Slow Puppetry
The ‘slow movement’ is a cultural shift toward slowing down the pace of our hectic world. The goal is to take better care of the planet—and of one another. The idea started with Slow Food in Italy to counteract the encroachment of fast food, and has caught on in other areas: Slow Money, Slow Housing, Slow Parenting, Slow Clothing, Slow Travel. I propose a new category: Slow Puppetry.
A rushed story doesn’t have a chance to land in a child’s heart. This truth became clear to me when I would narrate puppet plays for young children along with my early childhood colleagues at school and community events. I noticed that by calming my speaking pace and allowing more time for the puppets themselves to ‘speak’ through their silent gestures, the children could more readily absorb themselves in the story. I’m not suggesting a plodding and lifeless narration. Rather, allowing space to flow in and around a story’s words means they can be carried more directly and fully from speaker to listener. And it allows each puppet to take its rightful place in the story, no matter how fleeting.
When I first started narrating, I had a tendency to speak too fast—until a hurried puppeteer would plead, slow down. I suppose I wasn’t convinced that the gentle motions of the puppets during those in-between, wordless moments would be enough to capture the children’s imagination and convey the storyline. I worried that there would be awkward empty space. But over time I began to see how essential those spaces are. I began to write ‘wait’ on my script in numerous places to remind me not to race ahead.
Well-placed pauses help weave a story’s spell. When a narrator pays attention to the pace and quality of her voice and the meaning of the story, the puppets have a chance literally to bring the tale to life. This is especially important for the littlest children who aren’t yet able to clearly visualize a story in their mind’s eye the way older children and adults generally can. The dreamy external images of gently moving puppets help them follow along.
Voice, pauses and gestures can work synergistically to make even the simplest nursery rhyme a captivating story for young children. And any spoken tale delivered in an unrushed, intentional way has a greater chance of communicating its essence and creating a bond between storyteller and listener, whether or not puppets accompany. But puppets do add an extra dimension, and have been used worldwide and throughout millennia to enhance stories for children and adults. They are the ultimate teachers of how to use gesture to communicate, because that’s what they do—they convey meaning through their movements. Puppets may gaze into one another’s faces, set out innocently on a wooded path for a transformational journey, hide behind a rock as a bear lumbers by, lose their way, kneel by a pond to weep, and express hope when a little bird comes along to show the way home. Those moments are fairytale magic.
I was reminded of all this while narrating A Visit to Snow Mother with my Waldorf colleagues; we’d had the opportunity to perform the play several times in different settings, letting it breathe a little more with each retelling. For instance, there’s a moment where the snow children are called for a snack of snow porridge and gather around expectantly. This scene delighted the children from our school, who were used to having rice porridge for snack every Monday. At first, this struck me as a non-moment in the story, something to skate over in order to get to the meatier parts. But when the expressive rod puppet who played Snow Mother had plenty of time to lovingly spoon out the porridge and hand a bowl to each snow child, our listeners were transfixed. Here was a humble activity from their own lives depicted with great ceremony, and they drank it in. A similar effect happened when the little girl “helped to carry piles of snow to cover all of Mother Earth’s children that were not already tucked in under their snowy blankets.” I lightly poked at some hanging chimes to create a magical sound while the simple action of covering the root children took place in its own good time. The children watched with knowing engagement at a moment that reflected their own familiar nap time rituals. They understood that it was an honor for the little girl—who had so longed to help with some real work but had too often been told to “run along”—to be allowed to participate in this meaningful task.
People in modern Western culture are often uncomfortable with gaps and pauses. That’s why even when we try to offer something different—gently paced puppetry for young children—pauses can initially elicit in narrators and puppeteers a feeling of low-level anxiety (“oh no, let’s fill up the space!”). In contrast, an image I saw from a slower-paced (or, more accurately, wisely paced) culture beautifully illustrates the fullness of emptiness. At a conference on “The Development of Speech and the Human Encounter” (February 2018, Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America), presenter Michael Kokinos showed the audience a picture of a snake drawn by a man from the northern Australian Outback who still lived in accordance with traditional ways. The snake, instead of being depicted as a thing apart from the background, emerged out of its surroundings while remaining embedded in it. The ‘empty space’ was completely filled with dense cross-hatchings to represent a living, connecting substance. The seemingly (to us) inconsequential background was as meaningful and ‘there’ as the snake itself, intertwined.
When given enough time, sound effects for a puppet show—a bird’s call, the strum of a lyre, the crunching of dry leaves—can similarly work their enchantment. Otherwise, a moment meant to enhance the story can be cut short, like a chime muffled too soon and robbed of its resonance. And practically speaking, approaching the task of narration with a sense of presence (a quality supported by slowing down) can mean that technical difficulties don’t have to derail a performance. An inattentive narrator won’t notice the tangled marionette strings that need an extra moment for undoing, or see that a forgotten prop needs a few unrehearsed beats to reappear in its right place. But a present narrator will calmly wait until the storytelling and action are able to glide back into sync.
This same principle seems to apply to every kind of human interaction: If the goal is to fill up empty space with something (words, noise, food, stuff) then the effect leaves us feeling hollow. But when the intention is to make a heartfelt connection, the exchange fills us up—even if a few strings get tangled.
[Notes: Versions of this essay previously appeared in the publication Gateways, Issue 75, Fall 2018, and on the website for the World Association of Puppetry and Storytelling Arts. A Visit to Snow Mother was written by my early childhood colleague, Somer Serpe.]