November 1, 2026 · No. 7 · WychBourne Village
The Front Page
Practice, practice, practice
Somewhere ahead of us is a wonderful ordinary evening: everyone has a puppet on their arm, we meet online, and the village comes to life from a collection of kitchens and living rooms. Getting a puppet into the hands of everyone in the troupe remains our longer-term goal. We are still working out the best arrangements until we can place our full order of 24 puppets with Hawkey Studios, hopefully in the spring.
Meanwhile, there is no need for the characters to sit quietly waiting for their bodies. Voice and character lessons give us plenty to work with now. We can get to know what someone cares about, how they answer a question and what happens to their voice when they are delighted—or trying very hard to sound as though they are.
Eventually, voice, gesture and puppet operation need to work together. That is a considerable conversation to have with our brains and hands all at once. Sometimes it helps to give just one part our attention: a line spoken in character, a listening gesture, the rhythm of a sentence. When we bring the pieces together again, one of them may feel a little more at home.
A modest weight, with a personality attached
It is giant-pumpkin season. For perspective, Don Crews’s Canadian record pumpkin weighed 2,537 pounds in 2022. Our cast is considerably easier to transport. Although it is generally impolite to discuss someone’s weight, the puppets have agreed to disclose that they weigh just over a pound in their T-shirts. Costumes and bling can add another couple of ounces. They insist this is entirely the wardrobe department’s doing.
Arm strength is another part of preparing for puppetry. If you are exploring equipment for comfortable practice, here are Amazon.ca searches for one-pound dumbbells and one-pound wrist weights. Check the weight of each item rather than the combined pair. These are options to consider, not a requirement for joining us; a weight also feels different from a puppet. Keep practice comfortable, and seek individual advice if a shoulder or arm problem makes you unsure.
Our first theatre flat has arrived
There is something new to practice behind, too. The first theatre flat has arrived and will be ready for our November 14 Troupe Workshop. One side brings us to Freyja’s Café; turn it around and we are aboard WychBourne Transit. A café conversation can become a bus journey without anyone needing to find parking.
Help Festivus travel around the Island
Our biggest invitation still needs legs—preferably yours. Please help promote the First Annual All Puppet Festivus regionally. Share it with theatre friends, arts groups, college programmes and neighbours across Vancouver Island. If you know someone with a puppet tucked away, this is an excellent reason to invite them both out.
Saturday, December 19 · 1–4 p.m. · JDF 55+ Activity Centre / Silver Threads Centre, Room 201, 1767 Island Highway. There will be an Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strength. The puppets have been preparing their grievances for some time. Pass along the invitation, and help us reach people beyond our usual circle.
We are also still looking for our Master Bard/Engineer: someone whose first thought is “I would love to record that.” We have equipment and a simple green-screen studio with room for ensemble shots. We need the person who enjoys bringing the picture and sound together. A personal introduction at Camosun, UVic or among your filmmaking friends could make a real difference. Send the Troupe Guide a note.
Around the Village
A book you can bring along
One pleasant thing about listening to a book is that it can join the life already happening around us. A walk, a quiet bit of housework or a comfortable chair can become a place to learn. For those of us who find a page of text hard going, hearing a human voice may offer an easier way into the same material.
This week, our Audible focus is Anthony Jacquin’s Alter Your Experience: The Art of Self-Hypnosis. Its invitation to experiment fits our village well: listen, pause, try something, then return with a little more experience of your own. The Learning with Audible guide is our starting place for finding the book and getting oriented.
There is no prize for finishing first. A short passage that you remember and use may be worth more than several chapters that float past while you wonder what is for dinner. Save a useful moment, listen again, and bring an observation to the next gathering. “I noticed this” gives us something to explore together. When an exercise asks for your attention, give it its own quiet time rather than trying it while driving or doing another task.
