Before I go on to write about other recent projects, I must put in a plug for the excellent wands made by my partner, Stuart, who is known in the wizarding world as Magnus Arthfael.
For the special occasion of our Hogwarts @ Hillerman party, Magnus crafted lovely wands for me and for my colleagues.
He chose rose wood for most of them, paying homage to the exquisite rose garden that surrounds our library.
Here are some of the wands from the workshop of Magnus Arthfael, Maker of Fine Wands!
The wand that Magnus made for me is fifteen and three quarters inches long, springy, made of vine, excellent for transfiguration. It has a whimsical quality, much like that of my dress hat!
We are still glowing from the glorious Harry Potter party we had at our library on July 15, 2011. In honor of the release of the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, we had an after hours party—and what a party it was!
When I broached the idea that the film release would be a perfect excuse to have a Harry Potter party, I never imagined that my coworkers would launch themselves into the project with such brio!
Perhaps the darkness and uncertainty of the Great Recession was starting to suck all the joy out of us like a flock of dementors. With the library staff decimated, and our gate counts skyrocketing, it can be easy to lose sight of whimsy and the sense of wonder.
It was as if I had cast a wonderful Patronus Charm into our midst. (My patronus, by the way, takes the form of a fox.)
And the next thing we knew, we were plotting a million different ways to transform the library into Hogwarts for one magical night.
We succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, and almost 400 people came to share in the wonder.
It showcased what I love most about libraries: a celebration of the sense of wonder and the power of the written word and of the imagination, as well as the best of all worlds for learning on one’s own terms and at one’s own pace through exploration and discovery.
I wonder if some great scientist may one day trace the birth of her passion to that night’s chance to witness the stunning demonstrations led by our Potions professors, Esther and Kelsey, or to the astronomy lesson led by astronomers with powerful telescopes courtesy of The Albuquerque Astronomy Society and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science?
Will some future wildlife biologist tell other children about learning about owls firsthand from the owls themselves and their companions from Wildlife Rescue, Inc. of New Mexico?
Will a book designer in 2030 tell students that he first discovered the book arts and learned how books are made—along with some of the fabulous words associated with bookbinding (gutter, signature, deckle edge)—by making a bestiary (another cool word!) at that Harry Potter party long ago?
Kudos go to our brilliant branch manager and temporary headmistress, Linda Kennedy, seen at left…all I can say is, “Mischief managed!”
And here is a video valentine to J.K. Rowling, who dreamed up this beguiling world and shared it with us, creating such a magical portal for literacy and learning. (Thanks especially to my partner Stuart Heady, the handsome wizard seen at the top of this post, who wrote and recorded the voiceover.)
For our One Planet, Many Puppets workshop on rod puppets, I wanted to make a Bunraku style puppet so the kids could try working cooperatively with other puppeteers to bring a puppet to life.
Inspired by that most excellent book, The Most Excellent Book of How to Be a Puppeteer, by Roger Lade (which includes directions on making a Bunraku style puppet), I talked Stuart into building it with me. Stuart has a much higher level of craft when it comes to engineering things!
We were quite happy with our Dobby puppet (the house elf from several of the Harry Potter books).
Several of the kids took turns helping me to make Dobby walk around on the table. None of us had any experience with this style of puppetry, so our attempts probably weren’t all that lifelike!
Still, it’s amazing how the size of this type of puppet, and its joints, give a distinct illusion of life when it is just placed in a sitting or standing position.
Not bad…
…considering that it’s constructed from paper plates, paper towel tubes, cereal boxes, some corrugated cardboard from a box, plastic egg carton cups, duct tape, string, and an old dish towel!
The third workshop in the One Planet, Many Puppets series focused on rod puppets. We looked at examples of the Japanese Bunraku tradition and American styles derived from it, as well as rod puppets operated by a single puppeteer.
Although I chose examples to show the kids that they would enjoy (like John Kennedy’s Mummy rod puppet and Unraku’spuppet performance of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), I found myself being taken to a whole new place when I discovered clips from Dan Hurlin’s “Disfarmer.” A serious work of puppet theater, “Disfarmer” is inspired by the 1915-1959 career of Mike Disfarmer, a reclusive Arkansas photographer whose works somehow captured the essence of the American people of the heartland.
