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Puppet Practice Possibility

Structure is important in having successful puppet team practices, but be careful you don’t go overboard. Practices are not profitable if all you do is fool around. You may have a great time, but won’t get much done. If you are too stiff and formal, you might get a lot done, but there will be little fun and excitement. The key is to find and maintain a balance.

We have developed some entire routines out of times of fooling around in practice. Here’s one of them.

One night, we were fooling around with a human arm puppet, making it look like he was doing pull-ups on the top level of the theater. It looked realistic, so we played with it some more.

After doing a few pull-ups, the puppet struggled on the last one, shaking the theater just a bit to show the strain. We also discovered we could scrunch his face a bit so it looked like he really was straining. It was fun to do, but also fun to watch. We knew we could do something with it.

That led to a routine on goal setting where Mr. Jones would set a goal of doing ten pull-ups before the night was over. He started out doing three and went to rest. He came back later and did six or seven and went to rest. He tried a third time near the end of the program and did all ten.

After the last one, he came down to the lower tier and we talked about the importance of goal setting and the satisfaction that comes after completing a goal.

We never would have had that routine if our practice time was so structured that we couldn’t fool around. Some fooling around in practice is ok. When it does happen, try to direct it a bit and see if you can develop great routines as a result.

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