Thiago Farias turns his handmade striped-shirted puppet, Mustafa, to face the audience, then toward another puppet. Cue the music. Then the masters animate their puppets. Some are actors. Others are the puppet makers.
"We need to see the puppet's intentions, its decisions, then they start to move and the other one reacts," explains Paul deJong as he instructs 28 Humber College students enrolled in a pilot puppetry course.
The half-semester course bridges theatre performance and production.
Humber officials believe it to be the only cross-discipline puppetry course taught at a Canadian college.
"The idea of the puppets is that the performer animates that object. It's a great acting exercise that helps clarity of intention and clarity of movement," says deJong, who teaches theatre performance at Humber.
"Beautiful!" deJong enthuses to two puppeteers.
"The emotion has to be in the puppet, not in you or your face," instructs Heather Kent, who teaches theatre production. "Stay with your puppet. Your intention is through your puppet."
Performing on-stage is foreign to Kent's eight production students, who typically hone their skills in the prop shop.
"It's the idea that you can't build it if you don't know the needs of it - whether it's a puppet, a mask, a piece of scenery. You really need to know what it needs to do," Kent explains.
Later, Mustafa, animated by Farias, joins seven students and a collection of puppet spiders, flowers, a butterfly, a wolf's mask and two potato bugs - welder's masks painted white with googly eyes - in a rehearsal of their 10-minute skit, Wish to Grow.
Students mount their puppet performances next week.
"It's a nice opportunity for production to get on stage, too. We're not actors at all," says Heather Robertson, who created a 'wilting' flower in the prop shop.
Jade Lattanzi agrees. "It definitely brings us together. The collaboration is great."
The puppet course is expected to be expanded to a full semester offering this September.