Dowtcha Puppet Workshop.

We worked with Dowtcha over the course of 8 weeks. We explored the topic of segregation through puppetry, art and drama.Dowtcha encouraged and taught us to think outside the box. In many activities, we explored our creativity and how to look at problems with different perspectives in a fun way.Being a Comhairle member, most of us are already pretty confident public speakers, but Dowtcha made us not only look at the logical side but also on a creative and imaginative level.Overall, it was a very fun project to participate, but we feel that if we had two more weeks we could have perfected our performance at the end.

Our members assemble shadow puppets before our final show.

here is a link to a review of our dowtcha workshops by our very own Leticia. (please let us know if the link fails to work)

https://drive.google.com/a/ymca-ireland.net/file/d/1de6pQRZX3BCuJIocxrOSz2irtvx05vBH/view?usp=drive_web

our facilitator Elaine and member Jamie attempt to move some puppets.

In our exploration of the fable ‘the stone soup’ and using puppetry to depict segregation and discrimination, we discovered how easy it was for our members to become immersed within their characters. Each feud within the puppet families became divides within our own members, It showed just how quickly we can become discriminatory as a society. Our topic of segregation aims to highlight segregated communities within our city and how we can inform and better ourselves.

It takes three to do puppetry.
We learned to put ourselves into the mindset of our characters