Seminars

In yesterday's post, I talked about collaborating with other ministries. Today, I am going to stick with a similar, yet slightly different, topic. Puppeteering is a team effort, within the team, as well as with other teams. 

A big part of seminars is to share ideas. Part of each seminar is two different competitions. One of the competitions is strictly puppeteering. The other competition is a creative ministries competition that includes things such as miming, clowning, and human videos. Teams have only 3 minutes to get set up and are then judged on a set of criteria that is specific for the type of performance. Each team is then rewarded a bronze, silver, gold, or in very rare cases, platinum awards. Which you get is based on number of points, so there could be more than one team getting each award level. Anyways, I digressed a bit here. What this paragraph was supposed to be focused on was sharing ideas. Whenever you watching the competitions, you get to see how different teams do different songs. You may see a team do a song that you have done before or that you would like to do. However, they may do a prop, special effect, or choreography that you would have never been able to think up on your own. However, seeing the song performed at the festival was able to serve as an inspiration for you in your ministry. 

Another part of seminars is getting to learn about different techniques to puppetry and other creative ministries. There are three different sessions over the weekend where you can choose a workshop to attend. Some of the workshops are on puppetry while some of the workshops are on other ministries. During the third session, there is even something known as the lip sync challenge. This is a puppetry challenge where one member of each team that wants to be represented (16 different puppeteers) compete. We get a number and then go behind the stage. We start off in groups of 4. Each group has to use their puppet to lip sync to a song. It is a song that you may or may not have ever heard before. I have competed in the lip sync challenge a few times and have actually made it to the top 3 twice. Once I got second place and the other time I got third. It is always something fun for me that I enjoy at the seminars. 

Another great thing about the seminars is getting to meet a lot of new people. There are professional puppeteers through Creative Ministries Solutions that are there running it. There are also just so many other puppet teams and ministries there that you can meet so many amazing people. I am going to leave this topic as is for now because tomorrow's post is going to talk about some of the amazing people I met because of the seminars that we go to. 

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Proverbs 1:5 New International Version (NIV)

⁵ let the wise listen and add to their learning,    and let the discerning get guidance—  (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%201:5)

Proverbs tells us that we should continue to learn. This means that even after we have been doing something for awhile, it is still important that we listen to what people say and to learn from it. And, if we are struggling with something, we should ask for guidance. If we are going to live for God, we need to make sure to always be growing in our Faith and knowledge of Christ and His teachings. 

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To see the rest of the posts from this series please click here