A Day In The Life: freelance puppeteer Gemma Khawaja
Gemma Khawaja shares her inspiration for her unusual and creative career.
MY interest in puppetry spans 21 years, since completing my degree in Drama at the University of East Anglia.
Discovering the medium of puppetry opened a new world for me. It is a broad genre, with enormous creative scope, and I felt an immediate connection with what I saw.
Norwich Puppet Theatre offered a City and Guilds qualification evening class in puppet-making and I signed up as soon as I finished university.
The course was taught by puppet-maker, performer and director Joy Haynes, who became a hugely inspirational force in my life.
I signed up as a volunteer to help with children’s workshops and as a steward for the shows.
The workshops gave me new presentation skills and the stewarding developed my interest in puppetry.
It expanded my understanding about the scope of the genre, as I was able to see shows visiting the theatre and meet professional puppeteers.
After that I took the advanced course, which entailed creating a show.
By then my confidence had grown and I felt supported by the puppeteers and creatives I met.
I began to attend more puppeteer masterclass training opportunities and built up experience through voluntary work before applying for puppetry and theatre in education roles.
I had loads of rejections at first, which can be disheartening, but I kept going and began to get auditions and eventually professional roles.
I also developed my City and Guilds show “Liang
And The Magic Paintbrush” into a fully touring piece of my own and toured this on and off for several years.
There is no typical day. It depends where I’m working and if we are in the show’s research and development, rehearsal, in-house performance or touring phase.
In a school or nonprofessional theatre venue, I operate the technical equipment as well as perform.
Sometimes this means using remote buttons or laptops, but sometimes it’s done the old-fashioned way, using a lighting desk with manual fade up and down dimmers.
Whichever way the tech works, it is always incorporated into the show’s natural movement and choreography, but it takes lots of rehearsal time to work out how it’ll happen!
I like it when children ask questions such as, “How were the lights changed whilst you told the story?”
I tend to work in shows aimed at family audiences. Children ask questions, and during the show they often comment on what is happening as the story unfolds.
I enjoy hearing how engaged they are with the story or with a character’s journey.
As a puppeteer you bring to life something that is inanimate, but it’s wonderful how emotionally invested in the characters children get, even though they know it is not a real person.
Although they see me, the puppeteer, creating the character before them, they empathise with the situation and the character’s emotional journey.
Developing empathy through story is important for child development on a social and emotional level, and I’ve seen adults go through the same emotional connection to what they see on stage.
In “Liang And The Magic Paintbrush”, a magic bird says, “A true heart can make dreams come true.”
I think that was my way of saying to myself, and the children in the audience, that we all have the capacity to get where we want to be in the end – we just need self-belief!
To find out more, visit www.gemmakhawaja.co.uk.