By Dr Tania Saili Bakshi
Mussoorie, 16 Sep: ‘The Puppet Lab’, a two-week workshop, was hosted by the Centre for Imagination and the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Woodstock School, supported by Serendipity Arts Festival. UNIMA Puppeteers Trust India created this Lab to invigorate, renew and explore fresh approaches. The event brought together nine puppeteers who practice Glove, Shadow and String Puppet forms from six states of India – Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Delhi, West Bengal and Maharashtra. These young puppeteers from the traditional and folk forms collaborated, experimented and worked with each other in a first of its kind experimental incubator.
Throughout the two-week Lab, multiple expert facilitators and practitioners from the Lab also worked closely with the Middle Years students at Woodstock School, where they engaged in hands-on learning experiences in scriptwriting, storyboarding, narrative building and shadow puppetry. Puppetry, particularly traditional or folk puppetry is probably one of the oldest art forms in India, with a 3000-year-old history and twenty-three living forms in existence currently, practiced by generational puppeteers across India.
Today, these traditional puppeteers stand out despite OTT platforms, digital media and television churning out new content and grabbing eyeballs. Even in this scenario, Puppetry has been resilient and strong. Its steadfast quality and the highly evolved aesthetic of traditional forms, their tactility and the visceral experience make them even more relevant today.
The outcome of the workshop was eight shows using both tradition and some contemporary infusion which was attended by students from Woodstock School and other local schools. Speaking to Newspost, Bimla Prasad, Principal St John School, Mussoorie, who attended the show with her faculty and students from Grade 7-8 stated, “It was a lifetime experience for my students. They thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were amazed at the skills and presentation of the puppets. This is a show they would rarely witness elsewhere.”
(Dr Tania Saili Bakshi is the Programme Director of Valley of Words, Arts and Literature Festival. She is also the Consultant Editor for Newspost Uttarakhand’s oldest bilingual news web-portal.)
