Schroeder Cherry's African Puppets

these are some of the puppets that I acquired when I was traveling to Africa, I used to go to Africa at least once a year and I would just look for puppets and I went primarily to western African countries because they had puppetry traditions that I was familiar with this is an example of a puppet that I found in Dakar, Senegal it's a ram's head it's made out of wood and the mutton, the fleece is fashioned out of cowrie shells and I was just really fascinated with that and this has mirror shards for eyes someone made this using the materials that they had they had access to the cowrie shells of course, the wood and the broken glass and I love the simplicity of it I think it's really very elegant the next puppet I want to show you is from Mali and this is an example of a very simple puppet she's made out of wood and the puppeteer would operate the puppet from below using these rods it's also the the prototype for puppets that are also much larger so you can see a puppeteer for example who might be fully out costumed and the puppet would be on top of his head and he would operate the puppet like this and just dance through the streets the next puppet is from Senegal a gazelle and this is a puppet that I actually used in a show the land of primary colors and her role was to go to the land to help tell the story about the new colors in the land this fabric is attached to her body and I operate her this way she dances through the audience and the drummer is drumming like this she's made out of solid wood and after 5 minutes of holding her straight it is very heavy but it's pretty magical seeing it and performing it that's how she operates the next one I'd like to share with you is actually African inspired so I made this one but I was inspired by the African tradition so I have a rod holding up the body and then the other two arms operate her wing so this is bird and bird flies through the audience like this so that's an example of how I was inspired by just African traditions and the way craftspeople use materials that were familiar to them to make their puppets