Puppet Portal Project - Hospital A

The Puppet Portal Project is an arts in health and technology project. It is engaging 4 artists in 4 hospitals to establish an active and creative hub within each hospital community, facilitating a performing arts exchange between the hospitals. Contemporary puppetry techniques storytelling and technology will be used to create interactive, puppetry performances via the hospital web portal, Ait Eile, the online community for children in hospital. (www.aiteile.ie) The broad theme of the project is Intercultural Dialogue, which will be developed by the group of artists in discussion with and in collaboration with the hospital school teachers and hospital play specialist. The aim of the project is to promote community and communication for children in hospital through a combined creativity and technological intervention, while creating new artistic work. By employing multi-media technology, we hope to enable children in different hospitals to connect with each other, with the other artists, and hospital staff, through genuine artistic processes, sharing creative solutions and achievements. It is also our aim to promote the hospital community as a meaningful, immediate, and enriching environment for the artist to explore, reflect, and examine their own artistic process. Artists will benefit from the expertise in the technology, facilitated by the Centre for Health Informatics, Trinity College (project partner) through the use of their existing system Áit Eile. Artists will also be supported through the expertise of Kids’ Own Publishing (project collaborator). The Puppet Portal Project is produced by Helium, a new national arts in health company for children and young people, specialising in multi-disciplinary, performing arts.