04/12/2020 [Entry by Eden]
This blog post is long overdue, considering I graduated from The Curious School of Puppetry over a year and half ago!
I don’t want to go into too much detail about the course, for the same reason pictures/phones were rarely allowed in our space. The course was a magical and precious experience, covering many styles of puppetry and working with many professional practitioners with contrasting approaches to the craft.
The school’s Artistic Director is the incredible Sarah Wright (Silent Tide, Kneehigh (see left)) and the photos in this post (taken by Steve Tanner) were from a day led by Liz Walker (Invisible Thread). As you can see the students in our year cover a large range of age and professional experience. But where you can be a professional in one area of puppetry, you can be a beginner in another! And for this reason there was a level playing field of experience, with each of us shining in different segments of the course.
In our year the course was 6 weeks long, but the length can differ. It’s also been 7 weeks and 10 weeks in other years. Considering we aren’t exactly saturated with puppetry courses in the UK, Curious is a wonderful way to have an intense period of training, beyond the likes of a 2 day masterclass for example, whilst it also doesn’t take up a huge chunk of year.
In the 5 years the course has run for now, Curious has set up shop in London, Edinburgh and Falmouth, with more potential locations on the horizon. The idea being that this is a travelling school, ensuring that it isn’t too London-centric. Each year there’s around 16 students, which means there’s now about 80 “Still Curious” alumni. Over the last year and through the pandemic students of different years have been connecting and sharing projects in person (pre-covid) and on zoom.
With the current state of the world, it looks like the next full course will be in 2022. For more information check out their website: http://curiouspuppetry.com/. And in the meantime keep a look out for short courses here: http://curiouspuppetry.com/events/
I highly recommend Rene Baker’s “Storytelling with Objects” if that ever becomes available again.
Curious has really opened me up to the puppetry world and the opportunities it holds. It has actively made me want to work more in the industry, to collaborate and make worlds with makers and other puppeteers alike. I couldn’t recommend it enough.
All photography by Steve Tanner.
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