Students in Theater 314 spent their fall semester focused on one project and one alone: building their own fully articulated and totally original puppets from scratch.
The class met every Wednesday afternoon in the sunny basement workshop of Sewall Hall to bring their creatures to life. With a class-chosen theme of “fairies and demons,” the creations took shape: One had slender, red-ombre horns, another antlers on its head and jaws jutting from its chest. One puppet was a Bratz-inspired “drag” fairy, another was a frog.
The brand-new offering in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts (VADA) filled up quickly with students eager to learn puppetry design from professional puppet master Afsaneh Aayani-Santos. Their challenge was to build a tabletop puppet — a relatively new term that encompasses a long history of puppetry across cultures — using a variety of materials while learning practical craftsmanship skills.
“Initially I was just thinking, what if I made something super deep that has a really significant artistic meaning, but then I realized I also want to have fun in this class, and what do I like more than frogs?” said Brown College senior Bria Weisz. “And I thought it would be really enjoyable to make a frog fairy.”
Weisz, a computer science major, wore a green bucket hat that featured Kermit-style eyes on top and a wide froggy smile, holding a roughly two-foot-tall puppet painted a matching shade. She was among the wide range of students drawn to Aayani-Santos’ class in search of a course that would teach them new design skills while challenging them creatively.
The course began with character development before the students moved on to carving their creations into clay, painting faces onto papier-mache heads and sewing costumes for their puppets’ moveable bodies.
“Never in a million years did I think I’d be designing and making a puppet,” said Martel College junior Sofia Pellegrini. “When I saw that class and signed up for it, I was telling everybody, and everyone was like, that’s so cool — you’re literally going to have a puppet at the end of this class.”
Pellegrini is double majoring in sports medicine and exercise physiology and VADA. Her puppet’s character was a psychic who straddles the two worlds between fairies and demons. And she went home with Pellegrini at the end of the semester, as did all the students’ puppets, a tangible product of the skills they learned in surprising fashion.
“For me it was really interesting because some of them said that they’d never actually sculpted before and then they turned out to be amazing, amazing sculptors and designers,” said Aayani-Santos. “It’s just really nice to be able to explore and see what else we are capable of doing that we’ve never done before.”