AY Honors/Puppetry/Answer Key

A hand puppet is a type of puppet that is primarily controlled by a hand that occupies the interior of the puppet. Larger varieties of hand puppets place the puppeteer's hand in just the puppet's head, controlling the mouth and head, and the puppet's body then hangs over most or all of the forearm of the puppeteer, and possibly extends further. Other parts of the puppet may be controlled by different means, e.g., by rods operated by the puppeteer's free hand, or strings or levers pulled from inside the head or body. A smaller variety, simple hand puppets often have no significant manipulable parts at all.

Simple hand puppets

The simplest hand puppets are those with few or no moving parts. They can be stiff, made from e.g. a hard plastic, but are more often flexible, made from fabric, possibly with some stuffing and attached decorations for eyes, nose, and so on. The mouth may be a mere decoration that does not open and close, or the thumb may enter a separate pocket from the rest of the fabric and so simulate a mandible, allowing the puppet to talk.

Simple hand puppets are usually not much larger than the hand itself. A sock puppet is a particularly simple type of hand puppet made from a sock. A glove puppet is slightly more complex, with an internal division for fingers allowing independent manipulation of a character's arms.

Simple hand puppets, especially of popular licensed characters, are often distributed as children's toys or party favors.

Larger Hand Puppets

A nearly-completed hand puppet with arm rods. This puppet will be complete once eyes and hair are added.

Larger and more complex hand puppets generally have, at minimum, a complete working hinged mouth, and usually arms as well. Special variants exist with additional manipulable parts: e.g., eyelids that open and close. Most hand puppets depict only the upper half of the character, from the waist up, with the stage covering the missing remainder, but variants also exist that have legs. The legs usually just dangle, but in special cases the legs may be controlled either from behind the stage using strings that dangle over the top of the stage and control the legs from above (like a marionette's, or by another puppeteer using rods from below, hidden by a lower and more forward part of the stage.

Technique

Basic Positioning

As with any stage performer, the puppet should always face the audience; it may turn somewhat to one side or the other, but generally not more than about 45 degrees away from straight forward. This allows the audience to see the puppet's face.

Since the puppet stage is normally taller or higher than the seated audience (in order to best hide the puppeteers and provide room for them to work), the puppet must be made to lean forward slightly with its head tilted somewhat down, in order to make eye contact with the audience. A puppet that fails to do this appears to be staring over the heads of the audience or, in extreme cases, at the ceiling, a mistake often made by novice puppeteers.

Vertically, the puppet should be kept elevated, with its shoulders well above the stage. Ideally, most of the puppet's torso should be kept visible to the audience at all times. A puppet that is not properly elevated is said to be drowning.

Diction

The term diction refers to the manner in which the puppet's mouth opens and closes in order to appear to form words or sounds, similar to lip syncing.

As a rule, the puppet's lower jaw (mandible) should open downward, with the upper jaw, which is usually contiguous with the rest of the head, not raising much. This mimics the way the human mouth works. A typical novice mistake is to reverse this and open the puppet's mouth like that of an aligator, flipping the top. With practice, this tendency can be suppressed. When learning the technique, it often helps to move or lean the entire puppet, or at least the head, forward slightly each time the mouth opens; with more experience, this becomes less necessary.

The basic mainstay of diction for most puppeteers is syllabic diction, i.e., opening the puppet's mouth once for each syllable, closing it at the end of the syllable. Another common novice mistake is to reverse this, closing the mouth on each syllable, which makes it look as if the puppet is biting off its words; this effect should be carefully avoided.

When the puppet must speak very rapidly, a variant on syllabic diction may be used where some syllables are omitted. It is important to open the puppet's mouth for the first and last syllables as well as all long or emphasized syllables, but most audiences will not notice if some of the unimportant syllables are omitted, provided it happens fairly quickly. As the puppet's speech (or song lyrics) slows down, it becomes more and more important to include every syllable.

More advanced forms of diction are possible. Ultimately the experienced puppeteer will master phonetic diction, in which the degree to which the puppet's mouth is open at any given point mimics the motion of the human mouth forming the same series of sounds; thus, the mouth will be open wide for a long O vowel, briefly close almost completely when forming a dental stop, and so on and so forth.

Arm Rods

A hand puppet's arms are often controlled by the puppeteer's free hand via rods, which attach to the insides of the puppet's wrists in some fashion (most commonly via rubber bands, but other attachment methods may be used).

Body Movements

One of the most important techniques in puppetry is continuous motion. A puppet that remains still has a dull, lifeless appearance and is said to be dead. Motion should shift from one portion of the puppet to another, so that one moment the puppet is moving its head and the next moment shifting its torso or repositioning an arm. The puppet may shift from side to side, look around, lean or straighten, fidget (with part of the stage, its own clothing or hair, or any available object), cross or uncross its arms, sigh, tilt its head, or make any number of other small motions, in order to continue to appear lifelike.

See Also

• Muppet
• Human-Arm Puppet

External Links

• One Way Street Produces and sells hand puppets, as well as scripts and other materials, and holds instructional workshops for puppeteers, using hand puppets. Their puppets generally have arms manipulated with rods.
• Puppet Productions Produces and sells hand puppets, stages, and other materials.
• Technique information