Returning to Israel, Ayelet spent four years studying education and theater directing. While directing a stage version of George Tabori’s My Mother’s Courage, Ayelet first stumbled into puppetry. “I was trying to figure out how to tell a story without 20 extra actors onstage, as the play requested.” Looking to tell the intimate story of how Tabori’s mother escaped the Nazis, Ayelet decided to set the show in the mother’s kitchen. “Her son is telling her story using appliances and materials found there. Retroactively I realized that I actually animated the kitchen.” With a beautiful use of delicately placed flour, utensils, and more, this show ran for three years in Tel Aviv. “The audience ate a dessert baked onstage made of the animated ‘ingredients.’ I use every material that I am working with as if I am trying to animate it…I never use the visuals as a background. The visuals and the actors carry the same weight.” On their first day, theater students stood in a circle, facing each other, not sure what to expect. Ayelet led them through a body and vocal warm-up, moving, jumping, and making sounds. They moved about the space, creating imagined worlds, transforming their minds and bodies into characters. When a bug suddenly crawled across the floor, instead of reacting as humans to squish or shoo the bug, the students stayed in character, following the bug along on its journey. This spontaneity of movement was an unexpected surprise that hooked the students in their very first moments together, bonding them as an ensemble. “I tell my students that the puppet doesn’t do anything; it just reacts. Just observe, just listen, be curious,” explains Ayelet. “I try to give them exercises that let them be observers.” They soon moved to working in pairs to manipulate stuffed animals. “Our big note was to stop rushing,” recalls Kendall. “Take the time to build tension. Create a relationship, not only between yourself and the object but also with the audience.” “Directing puppetry takes more time than directing actors, because every tiny action shows so much,” explains Ayelet. “If actors are doing movements, puppets are doing micro-movements.”
“This was a new concept to us,” share
William and Lauren. “As actors, we learn to always be doing something onstage, but with puppetry we realized the importance of stillness, allowing the audience to focus on one thing at a time. Not just moving our bodies, but making the puppet an extension of us.”
After just one class, students had an entirely new outlook on theater and
puppetry. Next, Ayelet asked them to record a loved one telling an emotionally significant story. Gathering in a circle, each student played their recordings, amused at how many times their loved one had to rerecord because they were laughing or had forgotten an important part of the story. Sharing these stories was a brilliant way to disarm the students and draw them into a shared imagined world.
Their next assignment? Choose objects that, combined with the audio recording, bring the story to life. Soon the room was filled with tables covered in shoes, sweaters, toys, kitchen utensils, and more. Students placed and replaced objects to portray comedy, tragedy, fear, and love. “We learned that each object, even the audio that you bring in, is a performer,” shares Kendall. “If you don’t practice with it, it’s like not practicing with a scene partner.” As the students rehearsed and performed, just a few words from Ayelet transformed a disjointed piece into a cohesive theatrical presentation. One student began by wearing a sweater, which they slowly removed, and then used the armholes and body to form eyes and a mouth. Another student used sneakers and kneepads to tell the tale of an injury that had sidelined her final game. “We really focused on building a world. Suddenly everything was a puppet,” shares William. Kendall agrees, “I started seeing the world differently. When I was watching TV, I started thinking, why is that thing in that room? What is the significance?” William, Lauren, and Kendall share their enthusiasm. “It’s my most favorite class I’ve ever taken,” Kendall chimes in as William and Lauren nod in agreement. “You can get a bunch of puppets together, but how do they make sense together? That’s what you are really searching for. Not what I expected. I thought we were just going to watch Sesame Street.” The students’ solo work turned to collaboration as they prepared for their final presentation. “An Evening with Ayelet Golan: Art and Puppetry in Modern Israel” provided an opportunity for the public to learn more about the artist and her process with her students. Ayelet spoke about several of her projects and the many hats she wears. “My artistic
identity is still quite fluid.” In addition to teaching, she performs Puppet Cinema with Itim Ensemble, projecting images for an audience as they are performed and filmed live on camera. She directed A Sick Day for Morris McGee, which traveled internationally, including to the New Victory Theater in New York City. She created Concert in the Sand, a historical piece about the first concert held in Tel Aviv in 1936, before Israel was a country. Using Israeli sand as a theme she said, “We poured sand through a small hole and it created a screen. We projected characters onto the screen. As you work with different materials, you suddenly become an expert, up late at night pouring sand
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Above: A Sick Day for Morris McGee created and directed by Ayelet Golan, performed by Maayan Resnick. Photo: Dori Kedmi Below: Ayelet Golan performs a whale at the North Atlantic Right Whale Festival, Amelia Island, 2019. Photo: Genevieve Bernard
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