For our final program of the summer, we gathered in Nottingham for five days and played with different aspects of storytelling by experimenting with puppetry and performance. Teaching artists Katrina Pratt and Audra Brandt led us in creating a giant pageant puppet, our own small wooden dowel puppets or sock puppets, and bleach dyed shirts!
Kicking Things Off!
On our first day, we each made our own wooden dowel puppet from newspaper, masking tape, and papier-mâché. We imagined what sort of characters our puppets would be.
Painting Our Puppets and Giving Them Life!
On our second day of story camp we painted our puppets. Giving them costumes and facial features helped to bring life to our fun creations!
Collaborative Story Building
Our group worked individually and collaboratively to create a unified background story for the puppets we were going to build. Together, we imagined a mythical setting, with magical creatures which we could then use as inspiration as we built our final pageant puppet!
Pageant Puppet
From structure and form, to papier-mâché and final decoration- Teens worked together with our teaching artists to create a larger than life Cerberus puppet. Using a metal-frame backpack, PVC pipe, cardboard, and tape- the structure was created, and finished off with layers of paint and cloth, adding detail and expression to this towering creature.
Bleach Dying Shirts + Stations
There were many creative options in this program, and participants got to choose which ‘station’ to be at throughout the day. One option was to create a stencil (some chose to just design their shirts free-hand!) and bleach-dye a tee-shirt. Other stations included aerial silks, costumes, small puppet making, and sketching out the characters/setting from our story amongst the beautiful surrounding woods, water fixtures, and frogs 🙂
