Teaching and Directing Puppet Theater to schoolchildren

One of the teachers invited me to work with 40 children, aged 13- 14. Strating from scratch, with no idea about puppets they wanted to make parodies of well known fairy tales. Time was however very short: 2 months. I guided both the children and the teachers -who continued the work in my absence- in all the aspects of puppetry. Work included building different kinds and sizes of rod and hand puppets , learning techniques of animation, acting ,moving both their bodies and the ones of the puppets, correcting the use of voice, body and gesture...and guiding the direction of their plays.Their ideas for parodies were brilliant, the children never lost their enthusiasm and their texts were interesting, sarcastic and full of humor.

Here is a album of pictures.

Goya and Social Protest. Shadow Theater.

I gave a course of Shadow Theater at Kerem Institute for Humanistic Judaism. Students worked  in groups creating a few scenes inspired by a print for the series of the Caprichos.

They tried to see how Goya's work is relevant today and how it can relate to the present reality in israeli society.

Photos from student work.

Goya and Social Protest. A course in Shadow Theater

Here are photos from the course at Kerem Institute for Humanistic Judaism, where I teach. Each group worked on a print from Goya's series of Caprichos and developed some scenes relating it to the present reality in israeli society. 

Pictures here.

Shadow Theater

I have been invited to design an exhibit for the next exhibition of the Bloomfield Science Museum of Jerusalem. The subject is the Science of Superheroes and it is due to open in Pesach 2012.

Models for the exhibit design at the Museum.

Below some photos of  work in my studio. My first work with masks for Shadow Theater was with the group "Transparencias' that was formed in the Collegium Musicum of Buenos Aires under the direction of  Beppi Krauss in the 70's. We created big masks on metal mesh wire. Acting with them meant keeping the masks parallel to the screen. In my present work I want to use masks that allow the children and visitors to see their own shadows.The masks must therefore be placed differenty on the head than the ones we used back then. Furthermore two planes intersected give masks that throw  shadows at all times while the body moves 360 degrees.




Below a picture from a course in Shadow Theater at Hebrew University



I also give private lessons to individuals and groups both to amateur and professional puppeteers and actors.

A selection of pictures of student work over the years.

Directing children in the Bar Mitzvah show in a kibbutz.

I directed children and parents in Kibbutz Nir Itzjak. Se

See pictures here

A play for actors and shadow puppets:"The Alif"

The Alif

or

The language of the Birds

Written, designed and directed by Dr. Patricia O'Donovan.

Based on the Sufi poem: " The Conference of the Birds" by the Iranian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Other sources were the story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges:  "The Aleph", and texts on Arab calligraphy.

In 2007 I gave a workshop  on the basic techniques of manipulation and performance of  Shadow Theater at the Theater Department of HUJI  , which the students had to apply  in a stage production.

I chose a religious philosophical poem in prose by the Iranian poet Farid ud-Din Attar " The Conference of the Birds"  for the workshop because it deals with the journey of the human soul and uses frequently symbols of light and shadows. The poem deals with Sufism and the way of the Sufi but for our work in class I reinterpreted it to become the journey of the creative mind. There are obstacles to overcome and a need for sincerity and courage to reach a state of harmony with oneself and one's work. In this sense creativity is one of the soul journeys dealt with not only in Sufism but the aims of major philosophical systems.

In my reinterpretation the idea that generated the concept for the design was that the writing itself of the poem became visualized as birds. The image of the circle of light in which all the letters appear came both from the alif module of the Arab alphabet and the circle in which the Universe is seen in the story The Aleph by J.L. Borges.

A writer dreams a story.

The story is about the strength one needs to find in oneself in order to accomplish a hard but desired task. In the story this quest is represented by birds in search for their King .The hoopoe is the inner motor of creation that leads the birds ahead. The birds are thus not individuals but the writer's creative mind.



