Talk To The Hand Puppet

Hello, and welcome to the closing project for my Elective class, A Show of Hands. This class was all about puppetry, some of its variations, where it began, and where it's going. some of the puppet variations we studied are Bunraku, digital, object, hand, and rod puppets. Using this knowledge we crafted our own puppets and began thinking of what type of puppet show we could put on. In preparation, we watched 2 puppet shows: Rough House Theatre's Nasty, Brutish, & Short, and Manual Cinema's A Christmas Carol. We were even lucky enough to speak to 2 people from each show, Sarah Fornace from Manual Cinema, and Claire Saxe from Rough House Theater.

They talked to us about their history with puppetry and why they use puppets to tell stories and how they do so. I learned a lot more about making a puppet to feel life-like and give them gravity and weight. I used these learnings to create my own puppet show, The Prince & The Nutcracker

Since it's the holiday season I was feeling festive and began drawing a nutcracker which got me thinking about the nutcracker story. It grew into the idea that became The Prince & The Nutcracker, a queer take on the heteronormative story of The Nutcracker. 

The story goes, Xavier hates the Christmas dinner party his parents insist on having but it gets worse when his parents bring up the topic of being gay. Terrified of the conversation he runs to his room where his aunt gives him a nutcracker. His father, furious, enters his room and breaks the nutcrackers arm off. Fed up, Xavier runs off into the woods where he finds a familiar face. (Watch the show to know the rest :D)

The intended message of my work is to sympathize with LGBTQ+ people who have to deal with these conversations during holiday dinners and parties. Having gone through the same events (though less dramatically) I also wanted to show how I coped with it, running away. Which we learn is not the solution, you have to learn to face things, accept them, and stop running.

The story was the easiest for me to flesh out since I had the original tale to work off of and I had been thinking about the story for a while before making the puppet show. Then came the making of the puppets which took forever because I love to make myself suffer for my art. I made all of the puppets detailed and with a lot of attention and care put into all of them. I chose shadow puppets because of the detail you can get out of them and because I fell in love with manual Cinema's puppets! The hardest thing I went through I believe was the moving of the puppets. Since I worked on this alone I had to make everything moveable with two hands, maybe some teeth. Logistically it took a lot of work and thought to make things smooth and pretty (pretty is used loosely).

Using techniques I learned from watching Manual Cinemas', A Christmas Carol, I was able to use an effect to make it seem like there were stars in the sky in some shots or that there was depth to the world by using paper of different opaqueness. But, Since I ran this show on my own I needed to be a bit more innovative with how I puppeteered. I mostly used string to move the puppets to make my involvement lesser-known, and if something didn't need to move it was taped down. I also used color sparingly, in the beginning, to drive home that freedom of expression lies behind acceptance and a bit of imagination. I did use the original Nutcracker songs to enter a familiarity of the classic Nutcracker tale.