"Puppet Play" project @ HSC Bensonhurst Senior Center.1 8/05/2021


 HSC Bensonhurst Senior Center

Puppet Project

Blog 1 8/05/2021

It’s always fun to begin a new project and especially so with the wonderful older adults at Bensonhurst Senior Center. We will be teaching how to make a hand puppet using newspaper, masking tape, cardstock, a wooden dowel and loads of imagination. We warmed up by letting our fingers do the walking and talking! Each person enacted simple finger movements as though one hand was speaking to the other. There was a lot of love and kisses shared in the finger puppet displays. All our students have seen some form of puppetry, many of them in Guangdong Cultural Park, where the Guangdong Province Puppet Art Theater, founded in 1956, presents traditional Chinese puppetry performances. Lao Yu has also seen puppeteers in Time Square and Julisa mentioned seeing a school performance of puppetry.  

Many of our students were in class a couple of years ago when we taught tabletop puppetry and they brought out their puppets to greet us. Pun’s two puppets, one with bright blue punk hair and repurposed jeans made into a top, the other with braided orange pigtails delighted us as they exchanged kisses. So Sim made a set of twins with matching purple ribbons in their curly brown hair and lilac clothes. Julisa’s elegant female puppet spotted flowing clothes and long red hair which she braided and added brightly colored hair ties.

As background, Spica and I shared our puppets, shadow, Muppet, and tabletop. In order to highlight different styles of puppetry we played short excerpts from “Boxy George” (Kasse-Madsen), an excellent example of non-verbal performance, traditional glove puppetry, Budaixi from Taiwan, shadow puppetry from Australian Richard Bradshaw, traditional Indonesian rod puppetry, Wayang Golek and a Punch and Judy show from England. 

Students opened their bag of materials and used the wooden dowel to roll and tape a piece of cardstock into the neck. Next, they took a half page of newspaper, crumpled it into a ball and taped it over the neck, then added a second ball to increase the size of the head. Time to play! After marking eyes onto the head, students placed the “neck” onto their index finger and experimented with movements. Exercising the fingers is important when puppeteering so Spica led us in a fun game. Now it’s time to explore just what this simple puppet can do by inviting your family for a little show.


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