FEB
23

Shadow Puppetry Solutions to Production Challenges

By Brian D. Taylor, Project Editor, Pioneer Drama Service 

Brian Taylor is a former middle school drama teacher and the newest addition to the Pioneer Drama editorial staff.  Working with K-12, college and community theatre groups, he has a theatrical background with experience in directing, acting and technical theatre.  When he’s not working on a production, Brian writes children’s and young adult fiction. 

In the last newsletter, I suggested easy ways to incorporate shadow puppetry into your classroom or stage.  Now, let’s explore more advanced lighting and shadow puppetry techniques that can help you with your actual productions, yet are still fairly simple to implement whether you are a novice or a pro.

When might you use shadow puppets and silhouettes in a production?  When you have either a character — often an animal requiring an elaborate costume — or a setting that is challenging you.  Think about the Big Bad Wolf lurking in the woods, Jack’s Giant or the Headless Horseman relentlessly pursuing poor Ichabod.  Consider portraying a heavily wooded forest, a desert scene or an underwater adventure without eating up a lot of time or money.

To take advantage of shadow puppetry techniques onstage, you first need to build a shadow screen large enough to fit the scale of your stage if you are not lucky enough to already have a cyclorama.  Begin by visiting your local home improvement store and purchasing materials for a frame.  For the sturdiest frame, use galvanized steel pipes and fittings from the plumbing department.  Another popular framing option, though not as sturdy, is PVC pipe, which can also be found in the plumbing aisle.  You could also build a frame with a basic lumber construction.  For the screen, you’ll need to purchase muslin from the local fabric store.  Pay careful attention to the width of the muslin.  The most common width for fabric is 45”, which will probably not work for a stage size shadow screen.  Consider widths of 90” (7.5 feet) or 120” (10 feet).  Finally, build your frame and attach the screen, making sure to pull the fabric as taut as possible to avoid wrinkling.  With a little bit of effort, anyone can have a stage-worthy shadow screen.  Luckily, the cost of these materials is a one-time investment that can be used repeatedly for years with good care and storage.

Of course, if you’re going to use a shadow puppet in your production, it will have to be more than a simple cut-out shape on a stick.  It has to move and have life — moving arms, a working mouth, a tail that wags, etc.  This can be achieved by first cutting out the moving parts (keeping them separate from the body of your puppet) with more length so they will overlap at the spot where you attach them.  Once you have your shapes, take a brass paper fastener or brad and pierce the overlapping sheets to create the joint.  Finally, attach a secondary control rod to the moving part.  Every moving part needs its own control rod.

Let’s say you want to make a Big Bad Wolf with a mouth that moves.  First, you want to cut out the wolf’s body, head and snout — minus the lower jaw — as one shape.  Then, you will cut out the lower jaw separately with extra length to overlap where the joint will be added to your wolf’s mouth.  Put the two shapes together so the lower jaw is in its proper place and then attach a paper brad to the overlapping material.  Finally, add an extra control rod and you have a Big Bad Wolf with a big bad bite!  For the Headless Horseman, you can have a rod off to the side controlling the horse’s legs running in tandem and another one to shake a horseman’s threatening fist.

Undoubtedly, you’ll want to consider giving color to the set itself, instead of being limited to a simple black silhouette, to suggest a certain mood or time of day.  For forest scenes, I like to use silhouettes of trees with a dark blue or green gel overlay, adding a mysterious and dark feeling.  Think how effective this backdrop could be when a scared Snow White is lost in the ominous forest with tree branches actually moving and threatening...  all on a bare stage!  Orange or yellow gels are great for sunset or desert scenes.  Create realistic saguaro cactus from a sheet of green cellophane and a horizon of mountains in red or brown cellophane.

Colored gels are also great for special effect features.  When my school performed Pioneer Drama’s musical No Strings Attached, we used a large shadow screen and moving colored gels to create the ocean scene.  Using shadow puppetry for these difficult scenes made perfect sense.  When Pinocchio goes searching for Gepetto, he dives into the ocean.  At first, he swims across the surface.  To create an ocean wave effect, we cut out two sheets of blue gels with wavy lines at the top.  On each end, we added a control rod.  For the performance, the sheets were placed one on top of the other, then were moved left to right in opposite directions.  This action created an artistic “ocean wave” effect so Pinocchio could swim across the water’s surface.  Finally, when Pinocchio dives into the ocean’s depths, a full sheet of blue gel was slipped onto the projector’s picture plate, showing his descent.  For this scene, we also included simple fish shadow puppets with which Pinocchio could interact.

For an even more realistic water feature, take a flat-bottomed, clear glass container and add water.  Place this on the picture plate of an overhead project for a real liquid motion projection.  The same feature can be used with color by adding food coloring to the water.  You can take this a step further and create a groovy swirling lava lamp projection for the backdrop of your sixties show.  Put corn or vegetable oil into two or three squirt bottles, each mixed with a different food coloring.  Squirt the colored oils onto the water’s surface and let it swirl around.  The projected effect will be similar to a lava lamp and creates the perfect “hippie” mood!

The techniques and artistry of shadow puppetry can be expanded far beyond the simple classroom project to address true staging challenges.  But start small.  All these techniques described above can be scaled down to use in a classroom production.  Your students will have fun exploring and experiencing what they can create with colors, shadows and silhouettes and their imaginations will soar!