Day 4: Adding Up The Puppet Pieces

Wednesday, August 07, 2013 | Filed in: Newtown Creek Celebration
Sherry and Youth Paper Mache Tree Puppetby Kevin Ray

At the end of our third day making pieces that will be assembled into puppets for our final performance, teaching artist Heather Nielsen counted all of the paper mâché components that we have amassed with our youth participants. In total our 80 young people have used recycled cardboard, used paper bags, and cornstarch paper mâché paste to build 120 puppet pieces. The following is Heather's tally:

  • Laughing Gull Puppet Pieces
    Beaver Head Piece 19
  • Beaver Tails 10
  • Laughing Gull Puppet Bodies 10
  • Laughing Gull Puppet Wings 20
  • Laughing Gull Puppet Tails 12
  • Fish Puppet Bodies 5
  • House Puppets 7
  • High Rise Puppets 3
  • Tree Puppets 4
  • Tree Tops 4
  • Tree Leaves 2
  • Dollar Signs 5
  • Coins 5
  • Hamburgers 5
  • Wind Turbine Blades 4
  • Airplane Body 1
  • Airplane Wings 1
  • Frames 3

Now that we have our pieces we move on to the next step tomorrow: painting!

What’s It All About?

Newtown Creek Celebration: Puppet Parade and Pageant
Newtown Creek Celebration Tides of Change Poster
is a free, ten-session theater and puppetry project for over 80 young people enrolled in North Brooklyn Development Corporation’s Summer Day Camp. Over the course of ten days, we work with youth to create an original puppet parade and pageant that explores issues relating to the pollution of Newtown Creek and the effect pollution has on the surrounding Greenpoint community. Each day, Heather, Sherry and I see four different groups of approximately 20 youth participants ranging in age from 5 to 11. During our session time, we work toward building puppets with the youth, then putting the puppets into the young peoples’ hands to devise an original show based on the theme: Tides of Change.

Come and see our show!

If you would like to attend our free performance. Visit our Facebook Event page by clicking here. Let us know you are coming or post an encouraging comment on our event page. We hope to see you there.

Make a Donation Today!

Our crowd funding campaign is off to a great start!
Thank you so much to everyone who has already contributed. We are offering lots of different perks to folks who support the project including our 2013 poster, photos of the culminating event, or a puppet from the show to take home! If you would like to make a donation, click on the widget to the right or click here. If you want to support the project but can’t make a financial contribution, there are other ways to help out!

This event is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, both administered in Kings County by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

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