Stepping Into the Shoes of Another: Puppetry Throughout the Grades

By Jennifer Aguirre

Renewal Magazine Fall 2022

In 1917, Rudolf Steiner lived above a puppet theater in Berlin. The puppeteers, one of whom later became a teacher at the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, asked Steiner for his advice about their work. Steiner offered several observations which seeded the kind of puppetry found in Waldorf kindergartens to this day, including his key indication that puppetry is “healing for the ravages of civilization.”

In my work as a puppeteer and Waldorf educator, I explore the effects puppetry has on the developing child both as student puppeteers and as audience members. Puppetry brings forth a sense of reverence, empathy, and service to something bigger than the puppeteer’s individual self, and I advocate that puppetry is not only integral for young children, but also benefits the grade school curriculum through handwork and the performing arts.

For twenty-five years, I have been teaching and developing a puppetry curriculum for first through eighth grades at the Sierra Waldorf School in Jamestown, California, performing for the kindergartens and festivals as well. In the art of puppetry, a performance is a gift of oneself offered to an audience through the creation of a visual story realm with both performer and receiver benefiting from the story exchange. In a typical kindergarten performance, the performers (teachers or parents) strive to ‘ensoul’ the puppet through conscious imagination, bringing attention and intention through the movement and gesture of the puppet that is true to the nature of the story character.

Through their inner work, the puppeteers’ endeavor to capture the archetype, not the stereotype, the character not caricature, and the age and temperament of the puppet in the story. The storytelling voice is engaged, music and singing employed, and all these warming layers bring beauty and nourish the child’s twelve senses. Having the puppeteer be in full view of the children during a performance is also beneficial as it is relational to real space and time. Through imitation, children often create their own shows, enhancing the quality of their free play.

Through my expanded work with the grade-school children, the philosophy remains the same, but now the student becomes the puppeteer. The grade-school puppetry curriculum draws inspiration from Rudolf Steiner’s insights and blends elements of the Waldorf handwork curriculum, the curriculum, and the performing arts. It is also deeply rooted in the history of puppetry at large. In my studies, the history of puppetry complements, relates to, and parallels the developing child and the social-emotional aspects of performance and drama. Each grade works in a block period, making a different style of puppet, with the story drawn from that particular grade’s curriculum. The handcrafting of the puppets, their movement and gesturing, and the performance artistries are designed to build up skills and enhance developmental capacities in each grade in both a vertical and horizontal curriculum approach. It is a blending of therapeutic, pedagogical and artistic puppetry arts. The performance method plays a big role especially for the younger grades.

For children in the first and second grade, the best performance method is to have them sit in a wide circle on the floor with the audience encircling them. They move their puppets in a scenery setting displayed by colored silks while the story is told. This circle puppetry performance method is one they became familiar with in kindergarten where it offers an interactive element to certain puppet stories. However, when this performance style is utilized in first and second grade, the students now become active puppeteers with rehearsals and blocking taking place like a class play. Sitting in the circle offers a safe performing space and makes children of this age less self-conscious during a performance.

In the third and fourth grade, students use a lap finger puppetry/poetry performance method. The students sit in chairs in a semicircle with the audience in front. Half the group perform at a time with the second group often performing in another language.

Shadow puppetry is brought to the fifth grade for a production of the Ramayana. There are many layers to the production, which is an amazing social experience for all involved. It requires a physical awareness from the student puppeteer, not only in moving the puppet in a lifelike manner, but calls for self-awareness while the students are in movement themselves, on their knees, shoulder to shoulder with their fellow classmates, and aligned pace-wise with the student narrators.

String puppetry or marionettes are brought to the upper grades as they bring more complex lifelike movement performed in a linear fashion. Geography studies offer complimentary world stories. In teaching geography, Rudolf Steiner wanted to have the connection of brotherhood and sisterhood conveyed to the students with the idea that we are all related. Migratory songbird marionettes in the sixth grade offer a great puppetry and student-written poetry focus. Migrating birds stitch the continents together and as global citizens of the world, their continued survival depends on human stewardship, habitat preservation, and global partnership in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

Seventh grade brings a deepening of the marionette work with the crafting of five-string human marionettes constructed out of silk dyed by the students from natural plant dyes. This exploration of the string movement of the marionette offers adolescents focused balance. Students perform an African tale which compliments their geography studies for this grade. A presentation is given on the history of natural dyes as it relates to the age of exploration, old-world methods, and chemistry to complement the seventh grade studies. Elements of African drumming are taught by a guest drummer and the drumming is enthusiastically taken up in the performance along with song, marionette movement and gesture, plus stage blocking and story narration.

Lap storytelling rod puppets of biographical figures who have uplifted and served humanity are created in eighth grade with scripts written by the students. The rods in the puppet are an expression of bone in the early adolescent body as they experience strengthening muscles, stretching tendons, and lengthening bones. “Life literally becomes harder for them as bodily elements become dense. The hardness of the rod reflects the hardening bones, the hardness of life, which also leads to uprightness,” as Edmund Knighten, a former movement educator from the Sacramento Waldorf School, describes.

The art of puppetry deepens the entire Waldorf grade’s curriculum. The collaborative interaction between puppeteers, narrators, and the audience help build up the social/emotional feeling life; the crafting of the puppet transforms the physical material through the will and builds an aesthetic sense of beauty; and the imaginative forces utilized to effectively awaken a puppet build thinking capacities through manifesting an inner vision into an outer reality.

The expression, “stepping into the shoes of another,” is literally what puppetry is: conveying the essence of life through an inanimate object. It is a selfless act, one requiring empathy and the bringing of spirit into matter through reverence. In my many years of working closely with children, I do believe that puppetry offers healing. It bathes our children’s senses with healthy images and gives them strength against “the ravages of our civilization.”

Jennifer’s Bio

Since 1998, Jennifer Aguirre has been teaching a Puppetry Grades Curriculum at the Sierra Waldorf School near Sonora, CA, and has developed eight different themed Puppet Pocket Story Aprons, enchanting young audiences with performances in a variety of public venues. Jennifer is a founding board member of the World Association of Puppetry and Storytelling Arts and is actively writing a puppetry curriculum book.

Photos taken by Rory Thompson