Posts Tagged ‘Creation Station’

Let a short, furry guy be your next teaching assistant

By Marianne Messima

Dance teachers who work with toddlers and preschoolers know the power of the puppet. In fact, Judy Carmen, the founder and creative director of a national dance studio franchise called Creation Station, says her homemade puppet Miss Honey is “almost like an assistant teacher.” And if you talk to puppet professionals, they’ll tell you there’s a world of possibility for using puppets in early dance classes.

Carmen has always been connected to puppets. She once led the Los Angeles branch of Creation Station to participate in the Emmy Award-winning Sesame Street Elmopalooza DVD, where one of her 4-year-olds got to dance with Big Bird. Using a stable of puppet animals, Carmen gets toddlers and preschoolers to learn fundamental skills. But given the chance to ask one question of a master puppeteer, she’d say, “What is it about a puppet, unlike a stuffed animal, that makes a child think it’s a real living thing?”

Carmen is referring to a behavior that master puppeteers at the 2010 O’Neill Puppetry Conference, held annually in June at the O’Neill Center in Connecticut, found very familiar: “A child can see you moving the puppet, and the voice is obviously coming from the human,” she says, “but the child speaks directly to the puppet.”

Pam Arciero, the O’Neill conference’s director and a puppeteer/puppet creator for Sesame Street and Between the Lions, says, “They don’t see you; they see this magical puppet.”

That’s true even when the puppeteer is visible, says puppet performer Alice Bohm, also part of the O’Neill 2010 staff. “They all can see you, but they still believe.”

According to Arciero, a former dancer, many puppeteers have dance backgrounds. “We’re attracted to translating the movements of your body into the movements of the puppet, what works and what doesn’t work, and also the sense of using music and movement together. Coming from dance is huge; that’s what we do.”

Attention everyone!
Teachers find that puppets help create rituals for signaling children to attention (useful in getting class started), coming back from a break, or creating a smooth transition between activities.

At times when the scattered chatter of youngsters fills the room, Carmen will call on Miss Honey, who, Carmen says, looks like a monkey. “I’m holding it in my arm like it’s sleeping to get the kids quieted down and paying attention.” She speaks in a hushed voice to the class: “ ‘Don’t wake her up; don’t wake up Miss Honey.’ And they’ll come over. And then I’ll go, ‘On the count of three, let’s march one round and then wake her up.’ ”

Karen Hayes, of Twinkle Toes Dance Company at Main Street Performing Arts Studio in Canoga Park, California, uses a similar ritual, calling students to attention with Mr. Froggy. “Mr. Froggy wants to jump with you, so let’s all get on your lily pad,” she will say. The lily pad is a circular formation of children sitting on the floor. Once they’re there, Mr. Froggy calls them out by name, avoiding the challenging scenario of getting kids to line up and wait for turns. Hayes has learned that 3-year-olds love hearing their names, and they’ll perform for Mr. Froggy in an orderly fashion.

Motion, emotion
Hayes says her students are very much in touch with their emotions. “I do an emotion dance where I have them be sneaky, be shy, and dance.” For this dance, the children pick out and manipulate an animal puppet, becoming the emotion and voicing it through their chosen animal.

Hayes even uses this exercise to change the tone of the class. She’ll say, “This tiger is a mad tiger. This fishy is happy.”

What’s so fascinating about puppets, according to Igor Gozman, director of PuppetART in Detroit, is their movement, much like a baby’s crib mobile. But the test of good puppet manipulation is whether the puppet shows clear, readable emotions through that movement. He refers to PuppetART’s Sleeping Beauty, which has no spoken words. “[The children] don’t just understand,” he says, “they can retell everything that happens with the character.”

Gozman encourages teachers of young children to study the ways puppet movement conveys emotion. For example, he says, leaning forward is an aggressive action.

Getting students to focus
One of the strongest arguments for using puppets in dance classes is the way they can help kids focus. “If they’re not focusing and we’re trying to learn a specific step,” Carmen says, “I will pull the puppet out to help me teach that step because the kids will focus much better on the puppet sometimes than on the teacher.”

Why is that? Many puppet professionals believe there’s more to a puppet’s draw than the connection between movement and emotion. Referring to his experience working in theater, Phillip Huber, known for his puppet manipulation in the movie Being John Malkovich, tells a story about the mesmerizing power of puppets. Apparently a floppy white dog marionette he created for a Broadway production drew so much attention away from the actors in the cast that the producers took the dog out of the show. “The focus goes to the puppet because it’s something magical,” says Huber. “And that becomes almost magnetic, I think, for children. They’re just drawn to it immediately.”

