Ashland Center for Theatre Studies

Past Elective Course

Shadow Puppetry: Writing, Design, Performance

A weeklong 3-credit graduate-level course designed for high school and community college theatre educators, covering shadow puppetry techniques, show creation, character invention, improvisation, collaboration, and more.

In the course of the workshop, you will:

• Adapt a myth, fairy tale, and/or news item into a storyboard and then script for a shadow puppet performance
• Design and build shadow puppets for the show
• Learn how to perform with a shadow puppet
• Improvise and invent text and movement in a free-wheeling, joyful process of creation
• Perform our original shadow puppet spectacles
• Depart with the skills needed to create shadow puppet performances in your school or community

In addition to our work on our original shadow puppet show, you will:

• Attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions of Don Quixote and Equivocation and discuss the use of puppets and the meeting of politics and art in these shows
• Apply both traditional and contemporary expressions of shadows and other types of puppetry to our work
• Find out how to satirize current events with humor and trickery

Faculty

Lynn Jeffries, puppeteer and puppet, scenic and costume designer Paul Zaloom, puppeteer, film maker, actor, and performance artist   Photo by Rachel Jendrzejewski

Daily Schedule

Evening Schedule 2009

From a production of The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, at TheatreWorks; puppets designed by Lynn Jeffries Photo by Lynn Jeffries