Puppetry for Actors: Breath, Focus, and Bringing a Puppet to Life

The breakdown says “puppetry skills an advantage.” Or the director of your next show hands you a bird on a rod and says it’s your scene partner now. You’re a trained actor. And yet the moment you pick up the puppet, it looks like what it is: a thing on your hand, with you standing behind it.

That gap is what puppetry training closes. The good news is that the skills are close to the ones you already have. You’re still playing intention, reaction, and stillness. You’re just routing them through an object, and the object can’t fake anything. It shows the audience exactly what you give it, and nothing else.

The short version: puppetry teachers tend to start with three basics. Breath makes the puppet look alive, focus makes it look like it’s thinking, and weight (often called the fixed point, or gravity) makes it look like it exists in the same world as everyone else. Learn to see those three in a sock on your hand, and you’ll walk into a puppetry workshop or audition knowing what the room is looking for.

Start with the three basics teachers use

Different companies name the basics a little differently, but the same three keep coming back. A Derby Theatre workshop run by puppeteers from Hijinx’s Meet Fred was billed as a session on the three basic elements of puppetry: breath, focus, and the fixed point. The Australian company Dead Puppet Society teaches its core principles as focus, breath, and gravity. Those are the same three ideas, with “fixed point” and “gravity” both describing weight.

Here’s how each one reads from the house:

• Breath tells the audience the puppet is alive. A small, regular rise and fall makes a still puppet look like it’s resting rather than switched off.
• Focus tells the audience what the puppet is thinking about. Wherever the eyes (or the nose, or the front of the head) point, the audience reads attention and intention.
• Weight tells the audience the puppet is real. If it sinks a little when it lands, pushes off the floor to move, and stays at a steady height when it walks, it seems to belong to gravity like everything else on stage.

Give the puppet breath before anything else

Handspring Puppet Company, which built the horses for the National Theatre’s War Horse, says on its about page that it realized “attention to breath had been neglected in the puppetry tradition.” When the audience notices the puppet’s tiny in-breath and out-breath, the company says, they enter into an empathetic relationship with it. Breath is the difference between watching an object and caring about a creature.

On Broadway, one of the puppeteers who operated Joey told TDF’s Mark Blankenship that the hardest early lesson was resisting human reactions and accepting stillness. He passed on Handspring’s note: “You look more like a horse when you’re just there breathing.” A puppet that keeps fidgeting looks operated. A puppet that breathes and waits looks alive, and when it does move after that stillness, the move lands. His teammate said a small tail flick after a still moment “really reads.”

So how do you make a puppet look like it’s breathing? Start with your own breath, then let the puppet borrow it:

1. Put a sock, a glove, or a rolled towel on your hand. Sit in front of a mirror or a phone camera.
2. Breathe in slowly and let the puppet rise a fraction as you do, as if its chest is filling. Breathe out and let it settle. Keep the move small.
3. Now change the breath to change the feeling: a quick, shallow rhythm for fear, a big in-breath and a long release for relief, a held breath for surprise.
4. Add a thought. Let the puppet take a breath just before it turns its head, the way you breathe before you speak.
5. Watch the recording with the sound off. If you can tell what the puppet felt without hearing anything, the breath is reading.

Step four matters more than it looks. The National Theatre’s resident puppetry director Matthew Forbes told BroadwayWorld that the War Horse teams use “the inspirational breath, that in-breath before you do something.” It’s how a puppet seems to decide, and it’s also how puppeteers cue each other.

Breathing with a partner

When two or three of you share one puppet, breath becomes the way you talk without talking. The Broadway Joey team couldn’t see each other’s faces or speak on stage, so the hind puppeteer followed the heart puppeteer’s breathing to match his footwork. Puppeteer Chris Pirie, quoted on Durham University’s Life of Breath project, describes one partner exaggerating the rise and fall of the ribcage so the other can pick up the rhythm, sometimes with a spare hand on the partner’s back. He compares the shared in-breath to an “amber traffic light” and the out-breath to green: get ready, then go.

Point the focus and the audience follows

Focus is where the puppet is looking. When the puppet looks at something, the audience looks there too and reads a thought. When its gaze drifts, the thought vanishes. In the Broadway War Horse, TDF reports, the head puppeteer’s technical job was the eyeline, because it showed what the horse was thinking.

Two things go wrong for actors new to this. The first is eye level. The puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal described an audition for the Metropolitan Opera’s Madame Butterfly in which she misjudged where the puppet’s eyes were aimed, and it stared at the ground for her whole turn on the head. From behind the puppet, your sense of where it’s looking is often wrong, so check it in a mirror or on camera.

The second is your own focus. Your eyes are a pointer too. If you look at the audience, or at your fellow puppeteer, you pull attention off the puppet. Jason Jacoby, puppet captain on Avenue Q, put it simply in an ARTpublika interview: two puppeteers on stage are not looking each other in the face. They look at the puppets. He added that when puppeteers do look at each other on stage, it’s usually to signal that something has gone wrong.

A quick focus drill: put three objects around the room at different heights. Let the puppet notice one, take an in-breath, and look at it fully. Hold. Then let something else catch its attention. Make each new look a decision, not a slide.

