It’s now been a little over a week that I’ve been in Prague, and I’m having a wonderful time here. After a year of saving and planning, I managed to get myself over here to the beautiful Czech Republic to delve into an intensive 2 week marionette (string puppet) carving course at the Puppets in Prague school. (There is more information about the school here: http://www.puppetsinprague.eu). I knew very little about this country before I arrived – I only knew that it was the place to see some beautiful traditional puppets, which is my main interest. (a friend of mine had traveled in Prague years ago and got me a bright pink T-shirt that said “Czech me out” so I had that image in my mind too.)

I'm staying in an apartment right above the puppet workshop on a very quiet street. My tutor Mirek greeted me at the door when I arrived - he told me I was the first one there, which made me "winner".

I dropped off my belongings and headed over to the local grocery store for supplies. The lady at the grocery store is a Czech speaking Vietnamese woman named "Ng" and it was pretty amusing trying to communicate my shopping list. I ended up acting out 'shampoo for oily hair', ‘body moisturiser’ and 'eggs' (which is my favourite because I flapped my arms and clucked like a chicken). Perhaps a simple Czech phrase book may have been a worthwhile investment. One mishap already was buying what I thought was butter but finding it was actually margarine (better than lard, I suppose).

Puppet School
It’s been a wonderful week so far of learning how to carve Czech-style marionettes. My ‘puppet class’ hails from all over the world, including USA, England, Argentina, Austria, Japan and Australia. We are also all women (which is rare for this course) and our backgrounds are very diverse. We have puppeteers, costume designers, a make-up artist (who also is a wig-maker), teachers, an actor, theatre students, fine artists and even someone studying computer science with a minor in art.

We all had our puppet designs prepared already (I’m making a simple little fairy tale puppet girl, which I’m hoping to use for a show at a children’s literature festival when I go to England next month).

We started off doing simple marionette operating classes (to get a feel for different puppets before making one of our own). Then we had a series of lectures on puppet making techniques, followed by an intensive bout of technical drawing (which was very technical! Lots of measuring, calculating and drawing using rulers and compasses – I had to come face to face with mathematics again, an encounter which caused some mild headaches but turned out to be very useful). It was then time to start cutting out the blocks of wood to make our puppets, and thankfully there were some wonderfully skilled tutors on hand to help us. Besides our teacher Mirek, there was also Zdar (an amazing Czech carver with decades of experience) and Sota (another extremely talented puppet maker, who came to Czech from Japan to study carving and has lived in Prague for 5 years).

I have now been exposed to the terrifying wonders of power tools – most of which I had never used before. I have had a go at using a bandsaw, drill press and sander, though the circular table saw was off limits (not that I was going to even going to ask anyway!)

I have discovered that a certain level of fearlessness is required to be a carver. Not only is some of the equipment dangerous (or at least dangerous-looking) but the wood itself is a medium that is all about going in deep and not looking back. It’s about cutting away at the wood, and you can’t glue it back on after it’s been chipped off (my puppet head has become so asymmetrical that it has now formed her character). I’ve also needed lots of patience and stamina, which a carver requires by the spadeful. Thankfully I haven’t needed many bandaids or betadine (my one carving ‘glory wound’ has been a pitiful nick in my left index finger, which happened when my hand just brushed the edge of a chisel. I did however start to develop a couple of impressive calluses). As intense as it was, I still really enjoyed the carving process. We even had an eclectic mixture of music to carve to – the workshop CD collection included Johnny Cash, the Eurhythmics, Bob Dylan, music from Africa and the “Get up and boogie” compilation.

Having carved the head, body, arms and legs, I was ready to start painting (which I did today). Tomorrow I will also work on the costume. All the puppets are now starting to come to life (they were all fragments of wooden limbs before) and there’s a real buzz of excitement in the workshop.

Sightseeing highlight: A flat full of puppets
One big highlight besides puppet school has been visiting an old lady’s apartment to see her late husband’s collection of puppets. Her name is Mrs Vorvola – such a sweet and petite lady with soft, papery hands, large thick round glasses and a head of curly strawberry blonde hair with wisps of grey. Apparently her husband wanted to buy a car in the 1960’s (which was unheard of in those communist days). But at the same time he heard that someone was selling a large collection of historical puppets, and he used the money to buy those instead, and he never ended up buying a car for the rest of his life! Now the apartment is full of what must be over 300 puppets, including knights, jesters, princesses, school children, kings and queens, animals, miniature toy theatres, witches, skeletons, demons, sea monsters and even a 3-headed dragon. All the walls and even many of the cupboards are full of puppets or puppet-related materials like costumes or spare parts. The dear thing is that Mrs Vorvola still very dedicatedly dusts each and every puppet on a regular basis. She has very few guests, so this private ‘tour’ was really special – she even serves us tea and coffee afterwards with little cream puffs. It was like visiting grandma’s house (but with a whole bunch of puppets squeezed in!).