“The little kids love looking at our puppets,” said Eva Illes, 15. Recognizable characters such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, and Ursula, Jasmine and Elsa from animated Disney movies intrigued the younger students. Once inside the book, the teenagers appear as marionettes and meet several more characters on their quest to return to reality. Their production told the story of three teenage kids who fall into a storybook and become fairytale characters. The students were also required to write and direct a play to perform with the puppets. After that, they began sketching and printing images of possible characters to use as a guide. “The ninth-graders study the structure of the physical body,” said development director Denise Ogawa, “which makes a connection to the marionette project in art because they are creating a physical body that moves.”īefore the students began molding the faces and bodies of their marionettes, they assembled the wooden control bar that supports the puppets as they hang. The more complex marionettes are introduced once they have completed courses in biology and anatomy. Students in the lower grades make and use rudimentary shadow puppets and table-top puppets during class. “It’s a tradition that we’ve been waiting eight years for.”
“I remember sitting in the front row when I was in first grade and watching the upper grades,” said Nadia Amirmokri, 15.
As they work toward the final goal of producing a full-length play in their senior year, the students have slowly gathered skills, through public presentations of monologues in 11th grade, poetry in 10th grade and a marionette puppet show in ninth grade. These performing experiences become markers for their grade level as well as their academic maturity. At the K-12 Waldorf School of Orange County in Costa Mesa, students of all ages practice art as a way to enhance and support their academic learning.
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