Puppet and Prattle with Shreedevi Sunil

Muskaan hosted puppeteer Shreedevi Sunil for yet another session with the young ones from Sushila Devi Birla Girls school. 

Mrs Sumitra Ray, programme Student advisor of Prabha Khaitan Foundation welcome all our young guests and introduced Shreedevi to the audience. 

Shreedevi started with some warm ups for the children and began her first story a folktale titled ‘It could be worse’ which is about an old man who gets disturbed by a rattling noise by his window. When the poor man was unable to stand it any longer, he ran to the wise jester for help. As he follows the wise jester unlikely advice, the poor man’s life goes from bad to worse, with increasingly uproarious results. In his little hut, silly calamity follows foolish catastrophe, all memorably depicted by her puppets that are both funnier and lovelier. 

Her second story is a folktale all the way from Haiti, about a 7 year-old girl Tiffany who is very kind and generous, who lived with an cruel old lady. The old woman wanted to give her away to an old man with a magic wand, whom she met in the woods. But Tiffany outsmarted them with the help of her friends and escaped the cruel lady and the old man with a magic wand. At the end of the story, the Jester told the children that the moral of the story is always to ask for help from friends and loved ones when in trouble

She ended the session a draw and tell story about a King in China who loves dragons As she and the children drew and the story progresses, more and more characters and objects appear on the page. At the end of the story, a final image often brings it all together.

The children really enjoyed the session and asked puppeteer a whole lot of questions which she happily answered.