Exploring Kinaesthetic Movement with Marionettes

As Caroline mentioned, we had some movement sessions with Wendy Cook to develop our own body awareness and movement, and feed that into our use of the puppet. Here are some things we learned:


Developing the Puppeteer
Because our marionette has short strings, we are partnering with the puppet. Therefore our movements need to be fluid and organic. We can do this by:
- keeping the knees soft and putting our body weight in our toes when moving around (which allows us to change direction easily)
- starting the movement in our own body (try out the action first in your own body)
- incorporating a 3 part rhythm into our actions (preparation of the action, action, recovery from the action)


Developing the Marionette
We need to do what marionettes do best (we need to let the puppet 'lead' us and show us what it can do, rather than us trying to force actions on the puppet)

Actions
There are countless possible actions to explore in the movement spectrum, and we categorised them as:
- Weight bearing (e.g. walking, jumping, hopping)
- Gesture (non-weight bearing e.g. bending, shrugging, grasping, pulling)
- Continuous (one action leads into another action, e.g. the act of reaching for an object starts with the head, then the hand, the arm, the body, legs, etc.)
- Simultaneous (actions happening at the same time, e.g. jumping)
- Stillness

One useful exercise we did involved us performing the following actions (not necessarily in this order): leaning/tilting; collapsing; jumping/flying; crawling; wriggling; stillness. We each developed a rough sequence of these actions and then tried to replicate them in the puppet, modifying the actions along the way.

Space
There are many different ways to use space – space in the puppet’s actions, and space on the stage. We need to think about using:
- Levels i.e. using the space above the puppet, below the puppet and in between (high levels e.g. reach up; medium levels e.g. reach out; low levels e.g. crouching, kneeling)
- Floor patterns (how does one action lead into the other? How can you cover the stage in an interesting way?)
- Directions (up, down, forward, back, side-to-side)

Quality of Movement
We also need to consider how to vary the quality of our actions to make them more interesting and expressive. We can do this by:
- Changing the pace/speed
- Rhythm
- Repetition
- Using weight (this is really important for developing the believability of the puppet e.g. when it is walking, the legs need to look like they have weight to them – otherwise it just looks like ‘dolly waggling’)
- Building up an action (e.g. the action start small and gets bigger and bigger)

Stillness
As Christopher Leith said, we must “show the intelligence of the puppet”. We do this best by incorporating moments of stillness into our actions. It is important to note that there are many different qualities of stillness, e.g. showing alertness or sadness; being subtle or obvious. Wendy described how stillness can also ‘draw us into the present’. She also pointed out that stillness is never empty.

Final tips
- When operating the puppet, ask yourself, ‘Does there need to be a pause?’
- Keep actions focused and spare (i.e. less is more)
- The movement of the puppet starts off in your own body (this stems from Peter Fuller’s notion of the ‘potential space’, that is, the potential of the movement starts first in the body of the puppeteer before transferring to the puppet)


To end this post, I leave you with a stellar example of great marionette operating by Philippe Genty, which especially makes good use of stillness.



Alterntively, Click here to view it on Youtube.