Puppeteer Kay Yasugi from Pupperoos recently completed a wonderful puppet project at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, California USA (just outside of San Francisco). She volunteered as a puppet designer, maker and operator to help the school create puppets and a float for their annual Memorial Day Parade. This project also allowed Kay to find out more about Waldorf (Rudolf Steiner) education, as Greenwood is a Waldorf-inspired school. To hear more about her experiences and insights, please view the video below which was created by talented parent volunteer and videographer/photographer Gary Yost.
Kay worked with students, teachers and parents from the school community to make a colourful myriad of puppets including flapping owls made from paper lanterns and ‘book butterflies’ made from lesson pages, bamboo and pipe cleaners. The centre of the project was the float itself, which was inspired by the school logo of a tree emerging out of a book. It was made with a plywood armature and wrapped in cane and tissue paper vines. Sitting atop this impressive tree was a nest made with cane, whereupon 3 beautiful owls happily sat enjoying their ‘birds’ eye view’ of the parade. Thanks to the many volunteers including parent volunteers Jen Jerde and Danny Castor (who helped to organise the parade and design the float) and Greenwood teacher Peggy Rock (who very kindly offered her room as a workspace), this project was an immense success. The parade was held on a beautifully sunny day and over 2000 people came to watch schools and community groups parade through the town. As an added highlight, Greenwood School won first prize for “Best Overall” in the parade! To see more photos from the project, click on the thumbnails below (there are many, many photos on Gary’s site at http://tinyurl.com/memorial-parade-2012)
