Single String Marionette Exercises

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Emily DeCola. I'm here at the Puppet Kitchen in New York City and we're going to talk about marionettes. So after all of that incredibly frightening technology, we're going to bring everything back to the basics here. The simplest marionette. The ball on the string. Any marionettist will tell you that the most important thing that you need to learn to work with, and you're working with a marionette, you're not performing a marionette. You're performing with a sting puppet; is gravity. Every string puppet, whether it's as simple as this one or as elaborate as the Chica puppet that you folks just saw, uses gravity and pendular motion to create movement and to create dynamic character movement in space. So, one of the first things that I did as a marionettist, when I was learning how to work in this form, was start performing with a ball on a string. There's a whole variety of exercises that my teacher, Albrect Roser and his assistant, who was also a wonderful teacher of mine, Ingrid Huffer, have worked on with me. Mainly not to swing the ball on the string or the marionette, but to be able to stop. Try it."