Best Position for Puppeteers...What do you think?

Puppet show? Yes... that's one of my favorite things to do. I like playing handpuppet so much. In fact, I played several performances for SundaySchool children in my church. I usually played with my friends and the performance usually took 3-4 people as puppeteers.

In playing puppet, we often found some difficulties. One of those is to set the best position to play with the puppet. We played with our hand-made-stage that resembled a box, large enough to be filled with 4-5 puppeteers. I will share about the stage later in the next post.
So, it has always been a problem for us to find the best position to play the puppet. We had try 2 different positions, i.e. : sitting and kneeling. There is another way to play it, which is to stand while playing the puppet, but we never try this one.

With the sitting-position, we found that puppeteers wouldn't get tired easily, as they could sit during the show. But in this position, the movement of the puppet was very limited, since they sit on a chair and couldn't move freely.
We tried to overcome this problem with the kneeling-position, so puppeteers could easily move the puppet from the left to the right or up and down. But this position also had a weakness. Puppeteers would get exhausted easily, since they had to kneel down during the show. Sometimes we put a mattress or a pad to support our knees. Yet, we had a problem with our arms. Yes, you can imagine how painful it would be to keep lifting your arm during the show. Anyway, we still try to find the best solution for those problems.

Standing-position could be an alternative in playing handpuppet. I found this method in "Sesame Street" and Jim Henson's "Muppetshow". They played the puppets this way. You can see a clip below, showing the crew were doing rehearsals before the show. But may be it was different since they played it on TVrecording. That means they could set the camera so that the puppeters would not appear on the screen. They could also re-take the scenes or make a scene in several taking. This would save puppeteer's energy during the show.