Around Manzer Commons
The next stage is coming into view
Our organisational readiness course finishes this week, and we have registered for the accelerator programme beginning in the new year. Each step has helped us see more clearly both the work ahead and the possibilities we might otherwise have missed.
The heart of Manzer Commons remains a permanent neighbourhood community and resource centre, with a home for our shared work. Studying social-purpose real estate has also opened our eyes to projects that bring community space and affordable housing together. If community-based solutions to housing are something you want to help build, there is a place for that interest here.
Sahhara, Trixie and Sneha, our University of Toronto student team, are continuing their study. Their report is due in early December. We will review their findings before deciding which direction makes the most sense for this property and our community. It is an encouraging moment: the questions are getting more concrete, and we have thoughtful people helping us work through them. Let us know if you would like to take part.
Your Two Cents · Jules at the café
Three things first
As the shakeout from the change in government gets underway, Jules has cleared a small space on the café table for a very large question: what should the three greatest priorities be?
Three is the important part. A list of everything we would like fixed can easily outlast the coffee, but choosing three asks us to think about what should happen first—and why. What would make the most useful difference in the lives of the people around you? What would you hope to see as evidence that something was improving?
Bring your choices to Freyja’s Café, and leave room to hear a neighbour’s. Their first priority may reveal a part of daily life you have not had to think about. Jules promises to listen, although she may have a fourth item hidden under her saucer.
The Tau Medicine Garden
Betony: a small plant with a great reputation
Betony rises from a gathering of textured leaves into slender stems carrying purple-red flowers. It is a woodland and open-ground plant with a reputation much larger than its modest stature.
In A Modern Herbal (1931), Maud Grieve traces its place in old physic gardens and the esteem in which earlier herbalists held it. Betony belonged among the plants people wanted close at hand, carrying household knowledge from garden to kitchen and apothecary.
Grieve records traditional uses for headaches, nervous complaints and digestive troubles. Teas, syrups, conserves and powders appear in its history. Its leaves also supplied a yellow dye for wool: the useful garden could serve a household in more than one way.
Alongside those practical traditions sat beliefs about protection. Betony was associated with warding off troubling spirits and nightmares—a reminder that older accounts of healing often joined the physical and spiritual worlds. Reading them tells us something about the people tending the garden as well as the plants growing there.
These are accounts of herbal tradition rather than treatment advice.
A Moment of Practice
First, STOP
There is a rather fitting beginning to Anthony Jacquin’s seven-step outline for self-hypnosis: Stop. His sequence is Stop, Sit, Sense, Set, Suggest, Surface and Set-Off. Before all that follows comes a word small enough to miss while we hurry toward the interesting part.
Alongside our listening to Alter Your Experience, I want to linger with that first word. The following is my reflection on it: stopping gives us a chance to notice that we are beginning something. We step out of the stream of answering, planning and getting on with the next thing, and make a little room for the experience in front of us.
That has a familiar place in puppetry. Before we launch into a line, there is a moment to meet the character. Before we try to improve a gesture, there is a moment to notice what our hand is already doing. If we rush straight into correction, we may never quite see where we started.
This week, let STOP be a small marker at the beginning of the practice you are learning. Put aside the competing task and arrive. Then follow the exercise itself, at your own pace. We will have time to explore the remaining steps; for today, beginning with our attention present is enough.
The Study Box
A character has something to say
The biography cards answer a very practical rehearsal question. We have found a voice, we are ready to practice synchronisation—and now what do we say?
Begin with a short passage from your character’s biography. Learn what it tells you about their life, then speak it aloud in their voice. Where do they pause? Which word matters to them? With a puppet, the same passage gives you familiar material for matching mouth movement to speech. Without one, you can work on the voice, timing and meaning, ready to bring your hands into the conversation later.
Once the words are familiar, ask another character a simple question and answer from the life you have been learning. The written biography gives you a foundation; the exchange helps you inhabit it. Knowing the set text well—including working toward verbatim recall—leaves more attention free for your scene partner.