Bohm’s theory is that “there’s a very strong belief within all humans that everything is alive somehow.”

Gozman says that a toddler’s uncomplicated connection to these basic human tendencies, to be drawn to the emotional content of movement, to think everything is alive, is what lets puppets elicit such a strong focus.

Motivating students to learn
Many puppet-oriented instructors find that youngsters will often perform more readily for the puppet than they will for the teacher. “I’ll use puppets as an audience,” says Hayes. “So instead of rehearsing for me, [the children] will be performing for the puppet.”

Hayes uses bunny puppets to teach sauté, handing out bunnies to each young dancer as she explains, “Bunnies hop and jump. Bunnies sauté just like ballerinas do.” She says the method has been very successful. “It gives them something tangible to hold on to, and kids can visualize animals doing that [action] because they’re so connected with animals.”

“If [young students are] not focusing and we’re trying to learn a specific step, I will pull the puppet out to help me teach that step because the kids will focus much better on the puppet sometimes than on the teacher.” —Judy Carmen

Carmen too uses a puppet to encourage her students to do dance steps, but she takes a slightly different approach. She’ll say, “I think Miss Honey wants to tell me something.” Then she holds the puppet to her ear “like she’s whispering to me, and I’ll go, ‘Oh I think that’s a great idea, Miss Honey.’ And I’ll say, ‘Miss Honey wants you to show her how to do a shuffle hop step. Who can show Miss Honey how to do a shuffle hop step?’ ”

Carmen and Hayes both weave ballet technique into the puppet stories they create. “I’ll literally take the puppet and put it down by the child’s foot,” says Carmen. When the child accomplishes the move, “Miss Honey will get all excited. She’s really just an observer as opposed to a participant in dance.”

Overcoming shyness
Hayes finds puppets especially helpful at the start of a new school year, a bumpy time of settling in, particularly for very young children. She goes straight to Mr. Froggy to reassure her incoming toddlers. “It really breaks the ice.”

Russian-born Gozman deals with shyness all the time because his company uses puppets to teach English to children from other countries. He reports that the same children who seem unable to speak English in front of a class speak perfectly well to a puppet.

In explaining this phenomenon, teachers and puppeteers emphasize that the children have a “relationship with the puppet.” In interviews for this piece, both the O’Neill puppeteers and the dance instructors used words like “comfortable,” “non-threatening,” or even, as Gozman puts it, “some kind of a shield,” to describe the relationship.

Reaching the hard-to-reach
The power of such relationships to bypass learning blocks is especially evident in the case of children who are developmentally challenged, hyperactive, or troubled in some way. “They can express things to a puppet that they have trouble expressing to a fellow human,” Huber says. “It’s safe.”

In working with children who were hyperactive, says Bohm, she was amazed at how one youngster was able to settle down and spend long stretches working with a scarf puppet. He was able “to have a calm relationship, where he had no fear.”

Arciero went on the goodwill tours sponsored by PBS after Hurricane Katrina, she says, “and I would take my puppet into these areas where kids hadn’t laughed or smiled literally in months.” Throughout the tour, teachers thanked her for getting their kids to laugh.

Hayes remembers an early experience as a dance teacher when she worked with a particularly hard-to-reach girl at a camp for the developmentally challenged. “She would never do anything across the floor,” she says. “We tried everything—ballet, tap, hip-hop, music exercises.”

Then she brought out a bear puppet. “I said, ‘If you’re not going to do it for me, will you do it for the bear?’ I actually closed my eyes,” Hayes says. “That was the first time I got her to go across the floor. After that, the shyness went away. [The experience] taught me to use props more. She did it for the bear.”

A Quick Guide to Using Puppets
Using puppets in children’s classes to increase enjoyment and facilitate targeted learning is less about acting lessons and more about applying thought and creativity to a few guidelines.

• Create familiar puppet rituals; they work well for transitioning.
• Be flexible enough to seize “puppet moments”; for example, when the class needs to focus.
• Create stories that weave instructions into the puppet or puppet personality.
• Let puppets tap into children’s innate sensitivity to emotion. Exploit emotional variety (“Tiger is mad”; “Fishy is happy”).
• Use music, movement, voice, and puppetry together to present clear emotions.
• Devise ways for puppets to tap into kids’ natural inclinations to identify with animals, treat objects as if they’re alive, and respond to movement.
• Become a student of puppet movement and how children respond to it.