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Story structure prompts | Puppetry With Transition Years
2013-04-24

Story structure prompts

Description

These prompts on the whiteboard were used to help the groups develop their storyboards after puppet character brainstorms:

Beside each puppet was a sheet at which the class took turns - by rotating around the desks, three minutes approx at each puppet - to jot down ideas of character. If they found this difficult they could use the prompts. They then folded over their contribution to keep it secret so the next participant had a ’clean slate’. At the end the students returned to their own puppet and chose from the other students’ ideas to develop/enrichen their own. They then came together in their groups to make interconnections between the different puppets and new ideas to develop their original storyboard.

I then asked them to choose to create tableaux or ’frozen dramatic images’ from different stages from the storyboard, to ease them into the transition from Storyboard to performance, and to highlight the visual aspect of puppetry and encourage them to work pictorially. It should be noted that a lot of them found this difficult, and it was only in group discussion afterwards where we wondered how we could make their images even better, that understanding began to dawn, and this was quite hard going.