The Micro-Grant and The Great Puppet Building Experiment
At the end of 2020, Arlene Thomas, Artistic Director of Puppets & Shadows Theatre, was one of 35 artists from the Region of Waterloo to receive a KW Microgrant through @patthedogpdc .
She used the grant to spend a week doing an in depth exploration of puppet building techniques.
She also documented her experiments on Facebook and Instagram, but we decided to post the GREAT EXPERIMENT on our new Website as well.
The project wasn’t supposed give us any finished products, but rather be a week to experiment with the “guts” of puppets– to explore how to make them move better without the pressure of a final show at the end. The week lived up to its expectations. It was great fun to create and be free to make mistakes and learn from them without any judgement or deadlines. Since that week in March, we’ve used a lot of the lessons from the puppet experiments to make improvements on current projects and shows, and we’ve tried a few more experiments with some fun and messy results!
The following seven blog posts are the unedited posts that Arlene wrote on Facebook and Instagram after each day of experimenting. The posts were usually written between 10 and midnight under very tired circumstances. Take from that what you will.
