Audience Participation!

Below you'll find the article I wrote for Stephanie Stokes of Mr. Anderson's Company. She's put together a newsletter called, Puppet Tales and asked if I'd write something for it. I thought I'd share it here in case it proved helpful! It's about using Finger puppets (such as the one above) during storytelling, to include audience participation.

Greetings all!

Prior to starting with Swazzle, I had my own one-woman puppet show based on "Red-Riding Hood". Performing a one-person show can be very challenging and one of the ways I headed off "challenging" audiences was by incorporating audience participation. In my "Red-Riding Hood" show, the audience "became" the trees in the woods that Red was lost in. Whenever she would look around and say "Where am I?" the audience would put their hands in the air and reply "In the Woods!" to which Red inevitably said "Oh! Right!" and would continue on her merry way.

Later, when Swazzle formed, our first Summer Library Show was "Prairie Dog Pete and the Magic Buffalo" in that show we asked the audience to repeat the magic words Pete had to use to call forth the animals in the show. Giving the audience something to do was a wonderful idea! Instead of being passive viewers, they became active participants--a part of the show, if you will! The children would listen very carefully, eagerly waiting for the moment when their assistance was required. It can be magic! Now, most of you guys are not going to be putting on an entire show! You're going to be telling stories and (hopefully) using puppets to make things more lively and fun. How can you use puppets to create active audiences for Story Time? Easy! You can use Finger Puppets! They are small and you can store many of them in a small space! How do you use them? Well, does you story include birds flying by? Or Fish Swimming? Butterflies fluttering? There are little finger puppets for all of these things. You can have each audience member use the same one or combine several for different actions!

There is one very important thing to remember whenever you introduce audience participation into your storytelling! And that one thing is? Communication. You must clearly communicate to your audience exactly what you want from them, otherwise, chaos ensues. Take the time to set up audience rules. Over my many years of performing, I've come up with a pre-show spiel (and I must admit to cribbing from the other Swazzle performers!). The rules are as follows:

*Stay in your seats (behind the line, on the carpet, in a circle...etc.)
*Stay nice and quiet so that everyone can hear (I usually have them practice this!)

Once you've got them quiet and attentive, it's time to introduce the action! Ask them if they know how a bird flies, what noise a bee makes, ask for a show of hands. Once you get the desired response, show them the puppet. Show them exactly what you want them to with the puppet and ask them if they think they can do this simple action. Of course they'll say "Yes!". Then, explain what you want them to do during the story, if applicable, give them a "Cue" to follow (whenever you hear "Blah" flutter the butterfly like so) and then remind them that when the story is over they must bring the little puppets back to the basket (or box) for the next story. Pass out your puppets and enjoy! You've just turned a group of listeners into performers!