The lessons have been updated to support this work. In Voice Found, work with one listening reference at a time and give yourself room to repeat. Find the cards through the Resources tab in your membership profile, with the monthly releases kept together and September and October in separate groups. Bring a passage you have practiced to our next workshop. A little familiarity can turn an awkward beginning into a conversation.
A Little Play
Who has the missing prop?
Three performers—Ari, Bea and Cal—each have one different prop: a hat, a cup or a bell. They are waiting behind the café flat, and the stage manager has only these clues:
- Ari does not have the hat.
- Bea has neither the hat nor the bell.
- Cal does not have the bell.
Who has which prop? No peeking behind the flat.
Ask the stage manager for the answer
Ari has the bell, Bea has the cup, and Cal has the hat. Bea’s clue leaves only the cup. Ari cannot have the hat, so must have the bell. That leaves the hat for Cal. Everyone is ready—provided someone remembers their opening line.
Hiring Hall News
Building support close to home
Our funding efforts to date have brought three wins totalling $34,820 awarded. We have had 15 unsuccessful requests, representing about $989,000 in known asks, and 109 requests remain pending, with an estimated $4.3 million requested. The pending count includes 80 local merchant invitations without fixed amounts; those are not included in the dollar estimate.
This week we focused on the Westshore business community, beginning outreach to merchants within roughly 2 kilometres of Colwood Corners. Our first 80 email invitations have gone out, asking neighbours in business to help with local puppet events. We are preparing a postcard campaign to reach more merchants, and the postcards have been ordered.
We’ll keep following up and share the news as answers come in. Every contribution helps bring the next gathering closer.
Support Our Troupe · Members’ notices
Jimmy’s invitation: make room for a little clowning
Clowning for the Health of It, with Fif Fernandes and Hamish Boyd, takes place in Victoria on November 7–8. No previous experience is required. See the workshop information and registration form.
Our village includes people making all sorts of interesting things happen. If you have a performance, workshop or community event you would like members to know about, send the details for the Weekly: what it is, when and where, and a link or poster we can share. Helping one another find an audience is part of being a troupe.
From the Troupe Guide
Working with what we have
Practice, practice, practice. I can hear myself saying it often enough that the puppets will soon be saying it back. It is easy advice to give when the room is ready, everyone has arrived and all the pieces are in place. Most of our days, of course, are not quite like that.
We may have ten quiet minutes and no puppet. We may have a puppet and no partner. We may have an excellent partner and discover that neither of us remembers what we meant to rehearse. There is nearly always something missing, and waiting for the complete arrangement can become a remarkably effective way of doing nothing.
This is where I find the Seven Habits useful in the ordinary business of learning. Beginning with the end in mind lets me picture the lively, responsive character I hope to help bring into the room. Putting first things first then asks a smaller question: what can I practice today that will move me toward that? Perhaps it is one paragraph of biography, spoken slowly enough to discover whose voice it belongs to.
Our Circle of Influence may be small on a particular morning, but there is usually something within it. I cannot make the full cast arrive this afternoon. I can become better acquainted with the character already in my care. I can invite someone to practice, or pass the Festivus invitation to a friend who might enjoy it. Those are choices I can make, and together they begin to change what is possible.
Then another person joins us, and the work grows in ways we could not have planned alone. Listening before deciding what our partner needs, making room for both people to learn, and discovering what we can create together bring more of the habits into the room. They need not arrive as a numbered lesson. Sometimes they look like allowing someone another try, or noticing that their unexpected idea has made the scene better.
And sharpening the saw belongs here, too. Practice needs renewal: a pause, a laugh, enough rest to want to return. I would much rather we build a habit we can enjoy than make a grand effort that leaves us reluctant to pick it up again. So this week, work with what you have. Give one small piece your attention, then bring it back to the village. We will have a little more to work with together.
— ChrŸs, Troupe Guide