The birds' journey is a visualization of the process of artistic creation. As such they are not individuals or allegories of individuals but the workings of the artist's mind. Finding the King means reaching the fulfilling moment of finishing one's work, of reaching one's goal.

The writer is woken up by his dream. The story therefore is left without an end.

The birds are desperate because they feel lost at the end, in a new place and no visible King.The writer is desperate and lost because he is in a place with no visible end. This new place is the passage from the screen to the room, a passage from two to three dimensions. It is actually the moment when ideas become a coherent whole. The birds and writer share now the same space.

the hoopoe tells the birds that it is written who is their King. Birds read and discover that the writer is the King.

The writer is in the middle of a brilliant circle of light, the birds dissolve back into letters.

The letters of the Arab alphabet became the basis for making the bird-puppets .I developed a special technique for the puppets in order to keep the letters clearly recognizable. Soon a story by Borges 'The Aleph" became involved and as for today my concept for the play is as follows:

The play is about the realization of one's own creative power, of a search within. On stage is a writer. It is Farid Attar creating his poem about the birds, which are symbols of the human soul. Actors with puppets are the ideas in his mind and one sees the poem in shadows as it is being written/ dreamed/ created by the writer. The King that the birds in the poem search for turns out to be the writer himself. Attar is like the Alif, the first letter of the Arab alphabet, the letter that generates all the other letters, the pen that generates the text. The birds re dissolve into letters when they find their King and thus become immortal: in him they can be reborn again and again in new texts.

New ways of acting and moving on stage are demanded especially since students function both as actors and as puppeteers. I use movable sources of light, and the materials both for props and puppets belong to the world of writing: letters, paper, ink, brushes…

Read here about the alif module

Actor enters with a lamp and a wooden box. He sits down, lights the lamp , opens the box and takes out his writing implements .Holds up a brush




When I was (age?)…I was given this pen by my father. It is made of 24 hairs of a donkey he told me. It made me laugh…24? I imagined a man counting hairs...one….. Two….22…23…24…Why not 25? No! He said….exactly 24! I'll show you why.

Actor spreads out a sheet of paper.

and grabbing my hand made me dip the pen in the inkpot. We will start with the first letter: the alif, make a dot!

Actor shows in actions what he is talking about.
Now make 9 dots one on top of the other. The dot tells you the width of the alif and the nine dots the height of the alif. And now we make a circle whose diameter is the length of the alif. See the circle?

The Alif marks the height of the text and the circle contains all the letters of the alphabet. These 3 elements, said my father, the dot , the alif and the circle determine the proportions of the text.

He then taught me how to write all the other

28 letters



See? They each have a head and a body and a tail……

And they always stay inside the circle?

He laughed, no! No! When you write they come out of the circle, as many as you want …….

I loved the idea of spinning the alif and creating a circle from which an infinite number of letters came out. Everything I saw and thought about was there. Every story I was told was there. I was at once in one place and everywhere, the circle was nine dots in diameter and yet contained the whole universe. It contained all the books I wanted to write…

Sources for the visual language of "Jan's Daughter"

I will write here about the images, materials and ideas  that inspired the design for the show.

I have a collection at home of broken chairs. I pick them up from the street. The shapes of the legs  remind me of human and animal bodies. When I decided to work on Hannah Yakin's childhood memories I immediately knew I'd use the legs to build with them my puppets as I had done some years ago  for the Youth Wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.They had commissioned an interactive puppet corner for their exhibition on Heroes. I was also asked to create a play for the general public, and I wrote, made the puppets and performed "Theseus and the Minotaur" . Below are some of the puppets I built for the exhibition. Left: soldier. Center: horses. Right: horse.



The fact that I gave the broken chairs  a new life in the theater after being thrown to the garbage suited a show about survival. Wood, the connection between chairs and ideas of home -a place to rest-be-stay-came to my mind.

