El Coquí Puppet Show

Hello and welcome to this three-week course that I have taken called A Show of Hands! I would have never thought that I would get the opportunity to take a puppetry class, but here I am with my completed blog post filled with everything that we have learned and completed. You may be wondering what did this puppetry class consist of? I found this class to be super interesting because of the perspective that we used when learning about puppetry. This course focused on the different cultural and historical aspects of puppetry and how we can manipulate puppets to convey a message. For the first week, we were learning about the different types of puppetry. The first type of puppetry that we had looked at was called Bunraku, and this took us into a deeper dive into what types of puppetries are out there. We looked into the more cultural, impactful, and historical side of each type by presenting and listening to each other’s research. The different types of puppetries that we had studied were hand/finger puppetry, rod puppetry, shadow puppetry, marionettes, digital puppetry, sockpuppetry, body puppetry, and ventriloquism. The whole experience of listening to each type of puppetry was so fascinating. There are so many unique and intricate details that each type of puppetry contains. For our second week, we had the opportunity to further our studies and grasp a better understanding of how we can animate our puppets for them to come to life! We first attended a live puppet show on Youtube, which was hosted by Rough House Theater. We saw so many shows from so many local and awesome puppeteers. Later that week, we had gotten the chance to speak to someone from the Rough House Theater, Claire Saxe. We participated in a workshop with them about the different ways we can give our puppet life and some character. Along with that, we had the chance to watch the Christmas Carol, which was produced by Manual Cinema. We spoke to Sarah Fornace, who’s apart of the Manual Cinema team, about how they utilize shadow puppetry to convey their message. For the third and final week, we were now ready to create our puppet shows! In the process of creating our shows, we had to design, write, perform, entertain, and also inform the audience with a message. This was a truly memorable experience, and I can’t wait for you all to read and watch it. Enjoy!

When compiling ideas for my puppet show, I had many! I knew that I wanted to create a show that had something about myself in it. I thought it would be an interesting and informative idea to write my show about a piece of my Puerto Rican culture. I love learning about different cultures, so I’d thought to share something about my culture through a puppet show! A piece of my culture that I decided to share about were Coquís, and how they are important to the island of Puerto Rico. I decided to perform with shadow puppets and rod puppets. I find these two types of puppetries very captivating, especially as an audience member. I kind of wanted to go for two different themes: colorful and vibrant and then neutral and toned down. I did this because I wanted to encapsulate two different tones, which depended on the topic that I was talking about. I used shadow puppets (toned down part of the show) when talking about the more historical and cultural points that I provided about Coquís. For the rod puppets, I designed a super colorful rainforest set along with the Coquís and spoke more about the factual sides of the species. I intended to maintain this contrast in my show to differentiate the topics and to pique the interest of the audience. To add to the show, I added a voiceover that dives deeper into the cultural, factual, and historical side of Coquís and their native land. Of course, I added the sound of Coquís, as well as a traditional Puerto Rican song. Throughout this course, we each thought about the first time we were introduced to puppets. As a small child, I was introduced to many colorful and animated shows! For example, Bear in the Big Blue House. One of my goals while designing was to carry those vibrant colors over to my puppet show and create a happy mood for it. Overall, I had such an amazing time creating this puppet show. I believe that the two most challenging things were creating the set for the rainforest and performing well while using the shadow puppets. Puppetry can be tricky and takes a lot of practice, but becoming a puppeteer for three weeks was a blast and I’d love to do it again!