Last week, NIDA Master and Bachelor of Fine Arts students were mentored by one of the world’s foremost puppeteers, Finn Caldwell, as he led a week-long program of workshops here at NIDA in preparation for his work on a student production next year.
Photo: NIDA Acting students get to grips with the art of puppetry in theatre
Last week, NIDA Master and Bachelor of Fine Arts students were mentored by one of the world’s foremost puppeteers, Finn Caldwell, as he led a week-long program of workshops here at NIDA in preparation for his work on a student production next year.
Recent productions of Caldwell’s include international stage hit War Horse, and other hit shows such as the West End’s Shrek – The Musical and Groundhog Day.
NIDA’s Artistic Planning Committee had been in discussions with Finn for two years to have him direct a student production here. Caldwell’s week at NIDA was an exercise in research and experimentation for next year’s production, as well as a chance to extend his extensive industry knowledge and skills to our students.
The project involved one student from each MFA and BFA (Design for Performance) course, as well as three third-year BFA (Properties and Objects) students, and eight BFA (Acting) students.
‘The use of puppetry is becoming more widespread and has experienced a surge in interest, especially in the UK. You just have to look at the array of recent big productions, including War Horse, which uses puppets. A lot has been done on animal puppetry, but in the UK I’m trying to get people passionate about human puppetry and in particular puppetry based on the traditional Japanese puppet theatre, Bunraku, which is the art form of three people operating one figure,’ commented Caldwell.
‘With this project, which encompasses my current time at NIDA and next year’s production here, I thought it would be exciting to look at what can be communicated through the puppet’s body. As opposed to a Muppet where just one person speaks, with a puppet the entire body is expressive. You can take an enormous amount of information from what the body’s doing, and then go one step further and align that with text at the same time – that’s what’s really exciting.’
Caldwell worked closely with the students to experiment with set design, puppet movement and speech.
‘I wanted to explore whether the puppets could sustain large pieces of text and discover the type of set we need to create in order to have the puppet live in a claustrophobic environment. Moving the puppet around the set is also important, so we were looking at how that would work as well.’
‘We’ve been experimenting to see if we can go into extreme miniature. With this, we use cameras to film scaled-down scenes, and project that to create large images. For instance, we’re using cars the size of matchboxes and creating the impression that they are bigger with the use of projection. That gives us the opportunity to go to large spaces as well as more intimate ones.’
During the morning sessions, Design and Properties & Objects students would have a ‘making R&D’ – an experimental development process of Caldwell’s.
‘What that means is we don’t try and make things well, we make things fast and crudely in order to test ideas.’
The students have been creating generic sections of wall, which were interchanged during scenes to create the illusion that the puppet was moving (when actually the walls were), creating pathways for the characters to move along. They also hand-crafted the miniature objects, such as beds, windows and desks that were necessary to the set.
Next year, NIDA students will also be responsible for making the puppets from a basic blueprint provided by Caldwell.
Third year Acting students had the opportunity to get to grips with operating puppets, which Caldwell described as having to ‘play an instrument.’
‘You have to have a certain amount of technique to be free and expressive. Therefore we did a crash course in the principles of puppetry. They picked it up incredibly quickly,’ said Caldwell.
To learn more about NIDA’s MFA and BFA courses, we’re hosting an InfoNight on 16 August. Find out more details and register to attend here.
