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What Shouldn’t I Do When Critiquing a Fellow Puppeteer?

The last post talked about the importance of critiquing in order to improve your puppet skills. Critiquing is when someone out front watches your performance and gives suggestions to improve the quality of the puppetry.

Here are some things to keep in mind when critiquing:

• The goal is to improve the puppeteer’s skills.
• It’s not a contest to see who’s the best on the team.
• Comments need to be phrased in a positive manner and not come across as put downs.
• Follow the golden rule: critique others the way you would like to be critiqued.
• The attitude needs be one of genuine concern to help build skills, not pride that says be like me.

With that said, what are some things you should not do when critiquing a fellow puppeteer?

• Don’t address the puppeteer. When you call something out, use the puppet’s name, not the name of the person who’s working it. The puppeteer can’t see what his puppet looks like. The ones critiquing are helping him visualize his puppet.
• Don’t criticize…critique. Criticism is giving negative comments in a blaming or condemning manner. Critiquing is giving suggestions to help improve the performance in a positive and uplifting way.
• Don’t use harsh language. “Hey Skip, that last motion you did was dumb. Don’t do it again.” Or “What’s the matter Bernie; you’re wimping out on us. Get that puppet up.” Negative comments like these cause the puppeteer to put up a defensive mental wall that hinders following any further comments no matter how good they may be.
• Don’t approach critiquing from an “I’m better than you attitude.” If you have that kind of an attitude, your comments come across as condescending and actually become more harmful than productive. Also, if you have that attitude, you are less likely to follow any advice given you when you are being critiqued.
• Don’t nitpick. In other words, don’t address every single issue you see. A puppeteer who gets a barrage of comments can quickly become discouraged. If the performance is poor, choose one or two things that if corrected would have the greatest impact and concentrate on those.

The next post will focus on things you should do when critiquing another puppeteer.

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