Give it weight so it lives in the world

Weight is what makes a puppet seem to exist rather than float. One of Joey’s Broadway puppeteers told TDF that the heart puppeteer has to control the horse’s weight, because you’ve got to believe it “weighs almost a ton.” However heavy or light the puppet really is, the weight the audience sees is something you perform.

Some companies call this the fixed point. The Canadian company The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, in a 2018 call for puppeteers, described it as “a palpable relationship to gravity.” In practice, that means a few habits:

• Keep the floor where it is. A hand puppet walking along a table or a playboard should stay at the same height, not bob up and down or sink out of sight.
• Let the puppet push off to move. Before it jumps or stands, it should gather and press down, the way you bend your knees before you jump.
• Let it land. When it comes down, it should sink a little and settle, not stop dead in the air.

If you’ve done animal work, this will feel familiar: you’re studying how a body carries itself under gravity, then putting that body somewhere other than your own.

Know what a puppetry audition may ask

A puppetry audition can look a lot like a normal one, or nothing like it. Movement director Josie Daxter told Spotlight that some puppetry castings aren’t very different from a typical acting casting, and that companies may be looking for movement, physical theater, or devising skills rather than puppetry experience. “It’s not always as specific as you have to be already experienced in puppetry,” she said.

When you do get puppet work in the room, expect it to test the three basics. The Old Trout call asked for a short video in which the puppet climbs something, sees something in the distance, wants it (or fears it), and then jumps or falls back down. That one little story checks weight on the climb and the drop, focus on the distant thing, and breath in the reaction. The company said it was looking for a breath connection between character and performer that showed tension being held and released.

Shows with large puppets may audition you in groups. In Kowal’s Madame Butterfly audition, twelve puppeteers warmed up together, then worked in teams on a three-person puppet, rotating through feet, torso and right hand, and head. The director sped the movement up until the person on the feet was running. She felt one mistake was coaching her team out loud, when the panel wanted to see non-verbal teamwork. The last task was a stylized gliding walk across the room.

Some productions fold training into the audition. Jacoby said that on Avenue Q, “puppet camp is part of the audition process,” and that training for new actors is typically two weeks. Forbes told BroadwayWorld that War Horse casts spend their first two weeks just on puppetry technique, and that the company looks for “an aptitude towards puppetry” and for people who are egoless and selfless. You aren’t expected to arrive finished. You are expected to learn fast and play well with others.

How to walk in ready

• Warm up your body, not just your voice. Kowal worked the puppet’s feet from a squat on the floor, and big puppets ask a lot of your legs and arms.
• Wear clothes you can kneel and crouch in, in a plain dark color. In shows where the puppeteers stay in view, a plain dark color keeps the eye on the puppet.
• Keep your eyes on the puppet, and keep your face neutral unless you’re told otherwise.
• Work silently with partners. Use breath and touch to cue each other, not whispered instructions.
• Take notes and apply them right away.
• Be ready for the unexpected. A two-session Morley College course, with a guest from London’s Little Angel Theatre, is built around both “traditional” prepared audition practice and the surprises that come up on the day.

If the audition includes a group improvisation, the same rules as any devised call apply; our guide to improv in auditions covers how to say yes and stay generous.

Get the words out of your way

In many puppet shows you speak for the puppet, and that adds a layer: your mouth is doing the lines while your hand does breath, focus, weight, and often lip sync. If you’re still reaching for the text, your attention goes inward and the puppet goes dead. The lines need to be automatic before you add the puppet, the same way a fight needs the words solid before the choreography.

Offbook helps with that part. You can hide your own lines while the other parts stay visible, swap them for first-letter cues, or hide the whole script for a final test, as the video below shows. Realistic voices read every other character and wait for you, so you can run the scene with the puppet on your hand and your eyes on it, not on the page. You can also turn a speech into cues with our free first-letter tool.

Once the lines are solid, practice the scene in layers: breath only, then focus, then weight, then add the spoken lines back in. It’s the fastest way to find which layer drops out when the scene gets busy.

Find a class and keep practicing

Puppetry is learned in a room with a teacher and real puppets. Look at what the theaters near you run: Little Angel Theatre, for example, has run a Puppetry Foundation Course, a ten-week beginners’ course covering object theater, glove, shadow, table-top, and three-person puppets, with the basics of manipulation and making. Daxter’s advice in Spotlight is to take workshops, see as many puppet productions as you can, and practice with puppets you make yourself.

If you like training that starts from the body, puppetry pairs well with mask work, which asks for the same clear focus and the same willingness to let an object do the talking.

Questions actors ask

How do actors learn to use puppets?

Usually through workshops, short courses, and on-the-job training. Some productions teach their own style: War Horse casts start with two weeks of puppetry technique, and new Avenue Q actors typically train for about two weeks. Movement, mask, and physical theater classes are useful groundwork too.

Do I need puppetry experience to audition for a puppet show?

Not always. Casting may look for movement, physical theater, or devising skills instead. It helps to show that you understand breath, focus, and weight, and that you take notes quickly and work well in a team.

How do you make a puppet look like it’s breathing?

Link the puppet to your own breath. Let it rise slightly on your in-breath and settle on your out-breath, keep the move small, and take an in-breath before every new thought or action. Change the rhythm to change the emotion.