Madrid Players Shadow Theatre Workshop

This is the blog for Madrid Players Shadow Theatre workshop, which I'll be organising. The idea is to meet once a week, on a Wednesday, initially  from 8.30 - 10.30, at the Clubhouse, Plaza Perseo. The first session will be Wednesday May 6th.

Shadow Theatre is an ancient form of storytelling which is still popular in many parts of the world. It's mostly associated with the Far East, particularly Indonesia and China, but also became popular in the eighteenth century in France and widely throughout the Ottoman Empire. The principle is pretty simple : put up some form of screen which allows light to pass through it, put a light behind it to cast shadows, and away you go.
 

My own interest in Shadow Theatre was kickstarted by an Indonesian-style show I saw in 1998, and I spent a good few years experimenting by throwing kids on stage, equipped with shaky fragments of The Tempest and a shadow theatre set-up ( I might have claimed this was "teaching" at some point ). However, I actually got some proper training with Asombras theatre group, who are based in El Escorial, on a couple of courses they ran at the Casa Asia in Madrid in 2010. This gives a flavour of their live show., and an idea of what's possible.

Course Contents

The focus would be on both learning techniques of shadow theatre, and using these to draw out the storytelling skills and general all-round creativity of the participants. It will be very hands-on, active time : there's no rulebook for Shadow Theatre, and you learn how to do it by doing it. It's an activity which draws on a variety of skills, so actors, writers, artists, crafty folks are all needed and welcome.

Each session will run for 2 hours, and in my head, a rough plan is this :

Session One will be a short ( 10-minute ) historical/cultural introduction to shadow theatre, followed by some warm-up, movement games to get a feel of the properties of shadow and shadow theatre. We’d probably finish by starting to design a puppet.

Session Two would start with some narrative, story-telling games, followed by working with an Overhead projector, looking at different techniques and scenery; then finishing off the puppet from session One.

Session Three would focus on the different types of lighting instrument you can use, and the different qualities of light offered; then we'd play around with bits and pieces from the props cellar, working on character and movement. Probably a bit more work on storytelling, different qualities of voice, etc.; and then either giving each group a choice of stories to work on, or inviting their own contributions.

  Now we’d need a decision from the group : do you want to work with puppets ? Live, human shadow ? Or some combination of the two ?

From here, it turns into a theatre workshop. Ideally, we break the group into 3 sub-groups, each working together on a different story, to produce specific piece of shadow theatre, developing storyboard, backgrounds, puppets ( if needed ). This would take between 2 or 3 sessions, building up to a final, presentation session.

The idea group size would be 8 – 10, although I think we could squeeze in up to 12 – really, 4 people per group works quite well.

The course is not specifically designed for teachers, but shadow puppetry can be used very effectively in schools as a cross-curricular activity, and is great for developing groupwork skills. The puppet images here show off the work of year 8 students ( 12-13 year-olds), in an Art/English/History/Science project. 

Finally, Shadow Theatre is both a great tool for drawing out people's creativity, and also works well for anyone with an interest in theatre, but who maybe is a bit shy about stepping out in front of an audience. All Madrid Players members are welcome to take part.

If you want to know more, or if you want to sign up, please e-mail Andrew on andrewdes4@hotmail.com. 
The ideal group size would be somewhere between 8 and 12 people; if there's a stampede to sign up - and who knows, shadow puppetry could turn out to be the new rock n'roll - we'll assign places on a first come, first served basis.

That's all folks !