Prelude

For the past four days I have been spending three hours at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre in Islington, London, doing a workshop on developing character in marionettes (a little side note: it allows me to hold a proper, a real puppet for the first time since childhood...) It has astounded me how exhausting these three hour sessions have been.

Although this workshop is separate to the course, I feel I may look back on this week and see it as absolutely pivotal. What I really needed was to get a feeling, become introduced to manipulating marionettes...to just confirm to myself that it is how I have been imagining all this time... I was afraid I might be disappointed - or even have a huge crisis and ask whether I have made a grave error of judgement.

It was all that I imagined and so much more.

It was this exercise that did it for me. We spent a considerable length of time walking around the theatre, with the gentle encouragement of our lovely, earnest teacher Christopher. We were to create three different walks - the first representing how we felt on waking this morning, the second representing how we would feel as a "master puppeteer" and the third, what kind of walk our 'inner puppet' would have. As an individual whose beloved drama lessons ended just before GCSE level it was a huge pleasure and novelty to be focusing on the subtle movements of the body, and the massive effects of the imagination. We were to choose one 'character' and build on it, strengthen it. I chose the master puppeteer. My master puppeteer was just a very calm, quietly confident individual with strong hands and a look of contentment. Now we were told to go and choose a puppet off the rail, and extend this character into it.

The elegant, stately human puppets seemed to be at the far end of the rail, so I opted for a goose and wondered what would happen. This was the big moment: my first experience.

I stood in a space with this surprisingly heavy assemblage of wooden parts dangling by string from a very complex-looking handle contraption. Our teacher put on some puppet-friendly, ambient music. And I just tried to transpose the feeling I had whilst walking, and the person I imagined, into this goose. I ended up bobbing it up and down gently in the air, and making it slightly sway its head from side to side as if contently pondering nice thoughts. After a bit of fiddling around I discovered a part of the handle that unclipped, so that now the long goose neck could arch upwards and sideways and downwards, its personality really beginning to ooze out.

All I can say is, I doubt it looked like much to a bystander, but in those ten minutes I felt a huge stream of very odd, intense feelings. During that time I concentrated on the goose like I have never concentrated on anything before, and to me it was animated and alive. Its movements were scarce, and really the effort was spent trying to keep it very steady and still. But by focusing on such tiny little shifts and movements (I can really see I'm going to have to watch out for cliches and trite phrases on this blog) I felt like I was sharing in a spooky and electric silence with a living thing. It was how I would imagine Zen buddhists feel after meditating on flowers, or blades of grass.

In any case, it confirmed for me that the art of the marionette holds some kind of enigma, and it made me almost pass out from exhaustion on the tube on the way home...