Theater Work and Puppetry
I don't recall exactly how old I was when I made my first bird marionette with my grandmother, but that was the beginning of my love of puppets. I have collected a few "how to build puppet books" through the years and have enjoyed creating puppet characters, mostly wooden or paper-mached rod puppets. As my art classes for children grew, I started designing puppets for students to make.
These puppets were created by students and displayed at Kapolei Library in June 2013. The older students made rod marionettes (on the top row), and the younger students made characters as rod puppets. Both groups used wood and paper-mache to sculpt their puppets.
I began to dabble in theater work as a volunteer parent when one of my daughters participated in a production of Cinderella with CTO in 2017. I was part of the set crew and loved it! In fact, I continued to work on sets for the following two years. In 2018, I was an art resource teacher at Kipapa Elementary and was so excited to support the Kipapa Drama Club's production of Lion King, Jr. in the Spring of 2019. It was an amazing experience, and that was the beginning of my theatrical puppet production. It has been a joy not only working with the Kipapa Drama Club, but also Performing Arts Center of Kapolei and Kamehameha High School's Performing Arts.
