NATIONAL STUDANT DRAMA FESTIVAL

The NSDF is Britain’s only national festival dedicated entirely to the showcasing and development of student performance. Experiencing new skills is a central aim of the festival which programmes a dazzling array of workshopping opportunities alongside its shortlist of student performances. For the first time in 2005, puppetry workshops were added to the schedule with PCT taking two outstanding artist-educationalists to the event.

Rachel Riggs of DNA initiated the series, introducing student participants to a range of puppetry styles. She brought from her company a huge array of demonstration puppets, from simple canes and gloves and a playboard to experiment with focus and coordination, to improvised bunraku puppets, medium-scale rods and projected shadow characters and sets. Her second session gave students the opportunity to consider animating objects, playing with the innate characteristics of junk puppets and the best starting points to bring them to life.

Rene Baker, formerly of Norwich Puppet Theatre and recently appointed course leader in puppetry at the University of Madrid led the second set of sessions. building from Rachel’s work to consider approaches to focus and collaboration between puppeteers, and more sophisticated questions of animation such as breath and qualities of stillness and movement.

PCT was thrilled to be able to collaborate with the NSDF, which was a great opportunity to bring some of the possibilities of puppetry to some of the UK’s most promising and committed theatre-practitioners. At present, provision of puppetry to HE and FE students is fairly limited and the programme fulfilled one of PCT’s key aims in stimulating emergent artists to consider puppetry as a tool for their future theatre-making. PCT will be running a puppet residency for students at next year’s festival.