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MSA students picked for puppet show
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| By: THERESE APEL, DAILY LEADER Staff Writer |
November 03, 2009 |
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Photo By THERESE APEL
Mississippi School of the Arts seniors Kristen Price (from left), Jules Wood, Aubrey Palermo and Krystyne Rawls hold sketches and basic character profiles of some of the puppets that will star in the original puppet show they have written and will put together from scratch to be showcased at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The students attended a workshop recently and will return on Dec. 10 to finish putting their production together.
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Where else would you find characters like Charlie Gator, Mr. Bonejangles and Hickory the Voodoo Doll?
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The three are some of the lead characters in a puppet adventure masterminded by four Mississippi School of the Arts students. Not only that, but they'll be spending time in the Mississippi Museum of Art as well, since they were born to be a part of the Henson School Film Project sponsored by the museum and Mississippi Public Broadcasting.
"What the museum and MPR are trying to do is give three different schools the chance to participate in creating a story and making puppets, and using their talents," said Visual Arts Instructor Robert Bonilla.
The group recently went to a workshop with four students from Madison Central High School and four students from the Greenville Renaissance Scholars, where they learned the mechanics of creating a puppet show, from the script to the creation of the puppets and props.
Literary student Jules Wood said visual students Kristen Price, Aubrey Palermo and Krystyne Rawls, all seniors, gave her the characters, and from that she crafted a story with a distinct New Orleans flavor.
"Mr. Bonejangles is a skeleton, and he smiles all the time, but he's not happy, and Charlie Gator tries to make him laugh," Wood said. "I tried thinking about the audience, and tried to make it cute and funny for the kids, and that really brought the story together."
Price, Palermo and Rawls designed the characters, drawing on favorite characters of the past, as well as inside jokes to come up with the finished product.
For instance, Mr. Bonejangles came from a skeleton in one of MSA's classrooms that Palermo named during an art session. The name stuck, and then he was set to be memorialized in puppet-show lore forever.
And Rawls took a sketch pad and turned the ideas into reality, which has become exciting for the group.
"I want Charlie and Granny Gator in my senior show," Rawls said.
The group will return to MPB on December 10 to have their original puppet show filmed and edited, and the completed products will be five to seven minutes long, and will be shown at the museum during MMA's Spring Family Day on March 6 as a part of the "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" exhibit.
Bonilla said the workshop was held in the studio where "Between the Lions," an Emmy-award winning children's show, is filmed. He said every two years the producers come to Mississippi and film two whole seasons of the show.
And at this point, the students are waiting on "go" to start fleshing out their creations, which now are still simply ink on paper.
"We hope we'll begin making puppets by the end of the week," Bonilla said.
And MSA officials said they couldn't be more excited about the students' chance to be a part of MPB and MMA's exhibit.
"We jumped at the chance, because it's the whole idea of reaching out and making ourselves more visible to the public and the state," he said. "Being on public television and on display at the museum is great, especially for the kids to have that."
In addition, it teaches students that there are potential careers out there that they haven't thought about, said MSA Principal Jana Perry.
"This opens career opportunities, to be able to bring this experience back and talk about it," she said. "There are so many possibilities out there. People wonder how artists make a living, but we do. They wonder how puppeteers make a living, but they do too."
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©The Daily Leader 2009
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