Strings of communication

Ohm-Pong’s reaction after he realises that his body is full of junk food.

Characters have been adapted, both in size and design, to suit viewing by children.

When 200 junior high students gather in one room, you can do little to hush them up, let alone educate them. But if entertainment is combined with the education message, the results can be astonishing.

This was the case when learning post recently visited a 25-minute educational puppet play put on to alert kids to the dangers of a bad diet. Out-of-proportion characters like “Ohm-Pong”, with his oversized belly, resonate well with the young audience, helping them make the connection between junk food and obesity.

Ohm-Pong is a boy with a problem — he’s constantly pestered by a character called “good mouth”, who tries to persuade him to eat healthily, and “bad mouth,” who tempts him with junk food. This is a mental struggle that most kids can identify with, and the play ends with a message: replace junk food with healthy food and our bodies will stay fit.

While heard often, the fact that the message is presented in a way that kids will identify with helps to hammer it home — or that’s the hope of this particular project, which was initiated by the Ton Kla Institute and the Sema Thai Marionette Group. The project also receives much of its financial support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.

From July 6-15, the group performed its puppet play, entitled “Uh… Uh… Don’t Eat Junk!”, to 13-15-year-old students at four Bangkok schools. However, there’s more to it all than just a performance in front of a captive audience. Another way of making kids aware of certain issues — in this case, an environmental concern: all the puppets are made of recycled material — is to recruit them to the group itself.

Students recruited this way will then join the group for year-round activities, which involve learning more about healthy eating, producing a stage play, using puppets to send particular messages, and the art of making the puppets themselves. This year is the trial period; if successful, the project will be expanded to other age groups.

Pongsakorn Thaotong, a group member who plays the “bad mouth” character, explains that his group is aiming the message at the junior high age group for a reason.

“We would like to promote healthy eating in adolescence because these kids still have the potential to grow physically,” he says. “Content-wise, we think that students in this age group can still be taught to change their bad consumer behaviour. If we don’t start them young, when they grow up it’s too late to change.”

A total of 160 students — 40 from each school — can volunteer to take part in this project. By attending the camp and year-round workshops, these students will create their own productions based on the theme of healthy food consumption.

Towards the end of the 2005-2006 school year, five teams from each school will compete to find the final best teams. These teams will then represent their schools in the grand finale in which they will perform in front of the public and honorary judges, with one team selected as the ultimate winner.

“I think I will join this project,” says Jirapon Onsamran, a Mathayom 3 students from Pracharad Bamphen School, after seeing the performance. “My friends are thinking about joining too, because this kind of opportunity doesn’t come to us every day.”

Jirapon says she is drawn to the colours and puppet characters. She said that the play adds a whole new dimension to learning and helps her visualise what junk food can do to her body.

Wooden characters produced by the Sema Thai Marionette Group for use in its professional performances.

According to Pongsakorn, getting students involved in the actual process of puppet-making is important to the entire performance’s outcome.

“In the performances, we have to express our emotions through the strings and the puppets. This is unlike regular stage dramas in which performers directly act,” he says. “So, the bond between students and the puppet is a crucial element that needs to be developed first.” By making the puppets from scratch, he adds, students will naturally learn to develop this bond.

Before advancing to the stage where students actually develop this bond, the first thing is to provoke curiosity and create interest in the art. Pongsakorn says that large puppets, or marionettes, are the perfect medium for school children because the art itself is very little known in Thailand compared with the more-traditional arts of small puppetry and shadow plays.

“Evidence suggest that marionettes were introduced to Thailand during the period of King Rama V [1868-1910], but the art wasn’t assimilated into Thai culture and was lost through time,” he explains.

In reintroducing larger puppet shows, the Sema Thai Marionette Group blends traditional Thai puppetry, which mostly involves stories from the Ramakian and local folklore tales, with modern themes. The outcome is contemporary puppetry that is able to perform both traditional scenes as well as stories that have been written for a specific purpose — such as the story of “good mouth” versus “bad mouth”.

Besides being able to integrate newly written stories into the performances, the marionette characters themselves can undergo redesigns in order to suit a particular age group or audience size. For this recycled marionette project, for example, the characters are custom-made to be larger, more colourful, and amusing, whereas characters used in the group’s professional performances stand at about 30 centimetres tall and have human-like appearances.

The flexibility that Pongsakorn and his group is adding to this art form may well be the very factor that ensures its longevity. Students like Jirapon and her friends are taking their first curious steps toward promoting a positive message. More importantly, these students may also be playing their parts in ensuring the survival of a lost art.