I came to the puppet theater club by chance. My grandmother brought me to the children’s creativity center in the “Sokolniki” park, so I could take figure skating lessons. Upon seeing an announcement about the opening of a puppet theater studio at the entrance, I, of course, insisted on checking it out. And so, I began studying both figure skating and puppetry at the same time. By that time, I had been playing the piano for several years.

The puppet theater studio was my first serious theater. At least, that’s how I saw it. No longer was I merely an observer of lessons and rehearsals; I wasn’t a guest anymore—I became part of the process. We were preparing an entire play based on the fairy tale “Teremok.” I was given two roles right away—The Dog and The Rooster. We made the puppets ourselves, sculpting their heads from plasticine, applying papier-mâché, sewing the bodies, painting them, and so on. It was an extraordinary process, bringing the characters to life—my Dog and my Rooster. Reading the play, developing the roles—everything about it was a fascinating world, the world of a new play, a new performance, and I was an important part of it.

Thanks to my grandmother, who wasn’t afraid to enroll me in this studio and took me there several days a week, I learned how to bark, portraying different moods of a dog (which I have mastered to this day), and crow (which has become harder with age).

We prepared the puppet play for the New Year holidays and took part in shows at various schools. For me, this was my first job. Not a game—work.

I still don’t understand why my father—a director and actor—didn’t pay attention to my interest at that time. He didn’t hear me read the play in different voices, searching for the right way to present my dog. Perhaps he was too immersed in his own world of directing, or maybe he didn’t want me to follow in his profession.

A couple of years later, the head of another puppet theater club in our neighborhood left. The holidays were approaching, and the kids were left on their own. Knowing about my passion and seeing me performing at various schools, they asked me to stage a play for the club. “Stage” is probably too grand a word. But I was eleven years old. It was my first play.

I didn’t become a director of the puppet theater, but much later, I returned to puppetry, working at the State Central Puppet Theater in Moscow of Sergey Obraztsov (still under the leadership of Sergey Vladimirovich himself), where I did the choreography for the first production of Leonid Filatov’s fairy tale “The tale of Fedot the Archer.” Later, I would choreograph the ballet “Thinking of Petrushka,” where the main characters represent dolls , set to the music of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrushka.”

And years later, as an accomplished choreographer, I returned once more to my world of puppets, creating a full puppet ballet “The Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh” at the Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater. It was a true adventure.

Puppets were also part of my beginnings. At the time, while I was being raised to be a worthy citizen of communism, a person—an artist, a citizen of the theater—was growing inside me.

I was a decent student and actively participated in the life of the school groups led by the authorities. I even had the fortune of taking part in the greeting of the 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. For young readers, let me clarify: it was a big deal! But, perhaps, it was also my first experience with false theater, and I suppose it was quite useful, even though I was just a child. Of course, all the newspapers published articles about the greeting of the delegates by the pioneers. But there was a curious incident. A photograph of me, alongside other children in pioneer scarves, standing in the aisles of the Kremlin Palace (Congress Hall), was published in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura—the main publication for the workers of the arts. My parents joked about it for a long time.

The day I left my neighborhood school and entered Bolshoi ballet school marked my transition from childhood to the future.

To be continued.

© Konstantin Uralsky