Slate Magazine:
Jane Henson, the widow of Muppets creator Jim Henson, died on Tuesday. The couple met cute at a puppetry class at the University of Maryland in the 1950s. Do most puppeteers, like engineers or financiers, learn their trade in college?
Not traditionally. There are a handful of opportunities for formal puppetry education. The Los Angeles–based Puppet School and performance arts colleges offer classes. The University of Connecticut, along with a few other universities, offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in puppetry. Formal puppetry education has its advantages: It condenses a lifetime of practice into three or four years of intensive study, it builds a professional puppeteering network, and graduates have a slightly easier time finding work in Hollywood and on Broadway. But the programs are small—the University of Connecticut graduates just five or six puppeteers every year. The vast majority of professional puppeteers are either self-taught or learned the trade through an apprenticeship.
3 comments:
As a child, I grew up watching "The Muppet Show" re-runs with my family and when I'd watch TV in the morning before school, there was always "Sesame Street" on. In essence, puppets were an important part of my childhood. If I wanted to make my own toy, I used to make (rather poor quality) sock puppets with button eyes and pipe cleaner hair. The art of puppeteering is something that is very respectable in my mind, just as much as the theatre I do is very respectable to me. It seems a bit strange that a field that's such a staple on TV and in modern children's lives is something that only a few colleges provide a degree or training in. People who really like puppets shouldn't have to hope and pray that eventually a renown person in the field will find them. I think that puppeteering has a lot of theatrical value as well, and that more theatre schools (in the least) should provide more puppeteering and puppet making classes. I don't see this art form dying out anytime soon, which is so great that such a physical and traditional form of entertainment has such staying power.
Much like many art forms, it seems there's the divide between book smarts and street smarts for professionals working in the puppeteering industry, and then. The article pointed out a number of benefits of a formal puppetry education - condensed training, networking opportunities and exposure to the craft elements beyond performance. But I wonder about the benefit of learning by doing - there are numerous books and essays out there (several of them by Henson himself) and ways to learn to make your own puppets - what I haven't really seen are a ton of small-time upstart puppet companies producing their own work to combat the Henson Company or similar production houses where grads of college programs are finding jobs. Perhaps the field of puppetry would benefit from a convention or incorporation into a craft guild - that might allow for more of the networking upstart freelancers would need, and might find the Henson Co the next great thing.
To become a puppeteer is must more difficult than I expected. Because I am of a newer generation, when I think of puppets I don't think of the Muppets, but rather Sesame Street. I know Sesame Street spawned the Muppet show, but it died out before I was old enough to remember what I was watching on the television. Regardless of this, I still find the art of puppetry fascinating. I think it interesting that not many of the big theater schools don't offer any degree in puppetry and that most people today are still self taught or apprenticed. I think that it is to the few people's benefit who come out of college, that there are so few taught at the college level that it leads to their successful employment rate.
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