Education and Professional Development
Design custom workshops tailored to your group’s needs, be it workshops for educators, community centers, senior centers, and memory care facilities. Workshops can include: collaborative skill-building through puppet theater, incorporating shadow theater into physics curriculum (optics and light), storytelling techniques, puppet construction, and facilitating meaningful moments for memory care patients using puppets.
Therapeutic Applications
Let us explore lifestory telling for elders—a process also known as narrative identity development. Participants examine separate life experiences and weave them into a coherent narrative. By discovering temporal and causal connections and identifying patterns of values and ideals, participants observe the emergence of meaning in their life stories. This process builds resilience and empowerment for the individual and enriches their communities
Community-Engaged Performances
Dramaturgy for Puppet Theater
Let us devise performances for families and communities who do not typically attend theater, and share some food to build connection. Our current project in development is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood using hand-carved marionettes, where baking a pie on stage becomes part of the performance and the audience shares the pie after the show.
My goal is to strengthen puppetry arts in mid-Michigan and beyond, developing stories with local input and community participation in both urban and rural settings.
Puppets are not simply smaller actors. They can accomplish things humans cannot—surrealist imagery, dream sequences, and shifts in scale—yet they struggle with simple actions like sitting down or standing up. Object and puppet manipulation follows distinct technical principles that theater makers often overlook. We will provide dramaturgical consultation to help theater makers identify the unique puppet moments in their scripts and develop staging that leverages what puppets do best rather than forcing them to imitate human actors.
Interested in any of the services offered?