Get Involved!

by Erica Sapir

(This article was originally published in SDIA’s  magazine, IN CONTEXT. To get a printed copy, please send $4.00 along with your name and address to Susila Dharma International Association, 777 Campbell, Greenfield Park (Montreal), Quebec J4V 1Y8, Canada.)

Puppeteers Without Borders, Mexico AIDS Conference (photo by Erica Sapir)

We live in a fast-changing society and need to adapt and learn fast. What will allow us to thrive, to build and sustain ourselves and our community, while enhancing opportunities for future generations?

Education, in the widest sense, has a key role. As a puppeteer and founder of the NGO, Puppeteers without Borders, my aim is to bring creativity and play into schools. We work with teachers themselves, to help them discover the joy of play by making puppets, creating the characters, giving them roles and recreating with the puppets situations and conflicts that they meet in the classroom or in their private lives. A happy teacher will make a happy pupil. By transmitting to their pupils these newly discovered techniques in puppetry, teachers will be able to pass on many useful subjects. Children and adolescents can learn history, languages, or more personal subjects such as Human Rights, sexual education, nonviolent communication or hygiene in an interactive, playful and creative way.

In 2008 at the tenth international conference on Mask, Object, Puppet: the powerful means of theatrical expression in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I gave a workshop on Using puppetry in education with special emphasis on nonviolent communication. I started with a short enactment of the story of Cain and Abel with walking puppets. The killing of Abel was particularly gruesome. Cain crushed him completely and threw him to the crowd! The audience was shocked by the cruelty: how easily they had forgotten that the crushed Abel was, after all, made of a cardboard toilet roll! After the killing, I explained what had moved Cain to his violence: his need to be loved and appreciated, a basic need of all human beings, and how, with some empathy, he would have been able to express his anger at being neglected, without resorting to murder. I spoke about the importance of acknowledging our basic needs and what those basic needs are. I asked the audience to think of some conflict they faced in their personal lives or work and to think of what needs are involved in those conflicts. Then I showed how to make our famous walking puppets.

‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ —Albert Einstein

We need to understand why imagination is so important in helping us to face the challenges of our changing societies and to what extent schools encourage, develop, and teach children how to use their imagination.

Learning and knowledge do not provide all the answers. When faced with a completely new situation it is not ‘knowing’ that helps, nor experience; what is most helpful to both ourselves and society is creativity, the direct result of imagination.

Creativity, or as Edward De Bono calls it, lateral thinking, is the capacity of every living creature to take another path, not to follow along the well-trodden one, but to dare to be different, to go into the unknown and to follow one’s own play instinct and even to make mistakes. Carl Jung said, ‘The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct, acting from inner necessity.’ Another definition of creativity is the ability of the brain to generate original ideas that have value.

Puppeteers Without Borders, Australia workshop with refugees (photo by Erica Sapir)

So, the question remains, why do so many people feel blocked in their creativity, or feel that only artists are creative people?

We need to encourage and develop creativity in our every-day lives. Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to problems of relationships, to find a new job more in tune with our talents, to improve our living conditions, to improve the way we educate our children. The more we use creative solutions in these everyday activities, the more our life will be worthwhile, interesting and fulfilled.

One form of creativity is artistic expression. Art encompasses many levels, perspectives and manifestations. Not everyone will be a great artist, but artistic expression is something else: a capacity that everyone has to create something out of materials. It is different and more than the sum of those materials. Artistic expression is one positive and useful way to develop creativity. Picasso said ‘All children are born artists.’ But, for many of us, this ability is stunted by school and family as we grow.

The International Child Development Programme (ICDP), a member of the Susila Dharma Network that was founded by Professor Karsten Hundeide, integrates play at the forefront of good practices for child care. Through play, many major skills necessary for survival are developed and strengthened. Many other projects in the Susila Dharma Network use play, as well as creative and artistic expression to enrich their development activities. My Neighbourhood in Los Angeles, California, USA, focuses on helping inner-city children develop their creativity; in India the Centre for Culture and Development in Madurai holds creative summer camps for Dalit children from the slums, and the Mithra Foundation in Bangalore helps teachers learn more creative ways to teach children; Asociación Vivir in Ecuador has a playroom in their health clinic to help parents discover why play is important for their children’s health. We need more projects of this kind, if we want to educate our children to develop imagination to face the challenges that the future will bring.

Recently I held a workshop for sixteen teachers in Northern Italy on building puppets and using them in constructive communication. I was once more a witness to the joy and surprise these adults had in handling funny puppets they had made in an hour or two and breathing life into them. They had fun creating scenes from everyday life with the puppets in the uninhibited way that puppetry allows. With light in their eyes, some of the teachers said, ‘It has been a life-changing experience!’

Marionettistes sans frontières | Puppeteers without Borders

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