These are the things that will make you exude professionalism to the people in charge of the venue you will be performing at as well as the audience. Promptness “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” - William Shakespeare Being prompt goes hand-in-hand with accountability. Being reliable is important to the team, to the leadership of the team, and to those that the team will be serving. As a leader It is extremely important if you are on the leadership of your

Birds of a Feather… Ventriloquism is one of those skill sets that becomes better with time, but also gets better with proper feedback from other ventriloquists. Study masters in the field and mimic their actions and techniques until you develop a style of you own. Find a Mentor In certain ways, puppetry and ventriloquism is dying out. Less and less people are showing interest in this skill. Most of the veterans in this art would love to pass on their techniques to the next ge

Make Your Arms Live Rod arms are the bare-knuckle precursors to animatronics manipulation. They have to be one of the most useful tools in a puppeteer’s arsenal when trying to make a puppet seem more realistic. The arm rod allows for the puppeteer to easily move the arms of a puppet even while the puppet is talking. This is definitely one of those things where practice makes perfect. You will need to practice your technique frequently to be able to use puppet arm rods. Two R

Make It Original, Make It Yours Developing Set puppet characters can be a fun way to get and keep team members involved. For them to know that the character they do is their character and no one else can do it gives them a sense of pride and responsibility to the team. I always suggest that every team member create a character; whether they use it or not. This will really come in handy when the team does return engagements and uses a set character because audiences will know

Gestures Less than 20 percent of communication is done with words. Body language plays an important role in how we naturally communicate. The same holds true for puppets when they are communicating. Some puppets, such as vent puppets and animatronics are designed to have multiple functioning parts for the purpose of gesturing, but most of my training primarily works on the premise that the puppeteer will be using a foam style puppet. Unless you spend for the extra quality or

You Thought You Learned It All? You are probably asking why this is popping up now and why I didn’t add it to the earlier post on Puppetry Basics or; the reason is because if you master the basics, you have the foundation for starting a good puppet team. Plus, if you haven’t mastered the basics, this portion will only confuse the puppeteer. Start with cooking Raman and then move up to General Tso’s. Back to Basics Not really, this is going to show you some advanced modificati

Now that you have the basics of your team on paper and you have your team in place, we need to discuss a few things that will make or break this newly birthed team. Practice It is vital that you have a weekly practice time. This is the only way to effectively work on programs, keep well trained on the fundamentals, work out the muscles that will be used on a regular basis, and develop that team mentality. How and when you run your practices is also important. It will be easy

"One of the benefits of puppetry is that a shy person can perform to the utmost of their ability..."

Now that we have discussed all of the basics and got those out of the way, there is a chance that some of you are wanting to move to the next level and develop a team. If not, that’s alright. Keep reading to ge an idea of what is involved anyway, because, if you are going to look into getting into an independent act, this will still help you. The only difference is that you will be wearing all the hats.This is where the fun begins. In this post, I will cover and lightly discu