A New Season of Mini Courses starts in September with the highly skilled Japanese puppeteer Yuki Muramatsu introducing Wayang Kulit (indonesian Shadow Puppet Theatre. Yuki has represented Japan at Asian Puppet Theatre Festivals. She now trains under the great Asian masters of puppetry in Japan, but all her early training was with the London School of Puppetry where she took both the Diploma and ToP Courses.
The Marionette Mini-Course will look especially at the Marionette as a therapeutic tool. Students will be able to operate marionettes and play with them exploring the kinaesthetic links between human and puppet action.
A number of students have requested a course exploring human-sized puppets- this will be covered in the Rod-Puppetry Mini Course where different kinds of controls and operating techniques will be developed.
The aim of the mini course is to introduce the participant to some essential aspect of a puppet genre, by means of a three full-day intensive experimental project, led by expert tutors, underpinned by a rigorous theoretical profile and culminating in performance to an invited audience. It always generates an enormous amount of laughter-
How do we design LSP courses? They are created by the participants themselves in association with LSP tutors. LSP always attracts a high calibre of student with a highly distinctive cross arts contribution to make, and although LSP training is always very hot on what might be termed, classical operating technique,LSP is always keen to take advantage of the skills the students themselves bring.
Each mini course includes daily operating classes, puppet making- which is open and experimental, and performance, working as a director and being directed. The intensive nature of the courses is appealing to the participant because they can produce their best coursework during the daytime (instead of trying to study in the evenings when at their most tired) and go home buzzing full of anticipation for the next day.
The artists participating in the recent mini puppetry courses included sculptors, film-makers, web-designers, writers and puppeteers, theatre directors and physical theatre practitioners.Their varied contribution enriches the courses making cross-arts collaboration led by puppetry a valuable addition to puppetry trainingLSP courses place an important emphasis on puppetry technique balanced with experiment and innovation. The participants themselves are leading the development of these mini courses.