by Naomi Joseph

Our Puppetry Masterclass with Oliver Smart was brilliant. Oli is brilliant. I am enchanted by his skill and humbled by his genuine devotion to his craft. He is funny and articulate, and he uses words like ‘bubbling’ to describe the feeling when you puppeteer mindfully.

Puppeteering is both as complex and as simple as it looks. I felt like a little kid as I watched Oli bring an old coat to life. I glowed with excitement when I went home, keen to share what I had learned at ‘devising school.’

However, aside from any technical skill or knowledge that Oli had shared, what struck me as really fascinating is hearing about his puppetry work in other industries.

As artists, sometimes we become stuck because we can’t see beyond our own traditional performance spaces such as our theatres and studios. We live in a world that tells us we can’t making a living from our art. It tells us that our creative interests are equivalent to farting around. This means that we can easily forget that our work has value and use beyond our own industry.

Oli Smart has created his own shows, worked in the commercial world of big budget films but he’s also worked with psychologists, he has worked with educational institutes like King’s College towards making the experience of MRI scans easier for vulnerable groups of people.

Oli’s Masterclass made it perfectly clear that there is no room for snobbery across art forms or industries, and that the only way to validate your practice is to take complete ownership of it.

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IMAGE: Guest Artist Oliver Smart demonstrates puppetry techniques using a plastic bin bag.