southwark theatres' education partnership

This week, STEP met with Scary Little Girls to talk about puppetry with young audiences and why their workshops work so well. 

This year, Scary Little Girls are continuing their long-standing relationship with STEP by running a project called Chat, Clap, Caper! which will take place in eight nurseries in Southwark. The sessions will combine live puppetry from Baby Fairy Fifi, as well as songs and games to encourage young people to communicate with understanding and confidence. Watching a Scary Little Girls workshop is magical: the young people are positively spellbound by Fifi’s personality and captivated by her sparkly outfit - as illustrated in the main picture on the STEP homepage.

But what is it about Fifi that enables Scary Little Girls to explore positive behaviour so effectively with this young audience? "There is something about a puppet that makes the children simultaneously have enough distance to explore things that they would otherwise find uncomfortable, but it also brings out a protective side of them,” Becca explains. “Puppetry is a unique art form, and gives permission for a kind of intimacy. We’ve worked with young boys, who have behavioral issues. It’s really common for them to want to kiss and hug Fifi, and often they don’t know how to display that appropriately. Often it’s quite violent, and quite aggressive. We say, ‘let’s try that again. If you hurt them, they won’t want that affection again.’ To watch them calm down think about how they want to be touched, and touch the puppet in an appropriate way is fantastic. Of course, they can’t break it, but it’s a living thing for them. It’s enough of a reality for it to be an effective tool for work.”

The Company display the hallmarks of theatre-makers who truly understand their audience, and their dedication to making quality work for early years shines through. Founded by Scary Little Girls’ Artistic Director, Rebecca Mordan, the idea of the puppet Fifi delivering workshops came about at a birthday party. “I was already doing a set of positive behaviour workshops”, explains Rebecca, “and I met Diane at my friend’s child’s birthday party. Diane was working as the children’s entertainer, and was using Fifi the puppet to engage with the children.” Becca could see that Diane was clearly skilled, and that her command of her material, and the in which Diane negotiated the young audience was perfect for the positive behaviour workshops. “Her performance style was impressive – you could tell she had a background in performance”, Becca explains. “The themes she addressed in her set with the puppet, overlapped into areas of negotiating behaviour- all the things I was developing in my own workshop. As I was watching her, the workshop wrote itself in my head.” Since then, Becca and Diane have worked together to develop and deliver workshops and performances for all ages, but in particular, early years.

Sessions encourage the children to think independently, and to analyse their own emotional processing. Most sessions are one-off, but sometimes the Company work over a few days at an Early Years Centre. During a first workshop, the children make friends with Fifi. “She comes out of this carrier bag, it’s very undignified, she doesn’t have a rider or anything,” Becca jokes. During this first session, Becca has a small (orchestrated) dispute with Fifi. Fifi whips up the class to side with her and pick on Becca. Interestingly, Becca finds on the whole that the children find Fifi’s behaviour towards Becca unacceptable, and children have been known to defend and even hug Becca. They then talk to the children about what just happened and the choices they made, encouraging empathy and positive behaviour.

During follow-up workshops, children make their own puppet. “We try to get them to think about emotional processing exploring their mood, by selecting materials that have textures and colours that match how they feel, giving them a framework for emotional literacy,” Becca explains. But what kind of puppets do they make? “Girls make lots of Fifis,” Becca says, “and boys generally make superheroes.” Do they ever make puppets that are like themselves? “Well, it gets interesting when we what mood the puppet is in, and how their puppet is feeling. You very rarely get girls admitting to be anything other than happy. They really struggle to say ‘my puppet is cross’. In that way they want their puppet to reflect them, but it’s largely about what they want to present, and girls really struggle to present something that’s not happy. It’s such a prevalent thing if you’re a child, I mean, how often do you hear adults tell little girls ‘don’t cry, you’re daddy’s little girl’ or ‘cheer up’ or ‘smile’?” Whereas with the boys, their puppets have much more range. Some are angry, some are happy. “But equally with boys”, Becca argues, “there can be some extreme, dark emotions: puppets which are furious. We try and get them to exchange emotions and to get their puppet to interact with a puppet displaying a contrasting mood.”

The workshop Scary Little Girls delivered with STEP last year was on nutrition and encouraging the children to encourage them to try new foods. “We worked with child psychologists to develop the workshops, and developed a way in which to socially award children who are brave and try the healthy food. Nearly all of the children we work with at least try the food, and all of them have touched the different food.”

Becca explains how the workshops are not designed to get the children to like all the food and eat every piece of fruit and vegetable on their plate. “Actually, what we’re doing is to try it and get children to articulate why they liked or didn’t like the food. It’s all about emotional processing, and that’s more interesting to me than turning them into little automatons that likes the healthy food that the adult tells them to like. And as adults, we should question these assumptions. Why do we want a child to automatically obey? Shouldn’t we encourage them to question? That’s the only way they’re going to be safe. As Diane and I write and develop a workshop, we have to question our own adult assumptions all the time to enable children to think independently.”

Scary Little Girls may not be running their workshops on nutrition this year for the STEP Festival, but their approach to encouraging positive behaviour remains the same. “Puppeteering is all about empathy” Becca says. “Our priority is to use the puppet to teach the children about empathy, so we need to be able to empathise with them at every stage.”