Walking with adjunct professor Geoffrey Navias into the puppeteering workshop at the Open Hand Puppet Theater company is like walking through a dream. The walls contain murals, primarily medieval scenes. Puppets from performances past are scattered intermittently.

A Dave Matthews Band song floats from one student’s iPad, part of a small group working on bird-like shadow puppets. Navias stops briefly to tweak the wing of one of the birds and continues walking. One phoenix head, reminiscent of the character Gonzo from ‘The Muppet Show,’ has enormous eyes and an eerily hooked beak.

At the end of the workshop, two students work with an enormous slab of clay. They sit, kneading it between their hands. The shape is unclear.

‘Have you ever taken glass and you put a little bit of water on another sheet of glass on top of it and slide them, and they don’t pull apart?’ Navias asks. ‘Well, clay is like thousands of bits of shale, and there’s water in there.’

As the professor explains the process of working with clay, the slab begins to take shape. A jaw becomes defined, along with sunken-in eye sockets – the two girls are sculpting a skull.

***

A small white house sits next door to the theater, where Navias has spent 30 years as artistic director. Inside is a giant puppeteering workshop used for Navias’s SOL 345: ‘Puppets and Community’ class, part of The SolingProgram through the College of Arts and Sciences. The class has been offered for seven years and teaches students to create a wide variety of puppets built from scratch. The class meets Thursdays from 2 to 4:45 p.m.

The first project, one incorporating the clay skull being constructed in the workshop, is part of this year’s SU Showcase for Sustainability taking place April 18 at the Schine Student Center.

‘The theme is the future of plastics, and so we’re making giant puppets completely out of plastic,’ Navias says. ‘It’ll be a large skeleton creature riding a pale horse made out of plastic.’

On the first floor of the house, a giant piece of plastic tubing snakes around the floor. One student applies a blow-drying device to the tubing, adorned in small leafs of plastic sheeting. The paint of the floor bubbles under the heat.

Navias, unconcerned with the bubbling floor, takes the tubing and moves it accordingly. The ‘pale horse’ suddenly becomes apparent.

‘As we were looking at the future of plastics, one of the themes of the future of plastics is death,’ Navias says mischievously. ‘And recycling. So much of the skeleton creature that they’re creating is recycled.’

This includes the skull; the clay has made several hundred masks before this project.

***

The second project is in collaboration with the fifth-grade class of Van Dyne Elementary School. Navias holds up a small cage crafted by his students.

‘We started with Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘I know why the caged bird sings,’ and so the image, for the theater piece, is a caged bird,’ Navias says. ‘If you think about different peoples and the songs that they create out of the movements, it’s that same issue of why do caged birds sing?’

Students working on the project traveled to Van Dyne Elementary School to work with groups of fifth-graders weekly. At the end of the class, the students and their parents will be provided with transportation to SU to see and be a part of the final production.

This freedom project is split into two groups: one works on the shadow puppets and shadow screen, and the other on the Gonzo-like phoenix creature.

Jillian Davis, a senior public relations major, shows off some of the preliminary sketches for the phoenix. The project will feature an enormous creature measuring 12 feet by 18 feet, covered in streamers with hinged, flapping wings.

Davis talks about how much she enjoyed her time working with the students, walking in each week and hearing them call out their names.

‘For me, that’s one of the best parts,’ Davis said.

***

On the second floor of the white house, several students sit, chatting amiably while ripping up strips from Wegmans bags. Though the SU students enjoy working with children and making such elaborate puppet projects, Navias is also a drawing factor to the class.

‘He’s awesome,’ says Cj Cervantes, an undecided freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. ‘He’s a really cool guy.’

Immediately to Cervantes’ left sits Sylvie Alusitz, a freshman jewelry making major. The two tease each other about the difference in size of their plastic strips.

Alusitz stops the teasing to comment on professor Navias and his passion for the class. Laughing, Alusitz reflects on one of her favorite memories from the semester.

‘One day, he was showing us masks and was rolling on the floor, acting out the masks,’ she recalled. ‘Is your professor going to do that?’

cedebais@syr.edu

Published on April 9, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chelsea: cedebais@syr.edu | @CDeBaise124