VIDEO: Passion for Puppets

EAST COUNTY — Sunlight filters through Connie Manson’s back porch in her home in The Meadows and spills onto the rocking chair on which she sits.

Manson looks at a handkerchief resting nearby.

“Watch this,” she says.

With a few flicks of her wrist and the delicate touch of her thin fingers, the 25-year puppeteer turns the square of cotton into a rabbit.

She spots a wool carrot across the room. Her newly made character nibbles its food.

“Unlike any other type of medium, puppeteering really needs the participation of the audience and the puppeteer to make it real,” Manson says. “A puppet is an inanimate object; the audience is what brings it to life.”

Manson’s audiences consist of her tri-weekly little seedlings, sunflower nursery and music classes at Waldorf Sarasota.

She uses puppetry to re-create what children see in everyday life; she prefers to use her hands to tell stories most educators would share with words.

She observes the movements of animals and studies their behavior to help give her audiences the truest representation of bears, rabbits, people and other characters.

The puppeteer, who also owns her own puppet company — Starlite Puppets — uses her dance and acting experience to help her embody the characters in her shows. She pretends she is the bear stomping through the woods or the bunny hopping in the field.

“When you’re acting, you’re playing a part,” Manson says. “In a puppet show you’re also creating those characters.”

Manson, who has taught and lived in Sarasota for nine years, wants children to visualize the stories she acts out for them. But, she also hopes her puppetry plays a bigger role in the creative development of her students by helping them better comprehend stories.

Children receive various intellectual benefits from seeing characters and how they interact with each other, she says.

Manson believes stories with underlying themes of moral values and the importance of making ethical choices inspire people to dig deeper when trying to understand the characters and the purpose of the story, she says.

“There’s something about sharing what’s important in a joyful way,” Manson says.

Manson uses wool, silk and other all-natural materials to craft the puppets with a needle-felting process.
She has about 100 puppets, including marionettes, finger puppets, hand puppets and a variety of other types.

Manson also considers music an important part of the storytelling process — it allows her to involve her audience in the puppet show.

She wears an ocarina — an instrument with small holes on the sides of its face that makes a whistling noise when air is blown into it — fastened on a necklace. She also chooses instruments with soft sounds, such as a harp and ukulele, to play during performances, she says.

Manson also provides instruments for older children and adults to play when she performs at events, such as the recent Spring Fling at Little Manatee River State Park.

Manson says the feedback she receives at shows justifies the time it takes to create her puppets and props, such as an umbrella-turned-tree to which she hot-glued 1,000 hand-cut leaves.

“It’s amazing to watch the children’s eyes light up,” Manson says. “It’s like we all come together to create magic.”

A love of puppets
Connie Manson started her career as a puppeteer in 1990, when a classmate approached her about joining her puppet company.

She remembers her early performances, when all she could see during a puppet show was the inside of a cardboard box.

In the beginning of her career, she only exposed her forearm and the puppet perched on top of her hand.

She transitioned into marionette puppetry, in which her audience is able to see her, as she developed her skills as a puppeteer and realized she wanted to perform puppetry as a teacher.

She later joined the Puppeteers of America — a group whose members share tips with each other at annual conferences.

Now, she uses puppets to tell stories to children at Waldorf Sarasota, where she and her husband, Peter Chin, teach.

Contact Amanda Sebastiano at [email protected].