Feminist Potato PUPPET theatre

Download the Puppet Character Creation Sheet here.

A Feminist Potato Puppet Theatre is a possibility to playfully explore formats of debate in order to reflect and alter hierarchies of knowledge production/appropriation/reception and to find fruitful ways of critique. It takes remote inspiration from Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed, but attempts to shift the attention from the individual’s capacity to alter their oppressive behaviors to collective agency and the question of how we come and be together. By scaling down a common scenario, like a panel discussion and using puppets as representations of fictional and real desires and behaviors, the format becomes a debatable stage. The moderation of each scenario encourages undisciplinary behavior of the puppets

 

How do you create a Feminist Potato Puppet Theatre?

 

A Feminist Potato Puppet Theatre is a Puppet Theatre that comes to live via roleplay of the puppetmasters and mistresses. For its organization there needs to be a team or one person as the game-moderator. A game-moderator is responsible for the clarification of the rules and the moderation of the parts of the piece, that is collaboratively created. Unlike a classic director, he*she*they do(es)n’t give directions on what to play, but involve the participants/players in an experiment, in which they can alter and even destroy the course of the game .

 

The game-moderatorand the organization of the Theatre provide materials and tools to create puppets and a stage. He*she*they invite the participants to create a persona according to their puppet. This persona can be very much like them, but also very different. For this they’ll receive keywords that relate to the context. They will get character development sheets in which they reflect on their puppet. What does the puppet represent to a specific context, what is its professional life/behavior, what does it only share with its friends, how does it behave in in informal situations with strangers, what are its relationships like, what are major conflicts and how does it deal with them? Does the puppet have an agenda, or not so much?

 

For those not wanting to be involved in the puppet-making, they can become stage creators, thinking about the specific situation, furniture and the involvement of the puppets (suggestions are being made through the organization of the Theatre, too).

Situated at the end of a symposium or festival, the scenarios take place in stages that the participants have most likely experienced during the course of the event. The stages can resemble set-ups of the recently experienced situations.

 

 

Materials:

3 kg of differently shaped potatoes (preferably seed potatoes)

Pins, Markers (Black and White), and decorative Material

50 m of thick Cord

Hand-Drills and Akku-Drills

skewers (for pushing the cord through the holes)

sharp knives or carving knives (if someone wants to carve their puppets

small pieces of fabric

Cardboard

smaller pieces of Wood

sticky tape, glue and hot Glue

 

 

 

 

The video is a poetic approach towards death and the particular role of the (mediterranean) sea within the circles of mammal life.

 

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Das Video nähert sich dem Tod auf poetische Weise und beleuchtet die besondere Rolle des (Mittel-)Meers innerhalb der Lebenszyklen von Säugetieren.