New Victory Arts Break: Baobab

There are so many exciting and imaginative ways of bringing the words of a story to life. You can physicalize words through dance and movement, illustrate the scenes you read with pen and paper or even sing the text out loud! In this New Victory Arts Break, inspired by Baobab, we’ll learn and explore different ways of transforming our favorite stories. Let’s get started!

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Some of the videos in this Arts Break were filmed at the New Victory Theater. We acknowledge that New Victory resides on the seized homeland of the Lenape people and the intertribal territory of many First Nations. We celebrate and pay deep respect to all Indigenous peoples, past, present and future.

One very special art form that brings words to life is puppetry. Before you witness the magical puppets that tell that tale of Baobab, learn how to create your very own Bunraku-style puppet using materials you already have lying around. Join New Victory Teaching Artist Curt James as he crafts and breathes life into Suki, a Bunraku-style puppet built around a wooden spoon, with help from New 42 Education Fellow Mana Kurozumi.

Step One: Create your puppet body! Try a wooden spoon like Suki, or explore your kitchen for other items to transform.

Step Two: Add some eyes! These can be googly eyes, drawn on paper and attached with tape, or even glued-on buttons!

Step Three: Attach some arms. Pipe cleaners work great for this.

Step Four: It’s time to accessorize! Use paper and markers to design your very own puppet outfit, and tape it onto your puppet!

You have now made your very own one-of-a-kind Bunraku-style puppet. Congratulations! What adventures will you and your puppet go on? Can you invite other members of your family to help you puppeteer?

Name your puppet! You can name it after yourself, your favorite story, or make up a silly name like Sal Ami or Che Darcheez!

While you travel to the New Victory Theater to see Baobab, play with ways of improvising stories—making them up on the spot! This next game requires you to think quickly as you work together to create something brand new. Let’s try it out!

Step One: Assign one person in your group to be the narrator. They will create the story and speak it aloud for the performer to act out.

Step Two: Decide who will be the performer. This person will embody the story that is being told by the narrator! The catch is… you can only act out the story using your hands!

Step Three: The narrator should customize the story below, filling in the blanks to create an original and surprising tale. Don’t let your performer see what you’ve selected!

Brianna from the New 42 Youth Corps and Kyla from New Victory Education narrated and performed their own story below! Let’s see what they created.

Step Four: Switch roles! Now the performer is the narrator and the narrator is the performer. Try it out and be as silly as you can!

If you could come up with one sentence to summarize your story and give it a title, what would it be? Name your story and pick your one-sentence story slogan!

Now that you’ve spent time narrating and performing your own story, you’re ready to see the story that unfolds in Baobab.

You’ve just experienced Baobab and witnessed how the artists of Motus and the SÔ Company transformed the story using puppetry and music! Before moving on to the next activity, spend some time reflecting on the show with the questions below:

Now, with the day winding down, let’s try out one more puppetry activity before bedtime.

Step One: Pick your favorite bedtime story. This could be one that you’ve created yourself, or one from a book you enjoy at bedtime.

Step Two: Select one person to read the story and another to puppeteer.

Step Three: Find and reuse your Bunraku-style puppet from Curt’s activity, or create a brand new one unique to this story!

Step Four: While the reader tells the bedtime story out loud, the puppeteer will listen and use their puppet to tell the story through movement! You can plan out your steps beforehand and rehearse, or do it in the moment together.

Let’s see how Brianna and Jhaunay from the New 42 Youth Corps transformed a few pages from Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina.

You’ve done an amazing job creating and transforming stories through movement and puppetry! Keep practicing your puppeteering skills and exploring ways of bringing the words on the page to life with the resources below.

• Get a peek Behind the Curtain at the Kennedy Center with a video about Joey the horse puppet from War Horse.
• Fold and decorate some tiny paper bunnies in an origami finger puppet tutorial from World of Art and Craft.
• From Illuminated Films, an animated version of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar provides the perfect backdrop for acting out the beloved story with a puppet.
• Learn more about the history of art forms like Bunraku and Kabuki theater in a Japan-focused episode of Crash Course: Theater from PBS Digital Studios.

Press play on a Puppetry Playlist Arts Break full of fun and approachable activities from New Victory Teaching Artists, staff and Youth Corps members.

New Victory Arts Break Supporters

New Victory Arts Break is funded, in part, by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.