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 21st October 2012
until the 16th 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 18th 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 =)
