Storytelling through Puppetry: Imagine - Design - Make - Animate

It’s been a few months since we did our last post and what a couple of months it has been! Katherine will be doing a Christmas update of all the going-ons but this post is about a project I was lucky enough to see during the Nov 2012 Photography Project.  

Here at Basti Ram we are keen to learn new things and put into place new projects and ideas. We are very interested in hearing about bespoke project ideas and especially if they involve creative education. This is exactly what happened with Kellie Rickell’s Puppetry Workshop. Kellie, aged 21 years, enquired earlier on in the year asking to do a puppetry workshop with our linked organisations in India, as part of her university course. At first we were all a bit unsure of what it involved; so we arranged a few meetings with Kellie to talk more and asked her to send us the workshop plans for each workshop and the concept behind the project. We were extremely impressed at what Kellie had planned and agreed for her to run the project in our linked disabled school and boy’s home. This post will focus on the workshops run in the boy’s home. 

The four week project was from the 21^st October 2012 until the 16^th November 2012. Kellie worked alongside Gaurav Bansal; our bi-lingual on the ground Project Manager. Each workshop lasted for two hours every day throughout the four weeks. The project came to an end on the 18^th November 2012 with the boy’s puppetry performances and an exhibition of all their work over the four weeks. 

All of the boys stories, were translated into English. The boys involved in the project were:

Group 1: Mahender, Nansingh, Kamlesh and Kishan.

Group 2: Rahul and Mukesh.

Group3: Jaswant, Dilip and Mukesh.

Group 4: Pratap, Sarwan and Vikram.

The idea of the project was storytelling through puppetry. Kellie wanted to evoke imagination and creativity so each session was planned in response to the boy’s engagement in the previous workshop. Kellie was very careful to plan the workshops so the boys didn’t just follow her choices but were able to expand their own mind in this unknown artistic practice. Some of the themes Kellie looked at were puppet design, construction and performance, two-dimensional and three dimensional shapes, fiction and non-fiction and storytelling and writing techniques. 

Kellie’s four keywords give a quick idea of the concept behind the project: 

Imagine - Design - Make – Animate

The four phases allowed for the boys to first imagine their stories, learn about story-telling and writing techniques. Secondly, they started to design their stories with their chosen puppet design and thirdly, they made their stories come alive by making the puppets. Finally, the boys then animated their stories with the puppets and performed their stories at the exhibition. 

All the volunteers, boys from the home and trustees were invited to the exhibition. The project went extremely well and on the day of the exhibition everyone pulled together to set up the exhibition. All of us at Basti Ram were mightily impressed with Kellie’s enthusiasm and input into the project and we want to say a massive thank you to here for running such a wonderful project. 

This project has got us thinking about the future and we would love to continue to run this project at the home each year, so keep a lookout for future project plans! 

Keep a look out for all the photographs and videos from the project on our website.

Thank you for reading! 

Rachel =)

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