Nature Boy Drawings- imagination biodiversity- Wild!

Students drew pictures of Nature Boy while listening to Dosh's music. We know he rides a skateboard of some kind, possibly magical, and he has a pigeon and snail for friends. They imagined different scenarios including 4-5 earth biomes we have studied a bit, with some bullying themes included also, and then took it from there. They have wild imaginations. So does Nature Boy. We are headed towards themes of imagination power, biodiversity, and bullying for our Nature Boy show. The young artists are on Spring Break this week and I hope absorbing this amazing weather, soaking up some nature time, and dreaming big. We will resume next week and start in on the process of stencil art and making the puppets using this medium and a lot of cardboard. Nature Boy is coming to life in my studio also. Stay tuned for that update soon. Then I think I'll hand some blog entries over to some of the other artists working on the show. Peace Out. Bart

nature boy puppet head sculpture

Nature Boy will be a bunraku puppet, which is a traditional Japanese form of puppetry employing three puppeteers on one puppet. The effect is fine articulation of a puppet's movements. I am attracted to bunraku for that reason and because I love to watch the relationship between puppet and puppeteer. The actual hands-on handling and group coordination of the puppet is beautiful to me. I love watching the relationship of the puppet to the puppeteers appear and disappear as you watch the movement.

I start the process of making the bunraku by sculpting the head out of clay. Then I papier mache brown paper and newspaper over the sculpture. After the papier mache has dried, I cut that off and put it back together, which is the puppet's head. Here is the sculpture before I papier mache, and was trying out materials for the hair also. The body is being made by one of my favorite visual and textile artists in Minneapolis, Amber Jensen. She will be collaborating on designing some of the textiles/puppet costumes in the show and making them also. In the interim, the adult puppeteers have been rehearsing and exploring movement with a similar bunraku puppet from a previous show.

bully portraits

The second session of Nature Boy development, we played an adapted theatre game in which students pose in a static portrait of a situation. We explored the theme of bullies, specifically thinking about how can someone bully your imagination. The students broke into groups and were given different categories of bullies. Then they were given a few minutes to get posed into their portrait of how this bully situation goes down, what it looks like. The group pictured here portrayed a bully that always knew the right rules and etiquette and made all their friends obey these rules. Their picture showed people resting their feet on the table and being corrected for doing so. I don't think the bully won this one from the looks on the boys' faces.