The Memorable 1980 World Puppetry Festival

                          

Why I attended the impressionable conference held at Georgetown, Univ.,and the Kennedy Center for Perfoming Arts, Washington DC

An Inspirational Experience

The conference was a joint venture of the Union Internationale (UNIMA) and the Puppeteers of America, of which I was a member. Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, helped organize the event.

To promote the festival, Statler and Waldof (his cranky, human, muppets) appeared in a series of Muppet TV advertising spots.  This resulted in 2000 eager attendees and performers from around the world.

Continuous, assorted, puppet show performances were featured at Georgetown University theaters and the Kennedy Center's seven theaters for the performing arts. The eclectic conference gained attention to puppetry, as an art form, to the National Endowment for the Arts, a govt agency.

Thereby, puppeteers could be funded through grants, to perform and teach puppetry classroom skills at colleges throughout the United States. I eagerly attended professional’s touring classes, and soon learned puppetry skills to instruct Kansas City workshops for teachers, to engage students in the creative arts.

Earlier, as a vital member and article submitter in the 1970s for “The Puppeteers of America” organization, I had created my own family Voco Poco Puppets show that toured Kansas City and Topeka. 

Our unique stage show featured ventriloquist puppets that interacted with a hand puppet theatre. Electric piano music embellished the comedic acts, providing sound coherence for multiple puppet vocals.

             

Subsequently, I was desirous to see the creative performances of world-renown entertainers on various stages of Georgetown University and Kennedy Center.

Multiple Georgetown and Kennedy Center theaters ran shows simultaneously for the entrants. Various types of puppets engaged.  (Ventriloquist figures, marionette, shadow, rod, and hand puppets).

The esteemed Kennedy Center featured celebrity film and TV puppeteers

The celebrity, Edgar Bergen, with his witty Charlie McCarthy sidekick, did not perform as Edgar had recently passed in 1978.

 Yet, Buffalo Bob Smith performed with his marionette Howdy Doody, of the 1960s TV show, “It’s Howdy Doody Time”, as did the Jim Henson’s Muppets.

Bill Baird’s marionette presentations were engaging at Kennedy Center, as he is best known for his work in the film “Sound of Music” where Julie Andrews and the children sang for the dancing marionettes. Baird was a protégée of the early 20^th century celebrated puppeteer, Tony Sarg. They designed the Macy’s balloons for the annual Macy’s Christmas parade.

The Smithsonian's Natural Museum of History and Technology's long-term exhibit displayed three celebrity, puppet characters together; Charlie McCarthy (Bergen’s ventriloquist figure), Howdy Doody (Buffalo Bob’s marionette), with Kermit the Frog (Henson’s hand and rod puppet).

Preferably, hand puppets (like the themed Muppets and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) and ventriloquists’ acts are best suited for film (television shows and movies mediums), rather than performing on large stages with large audiences. These performers obviously had production challenges adapting to a live stage performance with a vast audience.

Sitting in stage left box at the Kennedy Center's concert hall

Viewing actual live Muppets, Baird’s marionettes, Mr. Rogers work, and Buffalo Bob with Howdy Doody, in close proximity overlooking the stage, was joyful, astounding.

As a Kansas City performing artist, I found my self sitting next to, and chatting with the noted Hazel Rollins (Hazel’s marionettes) of Kansas City.

Key take away of our chat was: “be careful how you plan the puppet’s posterity. The worst thing you can do is bequeath them to a museum that will store them on a numbered shelf, stored in a box.” She now has her varied marionettes distributed online for mass market purchase.

But, the greatest experience was meeting several of them personally, and obtaining their autographs.

My greatest surprise was bumping into Jim Henson while I ran up the back stairwell of the Georgetown University’s “Old Main” building. Recognizing him immediately, he offered his autograph on my notepad.

Inspired and motivated, two months later, in August, 1980, I created the nonprofit, Educational Media Therapy Consultants, Inc, aimed to research puppets’ effects on listening sequencing memory, and learning.

"Cognitive Skills Training or Brain-Based Learning; Which Is It?"

Cognitive Skills training has a long history from the 1960s into the 1970s. Since it is a scientific, technical term, the average lay person is not sure as to what it really means. It can convey a detrimental underlying meaning that something mentally is wrong with the person.

