This spring semester, Victoria Ralston, coordinator for the visual arts concentration in art studies, will be teaching IDS: 495: The Art and History of World Puppetry. In this class, students will learn about the history of puppetry and create their own puppets, which is how Ralston discovered her own passion for puppetry; finding a broken marionette at a thrift store, buying it and making it her own style. 

IDS 495: The Art and History of World Puppetry will be offered online during the 2021 spring semester on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:30-2:45 p.m This class can fulfill students’ history and analysis requirements for art studies, theater and visual arts majors. 

According to Ralston, students will study different types of  puppetry, such as shadow puppetry or Bunraku in Japanese theater. Students will also learn how certain puppets move and how their actions affect people and relate to the human condition. Additionally, students will have the chance to create their own puppets. 

“The way we’ll do it is I’ll ask people to identify what they’re interested in,” Ralston said. “We’ll meet individually, and I’ll give them examples, something like a mentor artist. And they can begin to draw and design and plan.”

Grayson Fulp, a second-year studying arts studies, took the class in spring 2020. He said he liked the class because he found the material interesting and enjoyed making his own puppet.

However, Fulp took the class when it was still taught in-person and the pandemic caused the class to shift online mid-semester. According to Fulp, asynchronicity was the biggest change to the course.

“Something that did continue was reading,” Fulp said. “Almost every class, we had to write a short response paper…I don’t think we did a lot of synchronous meetups in that time. There were some videos she gave us to asynchronously watch because, at that point, the biggest focus of the class was going to be the production of our final puppets.”

Although the class is catered towards students in art studies, Ralston highly encourages students from other majors to enroll in her class because she believes it will make the class more diverse.

“I’ve seen some engineers in there, and there is quite a good fit when you think about what it takes to string or have a piece of sculpture so that it moves in an animated way,” Ralston said.

While the class is currently a special topics class in the interdisciplinary course, Ralston is in the process of making it a permanent class. By making the class permanent, Ralston said, it can help students fulfill their GEP requirements, such as the global knowledge requirement.

Ralston said she had to go through various committees and faculty members to make the class permanent. She said the process is going smoothly and hopes it will be done by January of 2021.

There are no prerequisites for the course.

Students who are interested can enroll through MyPack Portal or talk with their advisor about how it fits with their degree requirements.