The relevance of the topic of the article. Puppet theater is a cultural practice, the use of which in purposeful and systemic educational activity becomes an additional resource. The article examines the connection between the existence of a puppet in a modern puppet theater and the developing possibilities of this type of art for the viewer - a child and an adult.
The aim of the study: to study the possibilities of modern puppet theater as a space for understanding children’s play.
Research methods: theoretical and phenomenological analysis.
Description of the research progress. The study analyzes of the features of cultural-historical development and dependence on the social situation with the invariability of psychological laws of preschool age; the openness of a modern child to the emotional experience of the new, but with a different effect of previous stimuli; the insufficiency of the “miracle of revival” for the emergence of a natural experience in the puppet theater due to the richness of experience of visual transformations and animation of digital content. The analysis of the typology of theatrical puppets and the features of their use in modern theater: tablet puppets as the main type; active use and transformation of the subject environment; increasing the role of a “live” actor. In a modern puppet theater performance, the artist is visible and does not hide that he/she controls the puppet; the doll is small and controlled by the artist, who holds it with his hands or sets it aside so that it remains motionless while he/she performs another action; surrounding objects are involved in the game, which become characters, which makes it possible to talk about an analogy with the actions of a child playing, and about the doll as a child’s toy.
Research results. The study shows phenomenon of the similarity of the puppeteer’s position as a child playing a “director’s game” with a doll, and the features of the game direction accompanying the action, when the child directs what is happening, all the time being inside the process and creates an action along the way, experiencing the “resistance of the material”. The puppet theater is analyzed as a means of teaching adults who come as spectators and children to play, if after visiting the theater, adults implement what they see in playing with children; as an effective aid in overcoming cognitive centralization.
Conclusion. The experience of a modern puppet theater can take the director’s play of a child to a qualitatively new level, taking into account the properties of the “subject doll” and contributing to the regulation of behavior, understanding others with changing properties, which must be guided by for the implementation of the idea, the ability to abandon the most interesting and productive scenario, the ability to quickly respond to emerging obstacles and skills abandon the most interesting and productive scenario. The doll sets its own rules for handling it, which leads to the unity of the accommodative and assimilative orientation of the intellect, when the development of a child is considered in the process of separation from visibility, rigid attachment to the surrounding reality, in going out in consciousness beyond the limits of the close time and beyond the visible.