Puppetry Supporting The Three Milestones in the First 3 Years
We all stand in awe at the achievements of the child’s first three years of life. To gain the uprightness of the human being is the fundamental task we must achieve to begin our destiny of walking on our path in the world.
First, let’s look at the experience of uprightness. Our feet, limbs, and core body are strong enough to hold our weight. The muscles of the back and neck have developed enough to hold our spine and head straight up, freeing the arms and hands for doing. The first awakening to the balance of being connected to hearth and heaven has been achieved.
Then the first steps are taken. The walk is the experience of left and right. Left, right, left, right, steps are taken with the human uprightness, our balancer, in the middle. We begin to orient our upright self and then the walk, reveals our ‘leftness’ and ‘rightness’ as we become engaged moving ourselves through space. Our hands are free to pick something up from a greater distance than ever before! How exciting are all the new possibilities. Add the acquisition of language to this and we see some of the miracles of the first three years.
How can puppetry support the child’s early years? Purely by supporting these three grand accomplishments of standing, walking, and speaking. When a small table puppet or finger puppet goes for a walk on the path in the forest, we as puppeteers are conscious of the puppet’s inner uprightness, and the human left and right orientation of human walking. We surround the little ones with living speech as we speak the simple story, using a formative quality with the consonants and vowels. The spoken tale, together with the beauty of the puppet’s graceful movement fills the child with imitative forces they need to support their practice of uprightness, walking, and speaking. The quality of puppet gesture and movement inspired from our imaginations of these human milestones will mirror and sustain the inner processes of the very young.
It is an amazing thing to watch children’s faces and bodies when they are watching a sleeping marionette waking up and coming to their elegant uprightness! And when the puppet then walks with the breathing rhythm of our inherent human walk with a subtle orientation of left and right (as opposed to hopping walking, or the dreaded lifeless walk as though floating), the children feel their own humanness. When we accompany this puppet walking with interest in his surroundings and our story voice is warmed with our own inner interest, then the puppet play starts to come to life in a way that resonates with meaning for the children.
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