I was trying to describe this work-in-progress excerpt to Stuart, who hadn’t seen it yet, as we were driving to the library for the workshop. As I told him about the vulnerability and frailty and isolation conveyed by the elderly Disfarmer puppet, I got choked up. I’m still haunted by it.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I ran across this quotation in one of the puppetry books I was reading recently:
“The nature and the task of the puppet theater is to do and say things that the real theater cannot do or say.” –Fred Schneckenburger
I was glad to see the kids using their notebooks! Here is a Koala puppet being designed and built.
With simple and fairly limited materials, the kids made full use of their imaginations and came up with many different creative solutions.
For our workshop on sock puppets, we looked at Sandra Boynton’s music video of “One Shoe Blues,” starring B.B. King and some overambitious sock puppets, plus the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre’s “Facebook Song.”
Although the history of serious sock puppet theater is nonexistent, it’s my belief that sock puppets are in the process of breaking into the mainstream. Like the Theatre of the Absurd in the aftermath of World War II, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the Vietnam era, sock puppets have arrived to save us from the fear and despair of the Great Recession.
Sock puppets as Greek chorus. Just wait and see.
It was truly uplifting to see the creative gusto with which the kids in the workshop took to designing and creating sock puppets, and then performing them.
I was gratified to see that they were busily sketching puppet designs in their notebooks, although I was kept too busy at the hot glue station to document these particular observations!
When they finished their puppets and were playing with them, I finally broke free from the hot glue gun and grabbed these sock puppet portraits.
For our first session of the One Planet, Many Puppets workshop, we looked at several examples of shadow puppetry, particularly the wayang kulit tradition in Indonesia, the work of Lotte Reiniger, and modern shadow puppetry in the United States.
In the week since we debuted Stuart’s beautifully constructed shadow theater at our SRP kick-off, he had added a number of finishing touches that made it even more spectacular!
The kids really got into designing and constructing their puppets, and they loved trying them out in the theater. We shot some video, which is coming soon!
It’s my great honor to introduce Leaf the Bookworm, cousin brother of our dear departed bookworm, Page.
Like Page, Leaf is a globetrotter. In fact, he was traveling through the Far East and the Pacific Islands for many months, and so had not heard about Page’s tragic disappearance.
“I came as soon as they laid it on me,” he told me. “Bummed me out, sister. I grew up with that worm. We were tight. I am flat mystified. He told me he was really diggin’ his gig with you too. Life just ain’t fair. If there’s anything I can do to help, just lay it on me.”
“We’ve all been missing Page so much,” I told him. “The children keep asking, ‘Where’s the Worm?’ Would it be asking too much for you to spend some time hanging out with us and sharing stories from your travels?”
I’m teaching a seven-week puppetry workshop for kids as part of our Summer Reading Program. For the first four weeks we will look at different puppetry traditions around the world, and for the last three weeks we will write, storyboard, design, and rehearse an original puppet play to be performed on the final day.
The first week we will make shadow puppets. The second week we’ll make sock puppets. Tabletop rod puppets will be featured the third week, and we’ll look at examples of giant puppets and make masks the fourth week. On the fifth week, we’ll come up with an outline of our play and begin making additional puppets, props, and scenery as needed. We’ll put it together and begin rehearsing on the sixth week, and perform the grand finale puppet play the final week.
Each child will get a composition book at the beginning for taking notes, jotting down ideas, sketching puppet designs, and storyboarding performance ideas.
I taught an origami workshop at the North Valley Library as part of their Summer Reading Program. I proposed a number of possible models, and they chose the butterfly.
I ended up teaching three different butterfly models: the classic Yoshizawa butterfly, a fabric origami butterfly model, and a dollar bill butterfly.
This is a detail from a child’s dress I designed using fabric origami butterflies.
Here is a video in which Mrs. Kiyo Yoshizawa demonstrates how to fold Akira Yoshizawa’s butterfly. Here are the instructions for an easy dollar bill butterfly. And here are instructions for the fabric origami butterfly (from the Internet Archive…wait a moment for it to load).
Even though the class included beginning folders of all ages, everyone had a great time folding lots of beautiful butterflies.
The world travel theme of this year’s Summer Reading Program has prompted the interesting outcome that each of the branches of the ABC Libraries here in Albuquerque has morphed into a separate country!
And, by obtaining a passport, library patrons can visit them all!
No one promised me a rose garden, but somehow I landed at Rose Island, the most beautiful of all.
Before I go on to write about other recent projects, I must put in a plug for the excellent wands made by my partner, Stuart, who is known in the wizarding world as Magnus Arthfael.
