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Day 7 - Carnival - Hospital F | Puppet Portal Project phase 2
2010-12-01

Day 7 - Carnival - Hospital F

Today we had for the first time Caoimhe from Music Alive joining us to make some music with our puppets. This deemed a bit of a challenge during the planning of today`s activities as I wasn`t sure how to mix puppets with music in a way that both activities remain interactive (meaning that the children do two things at the same time). The solution was to use rod puppets with a hole where the puppeteer can put their hand through so it doubles up as the hand of the puppet. This allowed for musical instruments in the hand of puppets.

Right now I feel that the idea was probably correct, even if it got a bit tricky as most of the children who we worked with today could only use one hand for one reason or another. This resulted in some awkwardness.

Today was extremely hectic for many reasons so it is hard to asses right now how did the music+puppet setup work.

As we arrived in the morning we found that the play-specialist was nowhere to be found. It turned out she was out sick and one of the volunteers came in but she could only be there from 10 - 12.

This reduced the morning time by a whole hour and created a more unsetteled rushed atmosphere. I worked with five children alltogether but only 3 got to perform with the puppets in the link-up with Fionnuala at 11.30 as the others had to leave before.

With all the coming and going and the music it was hard to find playtime for the puppets to interact with oneanother. There was somewhat of an interaction and the children got quite aware and attached to the puppets, for example the puppet would hide if something fell of it during the music making and they all had names, but there was no interaction or story that developed.

Im not sure if this is because of the fact that we had four boys and a little girl, that there was a lot of coming and going, because I was out of the normal routine, the additional distraction of the music or another thing alltogether.

It might just be something that happens.

There were some really lovely moments however when for example the little girl who was too shy to talk with me loudly talked through her puppet to mine about her name and other important things like that or when a six year old boy briefly made a little conversation between the two puppets he made or when his first puppet started to kiss everyone it could find :)

It was also nice to see how all the parents invested into the activities today by actively participating (playing music, helping with puppets) or just watching the performance.

The linkup today worked but there was difficulties with the sound so sometimes it was hard to make out what Fionnuala said and I imagine it must have been similar for her too . We played some christmas music to Fionnuala`s puppets to the prompt of one of the parents watching. And she played some really funky carnival music and our puppets had great fun dancing to it. The children got really excited about the linkup and were keen to be seen and personally talk to those Dubliner puppets but this week the conversation didn`t spark up as it did last week.

After last week again I found that the linkup or even a performance attracts other children/adults into the game. Usually these children are only there for the little time of the "performance" but its nice to see the really small ones get curious about puppets even if just momentarily.

Today a lot of things that could become a challenge in the hospital infrastructure became a challenge. With the playspecialist and one of the teachers out sick, with the substitute volunteer only able to stay for 2 hours, the hospital arts coordinator stuck in Killarney because of the snow and a man arriving to fix the school`s computers in the afternoon things got a bit too complicated for the afternoon and there was no-one who could even advise me about which child could I visit in isolation, so I went home which gave me a chance to catch up on some editing, DVD making and figuring out the workings of ait eile.