About Play Making

The Puppeteers' Cooperative Playmaking workshops involve designing, constructing, rehearsing and performing a puppet shop using either small or giant puppets. We first work with participants to understand the purpose, environment, and audience of the play, and the individual strengths of the players. The group then creates a set of characters which will express the various interests and emotions of the plot. We work with the group to construct puppets expressive of the essence of the characters and their actions, and help them to construct a stage, while the group, by a mixture of improvisation and discussion, creates a script. As the puppets are finished, the group experiments with their characters, learns more about them, and incorporates their discoveries into the script. The result is a performance in which the action springs organically from the interaction between the plot, the characters, and the players.