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Make the Most Out of Your Puppet Team Practices

A weekly puppet practice is important to prepare your programs, develop your skills, strengthen your arm muscles, and more. How you run those practices is also important.

Early on, with our first team, we had weekly practices, but didn’t have much structure to them. In fact, we wasted a lot of time. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one of our puppeteers told me he was going to leave the team if things didn’t change.

The lack of structure and fooling around showed him that we weren’t taking it seriously. His statement made me realize that, and changes were made.

Now, when practice time comes, I have an agenda in place. I know what we need to practice for this week and the coming weeks. The agenda helps keep us focused on what needs to be done and also helps me know how to use my time wisely.

Last week, we had an interruption that took time out of practice. We wound up with only forty-five minutes of actual practice time. Since I had the agenda made up, I knew what was vital to practice and what we could put off until next week. 

Structured, organized practices are important for a team’s success. You want to be careful not to go overboard on the structure and become too stiff and formal. I still allow some time for fooling around in some practices. The key is to find a proper balance between work and having fun.

We have developed great routines arising out of times of fooling around. In the next post, I’ll share one of those routines.

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