Rafi Grafman was my partner back then, he was a Judaica expert and excellent goldsmith . He worked for major museums and private collectors repairing, identifying and cataloging specimens and collections. I was immersed in the world of Judaica through Rafi until his sudden and tragic death in 2001. This is how  Torah ornaments made their way into the design of the show, as a homage to Rafi.

The chair legs reminded me not only of people but of the wooden rods of the Torah scrolls.

Below left: Torah scrolls in silver case.Center: Torah case.Right: the School case in my show.Notice the ''rimonim" or silver decorations at the top of the rods.The photo in the row below shows these decorations in silver, very often including bells.



Soon both ideas came together: out of the chair legs I built the puppets which appear at first to be the visible part of the wooden rods.The puppets they are wrapped in the scenery cloth  as a scroll. Once the cloth is spread out the puppets become visible.

Below is a photo of the low platform on which I perform.The picture to the right below is a close up of the scrolls, each for a different scene.



Other Judaica objects appear, for example the hand with which the protagonist reads the home behavior rules written on the cloth that serves as the scenery for the family house scene.



The black cloth which represents the blackboard for the school scene is taken out of the Torah case in a gesture reminiscent of the lifting up of the Torah prior to prayer.



The show opens with a view of the village where Anita was born and an angel comes flying in. This angel was inspired by the Angel of History that Walter Benjamin wrote about after seeing a picture by Paul Klee.  I built a puppet copying Paul Klee's painting but then asked a friend of mine Jurg Beier to sculpt an angel for my show.

Below left: my puppet.Right: Paul Klee's Angelus Novus-today at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem.



In the meantime Jery Garval was writing the music for the scene, a storm which catches the angel and who can only come down to earth with my help.This was my original idea: to bring the angel down from the sky and ask him to see what is going on from a short distance...from above one misses important details. All the houses look the same...can the angel see that in some live Jews that are obliged to sew a yellow star onto their clothes?

The angel comes down and picks up Anita's house and rocks it to the music of a lullaby...saying by this gesture 'you will be safe...I will take care of you'. Interestingly half of the children and adults in the audience think it is the angel of death. I discuss this at the end of the show and the Angel of Death that spares the Jews in Egypt before the exodus.

Below left: first scene with the houses in the village of Amstelveen and a chair with the scrolls at the back. The shiny silvery case contains the school scroll. Center: the Passover angel. Right: Angel sculptures by Jurg Beier.



Below to the left is the photo of a house in Amstelveen in 1940 and to the right a photo of Hannah/Anita's house where one stills sees the entrance to the secret hideout as a grey patch in the wall.



Anita is seven years old and does not understand wht is meant by being Jewish. When she asks herself how does God decide who is going to be born Jewish she makes a gesture with her hands which is taken from the painting of the Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo.



Anita does not know what it means to be Jewish but she soon understands that it is ' a secret and dangerous". When she says dangerous she lifts up her arms , a reference to the famous photograph of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto.



During many different periods throughout history Jews had to wear an item of clothing to make them recognizable as Jews. Often it was yellow. A yellow ring as we see below or a yellow star with the word Jew during WWII



In the show my hand painted yellow or a yellow cube becomes the star



About the family.

jan van hulst was so tall that he was nicknamed the giraffe in the family. Today on the roof of tiny store in one of the small Jerusalem parks  thre is the sculpture of a giraffe made by Hanna's husband , Abraham Yakin in honor of his father in law.



Below we see Paula Horowitz van Hulst, Jan van Hulst and their three daughters, Miriam, Hannah/Anita and Alexandra.To the right we see tall Jan and his wife Paula.



Jan van Hulst never wanted during his life time to receive any medal  fromYad vashem.His story of courage in risking his life for others is recognized in Yad Vashem today and appears in the Enccyclopedia Righteous of the Nations.



In 2007 I was invited to perform the show in an international festival in meppel, Holland.Miriam and Alexandra came to see the show after which they sat with the puppets for some photos. These are seen below and they caught their excitement!.