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What is Blacklight Puppetry

On Easter Sunday this year, we introduced Black Light Puppetry to our children’s church program and it was a huge success. So much so that we now do something with black lights two to three times a month. Up until this point in our puppet experience we focused on hand puppets, but this new experience is opening doors to new and exciting opportunities.

What is Black Light Puppetry?
It’s doing puppets in the dark having only a black light for illumination and using puppets stand out or “glow” under the lights. Anything you don’t want to show is covered in black. So if you have a theater with black curtains, only the puppets will show up.

With black lights, you can make a large backdrop out of black material and have your puppeteers dress in black from head to foot and perform outside the stage. This allows you to use full body puppets where the audience can see their legs and gives you much more room to act out your play.

A big plus to using black lights is that you can make backgrounds that fluoresce that make the audience sit back and say “wow.” Background items can be made out of fluorescent poster board. If you paint one side black, you can have the black side facing the audience so it appears as though there is nothing there. Then, turn it around and it seems like it just appeared.

There are reasonably priced black light puppets available with skin and clothing that “glow” under the black light. You can also make your own using foam and painting it with fluorescent paint.

In the next post I’ll share some resources we used to learn about and get started with the black light puppetry. I wish now we had gotten into it years ago.

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