Puppets

How to Explain It

"One of you is the puppet. Your partner is the puppeteer. Puppeteer, you control your partner's physical movement with your hands. Do not touch them: use gesture and proximity. Puppet, follow exactly. Your body does what the puppeteer shapes it to do."

Objectives

Puppets develops two skills. The first is physical surrender: the capacity to relinquish control of one's body and treat externally imposed positions as dramatically real rather than embarrassing impositions. This is a core acting skill that applies beyond the game: performers who are physically defended or controlled rarely make bold physical choices in scene work.

The second is physical listening: reading a partner's physical intentions and responding to them before they complete the movement. In puppet work, this means committing to positions as they are being created, not waiting until the puppeteer is finished.

Scaffolding

Begin with a non-verbal version: the puppet only moves (no speaking), and the pair must tell a wordless story through position changes alone. This removes language from the exercise and focuses entirely on physical commitment.

Once players can surrender physically, add dialogue: the puppet speaks only in response to the positions they have been placed in. Introduce a simple constraint to prevent improvised justification: the puppet must begin each line from whatever position they find themselves in, not from a position they chose.

For groups new to physical contact, establish clear touch protocols in advance: puppeteers may only touch limbs and torso, not the head or face.

Common Coaching Notes

• "Trust the position. What does this body know that you don't?"
• "Don't escape the position. Find the scene inside it."
• "Puppeteer: you're the director. Make choices that serve the scene."
• "Puppet: commit before you understand. The understanding comes after."

The game's comedy arises from the gap between the physical situation and the performed dialogue. A puppet placed in a grand, sweeping gesture speaks dialogue that must justify that gesture; one placed in a cringing, low posture speaks dialogue appropriate to submission or fear. The more specifically the puppet commits to reading their position as dramatically real, the more the game works as performance.

The risk is that puppet performers speak regardless of their physical state, treating the positions as incidental rather than informative. When this happens, the scene is two people talking who happen to be moving oddly, rather than a scene driven by physical constraint.

Salinsky notes that the game has been performed in versions where the puppeteers are directed to simply move players around without intention, producing random physical comedy. The stronger performance version requires puppeteers who understand that their choices drive the scene: a puppeteer who makes deliberate, scene-serving choices gives the puppet more productive constraints to respond to.

Audience puppeteers benefit from brief coaching before the scene: "Move them like you are telling a story with their bodies."

Viola Spolin documents the exercise as "Puppets and/or Automation" in Improvisation for the Theater (1963), presenting it as a total body involvement exercise in Chapter V alongside Rhythmic Movement and Tense Muscle. Spolin's framing situates the exercise within a curriculum concerned with physical freedom and responsiveness: the puppet's complete surrender to external physical guidance is a formalization of the physical listening that all scene work requires.

The game later entered the short-form performance repertoire under the name Moving Bodies, in which audience members volunteer as puppeteers for a scene performed by two improvisers. Tom Salinsky and Deborah Frances-White in The Improv Handbook note that Moving Bodies (also known as Puppets) achieved television exposure and became widely recognized as a standard short-form game, though they document instances of the game being simplified in ways that diminished its theatrical demands.

Asaf Ronen in Directing Improv categorizes Puppets (a.k.a. Moving Bodies) as a scenic game and describes the core mechanic: players speak only while audience volunteers physically manipulate them, removing performers' control over their own physical choices.