Budget Wayang Kulit

During today’s puppetry presentations, the subject turned to annotated source lists. First a reminder: your annotated bibliographies are due by Friday in class.

For those of you who still have questions about what that document should look like, check out this example (you’ll need to be logged into your webmail to view it). Be warned this sample is from a paper submitted early in the new curriculum cycle, and it displays some useful mistakes.

Remember the requirements of a source critique. Just like in history class, you need to consider the origin, purpose, values, and limitations of your sources. In dramaturgical research, however, these familiar points have slightly different focus than you find in other subjects.

• Origin: who wrote this, and why should we take their word? What makes their assertions worthy of our attention?
• Purpose: Why did the author create this source? To teach? To examine a point of theory? Who was the intended audience? General readership? Students? Practitioners?
• Values: In what ways does this source help to answer your question? What aspects of the document itself make it especially useful to you?
• Limitations: What makes you question the validity or usefulness of the source? What did you have to be careful to keep in mind while referring to it?

Unfortunately, the example that I provide above does not address these four points in every case. Each of your sources needs a short paragraph that touches on all four of the items above. This does mean that you also have to research your sources—but then, if you included them in a major project, you’ve certainly done that already… right? Right?

So, what questions do you have? Post in the comments if you have a question about a specific source. You can email me, too, but I think the rest of the group would benefit if the discussion is out in the open.

Matt Acheson demonstrates leg movement on a War Horse

In the midst of all this, they threw in a few brief words from War Horse‘s puppetry associate, Matt Acheson [Hey, I've met that guy!], who touched on a point central to our study. As he puts it:

as human beings, we respond to seeing this “tactile and visceral” object, so intricately crafted, yet you still “somehow feel this extremely emotional experience.”

[...]

Acheson said a puppet scratching its face simply holds more weight than a human scratching its face. It’s more interesting to watch, he said, though he can’t fully explain why.

I’d like to think about “why”. Even in our own work in class, everyone sat riveted by the simple movements of our paper puppets. Would the reaction have been the same if I had said to a member of class: “walk across the room, stop for some reason halfway across, and then continue.”? What is it about the use of a puppet that makes such a straightforward scene so compelling for the audience?

via Puppets Are Back: The Reemerging Popularity And Relevance Of Inanimate Objects. Found, as usual, throughMary Robinette Kowal‘s Google+ stream.

They take the example of a student writing a script for in Independent Project, and walk through the questions to ask and pitfalls to watch out for:

It is not enough to direct a scene/show; act in a play; write a play; design set, costume or lights; stage manage; etc… Students must be able to support their work by understanding the demands of the particular role they have chosen. If a student wants to write a play for their Independent Project, then how have they understood the demands of that area?

Pop over the Triple A to read the full article.

And now a reflection opportunity. Looking at the movement of your group’s puppet during this sequence, comment on the points below. Relate your comments to the four elements of puppetry that we discussed (breath, focus, intentional movement, contraction/expansion):

• At what moments does the motion become fluid, believable, or “true”? What contributes to this?
• When does the puppet’s movement become forced, impossible, or “false”? How does that happen?

She has just posted a trailer for an amazing, creepy-looking film: The Narrative of Victor Karloch. This is also an interesting follow-up to Rajvi’s question about on-stage horror. Aside from the directing, the color palette, and the sound effects, how does the use of puppetry itself contribute to the mood here?

While we’re on the subject, you know why marionettes are the scariest puppets?

It’s the suspense.

Those of you who followed my travels over the summer will be completely unsurprised to find Matt Acheson’s collaborative puppet workshop xeroxed into my own course. I’m also lifting liberally from materials graciously provided by Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Twitter feed becomes positively hair-raising when she is constructing puppets.

In Wednesday’s class, we began our own puppet-building project. From long strips of art paper, students rolled up a couple of diminutive puppets for our coming workshop. A bit too diminutive, as it turns out. I intended the puppets to be about a meter tall, but when I got our paper, I forgot to account for the loss of length that came of all that twisting. So we’ve got a bit of a puppet-leprechaun.

[Show as slideshow]

It seems he took my joke as it was intended. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see what happens to my next rights enquiry…

Samuel French Sees into the Future

In an uncharacteristically futuristic move, Samuel French has placed over a thousand titles on Apple’s bookstore.

This is the same company that still prints their invoices on a dot matrix printer.

Electronic publishing was inevitable, but I can’t be the only person who thought their first eScripts would be txt files stored in a Commodore 64 that they would ship to your home via UPS.