Led by me (Poppy Burton-Morgan)
So had a great exploratory session last night playing around with all sorts of puppets and styles of puppetry. As ever add/delete and adapt anything and everything I say as you see fit. Firstly a brief description of some of the puppets we used in our session might be helpful. There were roughly 4 types:

1. The puppets I have made/designed that I used in several of my production which consist of a head on a stick attached to a coat hanger covered by a cloth with one arm (jointed) and a fully articulated hand (attached to a glove) - I'll put some photos of them in the photo section.
2. What I shall call 'the invisible man' – whereby you create a puppet by holding a hat above a shirt (on a coat hanger) and 'invent/fill in' the rest of the puppet with your imagination. This was incredibly effective and perhaps the most interesting of all the types we explored – partly because it required at least two people to operate it. This might work with a pair of trousers too (something to try for next time).
3. Object manipulation – taking quite random objects and animating them – in our case – making a face with a hat and a banana, or a suitcase, or a hat, a banana and a book. Or a small jointed mannequin (the kind that you draw from) though strictly speaking that's not quite object manipulation but I can't think what category to put it in. Here we observed noise – grunts or words or gibberish helped immensely to give the objects life and movement. And it brought a whole new meaning to the Gravedigger's scene!
4. Marionette – of which I have had little experience – but Victoria brought in a beautiful two-faced Indian marionette, which we all had great fun with. As there is less specific control they can be very effective at conveying a general feeling but can't effectively demonstrate/illustrate in the way we found type 1 can.

The main thing with all these types (and puppetry in general) is to ALWAYS look at the puppet and never at the other performer or into empty space – if that is where you give your energy and focus that is where we as audience will give our energy and focus (the same is true of live acting too.) This can be particularly hard if you are also providing the voice for the puppet – sometimes the tendency is to start 'acting' so you, the actor, look away to 'think'. That said you can play with splitting focus but we immediately become aware of the puppeteer, which is usually less interesting than watching the puppets simply do their thing!
And assuming we're interested in watching the puppets and not the puppeteers you can look either at your own puppet or at the puppet with whom yours is communicating. This is also hard when several people are operating one puppet as with 'the invisible man' type but you must simply look to the puppet and let it lead you rather than taking your lead from your fellow puppeteers.
Now for the other rules – many of these are obvious, some less so, but all worth being constantly aware of when using puppets.
Cardinal rules of Puppetry

1. Hold/cover as little of your puppet as you can.
2. Don’t block your puppet (in thrust this means creating lots of diagonals and never closing down the space.)
3. Give more personal space – we tend to forget that it(though interesting to play with very close proximity for intimacy)
4. Tocks – move a little in the opposite direction before you make a move – i.e. move down before standing up.
5. Stillness is good (don’t feel obliged to keep it constantly moving to keep it alive.)
6. Change the rhythms and movement of your puppet. Don't feel you need to be stuck in a mode of movement that's always slow and fluid (which is the tendency) – short and sharp movements can be hugely effective.

General observations from the session
Economy of movement is really important. In reality we move far more than we need to. With puppets every move counts so every move (and often the smaller the better) must mean something whether it's about character or action. This is a great exercise in becoming aware of what physical gestures and characteristics we use daily but subconsciously and what is necessary to tell a story physically but with as much clarity and detail as possible. As in acting (I think) the specific is always better than the general broad brush approach – we tell a clearer story.
It's almost impossible to be hammy or false with puppets because even if they move in a very stylised/pantomime or melodramatic way – their physical language always reads very truthfully. Perhaps this comes from the performer having to absolutely commit to whatever action the puppet is playing – indeed the only time when puppets are bad actors is when the puppeteers don't commit and throw them around willy nilly.
Consequently demonstration/illustration can work in puppets where it fails miserably in people – especially with the more articulated puppets – the trick is to illustrate in an interesting/beautiful way – not simply moving the puppet emphatically on every word. It becomes something closer to mime and very quickly a language evolves where certain angles of the head translate as certain emotions.
Spoken text seems to work better when the puppeteers don't provide the voices (except with object manipulation where it was very helpful in bringing them to life) and it's hard for a puppet to soliloquise, possibly because their physical vocabulary is better at describing character or action rather than the more cerebral or ideas based thoughts.
It's interesting to experiment with who leads when the speaker is separate from the puppet – Alex did a great job of letting his speech follow the puppet in pace and in vocal quality when he was speaking the lines of Hamlet but not operating it. As did Bedi and Emily with object manipulation when they were both voicing their own puppets – the voices created were completely born out of the physicality of the puppets (for Bedi a child-like yet somehow strangely pedantic tennis ball-in-a-hat and for Emily a refined, Scottish book-with-a-banana-for-a-nose!)
Puppetry tends to make you aware of several facts as actors. You become aware of all the unnecessary aspects of your performance, you become aware of your body and how you use it (both specifically as yourself and more generally in observing physical characteristics in others) and it hammers home that there is no such thing as character – puppets don't have back-stories – they are so engaging because we project our own meanings and stories onto them. In fact often the blanker/simpler they are the more effective because the more we can project/invent meaning and fill in the blanks ourselves – this is why the invisible man was so powerful. The same applies with acting (I think) – a man crossing a room and breathing, or simply speaking words, is interesting enough – we invent the rest!
In conclusion playing with puppets will make you a better actor! Why don't they teach it in drama schools?
Hope this is useful – sorry if it's a bit oblique/obscure for those of you who weren't there – I find it quite hard to articulate in words such a physical world, as puppetry is, but if it sounds interesting come along to the next session, which will hopefully be Weds 11th in the 11am-1pm slot.
Lots love, Poppy