Our research has had diverse impacts ranging from shaping museum practice and community outreach to raising awareness of military conflict and trauma and transforming communication of urgent health issues.
The Challenge
Certain messages can be challenging to communicate within or across communities, whether due to technical contexts or barriers of mental wellbeing.
What did we do?
Matt Smith and Erika Hughes carried out research into community-based theatre making, developing new means of engagement and expression for individuals and groups. Smith developed a new field of ‘applied puppetry’ as a tool for (re)conceiving identities particularly for marginalised groups.
Hughes investigated the ways in which applied theatre can serve as a tool for communities to address their pasts. In particular, Hughes worked with military veterans to use performance and theatre to share their experiences.
Smith collaborated on the ‘Tupumue’ project to inform communities in Kenya around the dangers of lung problems and air pollution. In 2020, the approach of ‘Tupumue’ was employed by Smith and Hughes (in collaboration with other UoP colleagues) to spread knowledge about COVID-19 amongst the Mukuru community in Nairobi.
The Impact
Hughes’ work with veterans helped to transform understandings of military life and service. Knowledge was gathered, generated and exchanged, sharing experiences with both fellow veterans and civilians to increase understanding of military conflict and trauma.
The team’s applied puppetry work in 2019 saw 900 children learning about lung problems and air pollution. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, 21 local community practitioner ‘champions’ were trained to use the techniques of digital storytelling and applied puppetry to share knowledge and engage local perspectives around the pandemic. This training raised awareness and shaped community behaviours to support community health.
Applied puppetry
Applied puppetry, for me,
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it can make people think in different ways.
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I've been trained in Applied Theatre, which is theatre that goes into communities
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and into educational settings, but my specialism is puppetry.
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So it was the idea of bringing those two disciplines together and
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using a lot of really, really good ideas that are coming in Applied Theatre,
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bringing them to bear, bringing them into the practise of puppetry
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that's used for education and community work.
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Puppets, like visual arts, like all the arts,
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enable us to detach from the real.
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And by detaching from the real, we can not just make something
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an abstraction, but make something symbolic.
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The idea that something that is a puppet or an object,
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how it seemingly speaks to us as human beings and tells us stories
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but also makes us think about what it is to be is really part of what
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some of those practises can be in Applied Puppetry as well.
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Tupumue
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means ‘Let's breathe’ in Swahili and the Tupumue project aims
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to look at the lung health of children in two different communities
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in Nairobi, in Kenya.
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We know that there are issues with adult lung function,
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but we don't know whether that starts in early life.
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This is the first research study of its type in Kenya.
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Part of the project involves testing the lung function of the kids
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in the two communities, but we wanted to demystify the process
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of data collection for the children and also for their parents.
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In Tupumue,
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we developed new partnerships with community members,
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some activists, teachers, artists,
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and we come with suggestions,
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we listen to what the community needs,
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what the community desires, what they think would be effective,
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and we build tools
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and approaches together,
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which ultimately makes them more effective.
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We used a number of different creative methods
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to devise a sensitisation programme,
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and this included things like music, street parades and games,
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but it also crucially included a puppet show.
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I had, at that particular time, created a puppet to test out.
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It wasn't the most successful in terms of functionality,
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but it at least demonstrated that
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this might be something that we can develop
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as a tool to engage the public, particularly the children,
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because in the context of Nairobi, there's very little access
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to objects of play, and we got some very good feedback
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and interest.
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The collaborative relationship with Louis Netter is great
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because there was a necessity to have a set of puppets
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that could work effectively in a project remotely.
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He was on the ground.
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He was working in Nairobi, he was doing that practise and could see a need,
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see that the value of puppetry as an art form,
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and really, all I did in that is just collaborate with him in terms of the making,
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and then the next level of working with that
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was working with Cressida Bower.
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Working at making those partnerships really, really happen,
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and I just slot into that as a creative,
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but also as a thinker about how you can find different solutions to problems.
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Matt and Louis created the puppet together,
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and then we took the puppet over to Nairobi,
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and we toured the puppet show
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around to all the schools that were participating in the research study.
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We wanted to make sure that any child that was going to come in
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and participate in the study
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knew exactly what they were going to go through,
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that they had basically seen Billy the Puppet,
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and it was very successful.
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We've now tested the lung function of more than 2000 children
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and many, many of the children that turned up
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had seen the puppet show, so they all knew about Tupumue
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Let's Breathe.
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Through the puppetry,
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it has been remarkable to see the engagement,
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the enthusiasm on the ground
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for what Billy's Day Out is all about.
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The way that the puppet enables
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that some other level of interest,
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generates that other level of interest, which is critical.
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If a single person does it, it becomes about that single person.
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When a puppet does it, it is demonstrating for all.
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This project is all about collaboration
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and that's collaboration
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not only within the University of Portsmouth, with Louis and Matt,
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it's also collaboration with our partners,
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but most importantly, collaborating with the people
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in the two communities in which the research is taking place.
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It's about doing research
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in the community, with the community and for the community,
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and the reason we do that is to try and maximise
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the chances of our research having real impact in those environments.
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I’ve always loved puppets and essentially that idea for the puppet
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for Tupumue in the very, very beginning was just a hunch,
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and finally, through working with Dr Matt Smith and Matthew Hahn,
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it was really interesting to see this transform
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into something more formal and highly effective.
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Research takes a lot of time,
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takes a lot of organising, takes a lot of sorting out
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and working as teaching as well is part of what we do here,
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it’s an essential part of what we do, but one of the big payoffs for me
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in terms of that side of the research is getting those little golden moments.
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Working with the partners, asking them to give us
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their reactions to what we were doing and their idea of why we were doing it.
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That's really, really useful because it helps the credibility
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of what our research looks like in terms of impact, but it also
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feeds the heart, it makes you feel like, Oh, okay, that's really nice to hear that.
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To have some evidence of that is one of the best bits of it.
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That's the proudest thing I think I have out of all of it.
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It's really heart-warming to work in these communities, with the communities,
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especially in ways that can be quite entertaining and quite good fun.
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I’m very proud to be involved with these projects.