Now that you have learnt how to bring your puppet to life it’s time to incorporate your puppet into a scene. If you are working in a classroom, get into groups of four or five.

Choose your tale

Choose a well-known fairytale that you are familiar with. On a sheet of paper break the story down into six key plot points. For example, if you chose Little Red Riding Hood your plot points might be:

1. Little Red Riding Hood wants to visit Grandma. Mother tells her to go but to not stray from the path or talk to strangers.
2. As she walks through the woods to Grandma’s house she meets the Wolf. The Wolf asks her what she’s doing, and she tells him she’s off to visit Grandma.
3. The Wolf suggests that Red picks some of the nice flowers to give to Grandma. While Red does this the Wolf runs ahead to Grandma’s house.
4. Thinking it’s Red knocking at the door, Grandma opens up and gets eaten by the Wolf, who quickly dresses in her clothes to disguise himself.
5. Red arrives at the house, knocks on the door and goes in. She is suspicious of Grandma’s deep voice, big eyes, big hands and big teeth.
6. Just as the Wolf is about to eat Red, the Woodsman hears her screams. He comes in, kills the Wolf and cuts open its stomach. Out comes Grandma and they all live happily ever after.

Why this story now?

Now that you have the bare bones of your story ask yourselves – why do you want to perform this story now? How is this story relevant to audiences today? If your story had a message behind it, what would it be? For example, could it have an environmental message like in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax?

You can choose to change some of your story plot points to update the story if you would like to do so. Or you could choose to tell the story from a different perspective. For example, if you were working on Little Red Riding Hood you could tell the story from the Wolf’s perspective, Grandma’s, the Woodsman’s, or a new character entirely. You could even choose to tell the story from the perspective of a non-living thing such as Red’s picnic basket.

Once you have made those choices, decide which character in your story is going to represented by a puppet. Which character would be the most dramatically interesting? For example, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, the character of The Lorax serves as the conscience in the story.

Create your scene

Now that you have the building blocks of your story, it’s time to get it on its feet.

Before a professional production goes into rehearsals, sometimes the company will hold a research and development (R&D) workshop. This is a chance for the company to try out ideas without the pressure of having a paying audience watching. You are going to choose one of your story plot points to bring to life through R&D. This is your chance to experiment and try things out. Things to consider:

• Who will operate your puppet?
• How many people are required to make your puppet move?
• How will your puppet interact with other performers or the environment?

You can choose to use the puppet you made earlier in the workshop, or you may decide to build a new puppet from scrap paper or newspaper. Remember, we are still experimenting with ideas – your puppet does not need to be the finished version.

Think back to the examples of puppets we saw earlier. What type of puppet would best suit your story? How much do we need to see? Remember, the audience will fill in the rest using their imaginations.

Once your scene is ready, try and share with friends or family. Get feedback and find out if they understood the story, how it made them feel, what they think the message of your piece might be and what they enjoyed about the performance. Remember, this is an R&D activity so it doesn’t have to be a finished or polished piece. It’s about taking risks, trying new ideas and testing your puppetry skills.