Saturday September 11 * 10am-noon * REGISTER
Lab is a safe place where people brave theatrical exploration and mistakes are welcome.
"the only failure is not trying"
theater = Baptism by Fire.
Puppet Lab supports the development of works in progress: you can present work for feedback or direct others in lab to improvise parts/puzzle out specific scenes and how your show might work. Improvisation is central to our explorations.
Puppet Lab’s purpose is to be a hub for all those interested in puppet theater who would benefit from:
boosting creative power
honing puppet-manipulation skills
cross-pollinating ideas
receiving feedback about works in progress
building puppet community
Open to all levels of experience.
Rhizome Puppet Lab works to uphold community access: no one will be turned away for lack of funds. However, if you appreciate what we are doing and would like to contribute something (suggested donation $8) please do so.
I would like to propose that Puppetry has a 5th wall and that is when the puppeteer morphs into a force that is for or against the puppet character or expresses the character's mental state or landscape.
On Saturday September 11th I will follow up Maggie Winston's lab about Body as Landscape with ideas about the Body as Force and the Body as Mental State.
we will explore force and mental state scenarios with table top puppets.
It is important for me to know how many people are coming (# of puppets I will bring).
If you have a table top puppet or floppy stuffed animal/ragdoll you would like to practice with please bring it.
This is a collaborative exercise and we are requesting masks and considering gloves. We will be working outside, weather depending.
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot.
"Breaking the fourth wall" is when this performance convention, having been adopted more generally in the drama, is violated. This can be done through either directly referring to the audience, the play as a play, or the characters' fictionality.
The presence of the fourth wall is an established convention of modern realistic theatre, which has led some artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic or comic effect when a boundary is "broken", when an actor or character addresses the audience directly.[1][6] Breaking the fourth wall is common in pantomime and children's theatre where, for example, a character might ask the children for help, as when Peter Pan appeals to the audience to applaud in an effort to revive the fading Tinker Bell ("If you believe in fairies, clap your hands!").