About Puppetry
Used with permission from Nick Barone Puppets
construction: foam core, felt and plastic
Copyright Nick Barone Puppets, All rights Reserved
A Balinese shadow puppet
construction: leather, horn and paint
- Rose Sage's Definitive Puppetry Page
- Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts
- Unima-USA
- Assitej International
- Puppeteers of America
For a slight twist, see the link below. Not that puppeteers will be put out of a job. But it is interesting to see that computers can be puppeteers too. Watch the videos if you can. This automat was featured on PBS. An automat is not the same thing as an "animatronic" -- like the robots you see in Disney World. Animatronics are pre-programmed to do what they do for show. An automat is programmed to learn by trying different behaviors on its environment. What it chooses to do is the subject of the study of Artificial Intelligence. It is a puppet with the puppetmaster being the behavioral interaction modelling program in the computer.
- Kismet -- an "autonomous" puppet
I always tell everyone that I was raised by puppets. Those were some of the best years of my life and I will
always remember them and be grateful to you [Tita Amel] for them. They taught me things like there are always people
in the shadows making things work and to appreciate the attention to details those shadows have to take to make
a bridge between reality and magic.
-Chito Lapena (site co-author/editor) from email to Tita Amel
On the power of children's theater, the venerable Mark Twain once wrote,
It is my conviction that the children's theater is one of the very, very great inventions of the 20th century and that its vast educational value-- now but dimly perceived and but vaguely understood -- will presently come to be recognized.
It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of good conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the reason that its lessons are not taught wearily by book and dreary homily, but by visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is the rightest of right places for them. Book-morals often get no further than the intellect, if they even get that on their spectral and shadowy pilgrimmage; but when they travel from a children's theater the do not stop permanently at that halfway house, but go on home."
Some links we'd like to share with you:
Send 'em if you've got puppetry relevant links!
Faces of Kismet
Construction: metal, plastic, servo motors, artificial intelligence