Leigh Wilson Smiley, “Puppet Cinema: When Film and Puppetry Meet on Stage” (Israel)

Image of two presenters in a classroom with another person projected on screens above.

This course was taught on location and virtually by long time collaborators Zvi Sahar and Leslie Strongwater. This course, “Puppet Cinema: When Film and Puppetry Meet on Stage” was the first employment of the IPCCR World Outreach Classrooms to use technology to bring in a teaching artist from abroad over an entire semester. Using puppetry and live-feed cinematography, this course explored the question of how we tell stories. Students investigated practical and theoretical studies to employ these multi-disciplinary mediums with the understanding that it takes a delicate balance to juggle two very different but complimentary mediums. The class was part lecture, part studio work. Both the Midterm and Final Exams were performance/film based. The focus of this course was on how to best integrate the elements of theater, puppetry, object theater and cinematography onto a multidisciplinary performance with artistic synergy. By the end of this course, students became fluent in the PuppetCinema technique of animating objects, operating a live feed camera and presenting a multi-layered story on stage and screen.