The Hollow Heart – Toy Theatre and the Bush

The story starts with a girl walking through the forest, feeling sad and with a hollow heart. She is blind to everything around her, asking the forest how to heal her hollow heart. In that moment she comes to a tree whose heart is burnt out and hollow and she leans into it. Breathes. The tree breathes with her and offers her a story of how its hollow came to be and why it is now so strong. The girl begins to come alive to the magic of birds and the magic of the forest. Now she is forest too, what can she be and do in the world?

This workshop features a 30 minute toy-theatre (table-top puppet theatre) performance, “The Hollow Heart”. The performance invites students to enter a world of sensing, feeling and wonder in nature, encouraging a deepening relationship with trees, birds and the lichen between our toes.

Following the performance, we ask the children to follow in the footsteps of our main character, guiding a playful sensory wander outside. We then craft toy-theatre puppets inspired by the characters in the show, and invite the children to then try their hand at creating their own toy-theatre story.

This would suit children from 5 to 10 years old.