WHY I TEACH

In 1979, after a long work day on Sesame Street, I came home and saw a TV commercial with really bad puppetry. The hand puppets looked as if they were being held up in the air above the heads of untrained manipulators, flopping the characters about without any sense of weight. The lip sync was not so good either. Nor was the eye focus. I wanted to reach through the television and grab someone...and aggressively show them how it's done! Calming myself with a cup of chamomile tea, I sat down at my desk to ponder a possible solution.

I wrote a letter to my boss, Jim Henson, making a case why we should teach TV puppetry at the Muppets. So the new generation of puppeteers could be set-up to succeed instead of fail, the way so many talented yet untrained trial Muppet performers had over the years. Jim asked to meet with me to discuss. He liked the idea of someone teaching the skill, but said there wasn't enough work at the time for those who already knew how. He encouraged me to start a class on my own and offered to visit. I told him my students would faint if Jim Henson were to walk in the door of my little puppetry class. He smiled humbly. I offered to pass along anyone I thought showed promise. He agreed that sounded like a good plan.

But how? How do you teach something that has never been formerly taught? Jane Henson, Jim's wife, had led a few workshops where she taught simple lip sync and eye focus exercises. But no one had yet formulated a technique of teaching this particular performing art: TV puppetry. So I looked to my teachers I'd studied with in New York. I was blessed with many fine instructors along the way -- singing, dance, acting, writing. There was much to draw upon and I did. And that is how I came up with my style of teaching that was developed through trial and error over many years.