This is not the case. Unless you understand the psychometric testing that measures the information processing and cognitive skill components, the subject becomes complicated. Unless one has advanced course work in this area, it is difficult to explain memory and cognitive processes in simple terms. Yet, we all have a particular cognitive profile, and most of us do not realize or know what it is.

For years, cognitive psychologists tested for problems, and gave medication or remediation. Little assistance was available for the average person. Teachers knew they had learning and behavioral difficulties in the classroom. Yet, it became too tedious and time consuming to complete full psychological batteries on the many children requiring identification. And, only the certified School Psychologist could administer the complex testing batteries. Yet, something had to be done.

In jumped "Brain-Based Learning" into the typical classroom. Many teachers and lay people came up with an irrational exuberance of solutions. The problem was that these techniques or methodologies were randomly implemented and not scientifically tested. It became a "hit and miss" proposition.

Interestingly, it requires minimally 12 hours of pre- and post-testing and a few more hours of evaluation to arrive at solid conclusions. This level of work becomes mind-boggling, and psychologists and specialists deservedly charge solid professional fees.

Since people are not willing to make large investments unless there is a real nagging necessity for it, subsequently the average person is not often, or ever, tested for cognitive skills weaknesses.

Yet, I conducted these exhaustive, comprehensive, standardized measurements and evaluations on thousands of high average, average, low average, and gifted individuals as part of the course pro bono because of my scientific curiosity. Each had a unique profile, which could be improved.

Importantly, I could see dramatic change with my intervention, although experienced at different time intervals by each individual. I knew how important it would be to document it completely.

Living in a university town, full professors and statisticians volunteered their services for this important analyses work, that entailed twenty years of publications and almost thirty of applied research practice. I had many scholarly advisors. As the work progressed through publications and peer review, additional psychology and education professors from different universities analyzed and followed the unique data compilations.

Scientific discovery was in process.

Today, there are programs that have statistical results, but few that have longitudinal findings. In other words, does the training intervention "last"? It takes years to collect this type of data, especially among various demographic groups. It is also difficult to locate the same individual years down the road for subsequent testing. Additionally, even if they are located, are clients willing to be retested years later?

Of my seven experiments, six studies, with a variety of ages and demographic groups, had 1-3 years longitudinal tracking with complete positive findings.

For further information, see the link "scholarly publications" on the nav bar. For comment, click on:" Respond Further on Jan's Blog."

"Can Puppetry With Musical Choral Speech Serve as a Tool to Enhance Memory and Intelligence?"

Today, there are many brain exercise programs, and most expect the client to have the motivation and interest to stay with a new, often tedious program. Many are random exercises without a specific goal in mind, and are no more than mere visual memory improvement of some sort. The various types of memory are not completely pre tested or delineated, and if they do, they are with the pretests primarily visual in nature and deliberately made difficult so the applicant performs poorly.

What is obviously missing from this paradigm is the crucial "listening-auditory memory" facet. Researchers have long written that auditory memory must couple with visual memory for comprehension to ensue. But how to teach auditory memory and the various subcategories of it?

My program has always used recognized nationally standardized cognitive skills tests. We did pretests and posttests to see and compare the improvement after twenty-four hours of intensive cognitive skills brain-skill practice. The results always showed improvement, and yet, every person's profile was different; pre- to posttest. That was most interesting to me and the client, and remains to be so, even today.

None of us have perfect profiles, although we would like to think that we do have them.

To teach rapid auditory-visual memory, and to make the training palatable and exciting, we used a family of ventriloquist puppets, speaking in tonal sequences.

Puppet characters have the following qualities: 1) they offer a non-threatening, stress free presence. The student remains in an abstract "one-up" position. Puppets do not challenge or intimidate you.

2) Their messages are rapidly understood. For example, they are used in political cartoons and comic strips.

3) With the recent surge of ventriloquist puppets as entertainment (America's Got Talent), they are now, and have been accepted for a long time, as a sophisticated arts medium for adults (remember Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy? and puppetry in the Czech Republic and India?).

Now, we can learn from them, too. They can improve our cognitive skills, which include visual and auditory memories. And, if puppet characters do give us "guff," we really do not mind!