. It’s a highly immersive experience that doesn’t stop when class is dismissed. Though it runs for only eight weeks, the structure is intensive, with classes six days a week from 10am to 5pm. Evenings are occasionally populated with theatre visits, and the whole cohort helps to host weekly talks from visiting practitioners on a Thursday evening (Curious Soup Nights). The course retains its unique foothold in the industry due to its unmatched variety and the experience level of the tutors, and its network of alumni who welcome students into an extended community of puppeteers. The variety of teaching is broad-ranging, from tabletop to marionette, from shadow and light to object theatre, through eleven separate modules which are each two to four days long. The focus is mostly on puppetry performance rather than making, though you may choose to take a design-led approach in independent projects, which take up the last couple of weeks and culminate in a public showing.
Personally, I came to Curious with an open mind, but I expected the teaching to be far more technical. Instead, we explored broader concepts, and responded to them working in groups to create performances. The course totally exploded my understanding of the art-form, and woke me up to what it was to be a puppeteer, beyond just the puppet. Through playing and working together, we formed a deep understanding of each other, which allowed for collaboration to flourish. I learnt that puppetry has even more to do with life experience and interpersonal skills than your understanding of movement and physics, though these technical aspects are also embedded in the teaching and feedback.
The course brings together a variety of experience levels and backgrounds. So if, like me, you have experience in another field (in my case, visual arts) but not so much in puppetry, that’s an asset to you. Although I found it very intimidating to be one of the least experienced performers in the room, I soon came to appreciate that I had a clean slate, as I had less habits to unlearn. I also really benefitted from seeing a range of different styles of practitioners so early in my puppetry career: the pathways I could take seemed very apparent.
In addition, I admired the variety of life experience in the room, which was very refreshing after an arts education where most people were of a similar age and background to myself. In particular, I loved working with students whose first language was something other than English. In devising visual theatre, it’s a strength to be challenged to transcend language and cultural contexts as the aim is to appeal to universal audiences.
My personal journey throughout the course was one of coming into my own as a performer. At first, I was terrified of standing up in front of the class. But little by little, my confidence grew. I finally lost my inhibitions when I started taking myself seriously as a silly person during a module on glove puppets. Hidden behind the playboard, at last I fully digested the idea that the puppet was on stage, not me. During our Object Theatre module, we were asked to depict a journey we had been on: my rendition of coming across a migrating frog made me realise that I was far more comfortable performing when I drew on personal experience, and I felt empowered by that throughout the rest of the course.
Almost all practical work done during the course is collaborative: mostly students are placed in groups of two to five and asked to devise a piece together in thirty minutes or less. This emphasises that in puppetry, collaboration is not just a means to an end, but rather an integral part of the process. I learnt that successful collaborations look like constellations rather than machines: you must learn to be adaptable and respond to what’s around you. Maybe at one moment you shine brightly and are very visible, and at other times go quiet, fading into the background so that others can be heard. I also found that I brought the most to a collaboration when I was being myself, listening intensely and responding truthfully. And most importantly, I appreciated when my collaborators held space for fun: when we felt free to spontaneously surprise ourselves with moments of mischief and subversion throughout the process.
I left the course feeling very fulfilled, and nourished in a creative and spiritual sense. Practically, I felt inspired and equipped to enter into a career in the puppetry world. Curious equipped me with a thorough understanding of puppetry performance, and helped to enable a lot of new connections that I feel confident will lead to projects and collaborations. More intangibly, my confidence had been bolstered and my morale replenished from stretching myself creatively, and I hope to draw on that for years to come.
The Curious School of Puppetry provides an intensive crash course in connecting, listening and being honest, where you’ll also push yourself emotionally and physically. Though it’s a short-term, and therefore not a complete training, in a landscape where puppetry education is hard to find, the course motivates you to go out into the world and find ways to keep learning. Part of this is in connecting with other practitioners, as building strong networks of collaborators is vital in an industry based on people power. In a moment where a particular kind of puppetry is making a resurgence in west-end productions, Curious also offers a more expansive perspective on what counts as puppetry, and what kind of stories can be told through it.
