Children often entrust puppets much more than adults, says the puppet principal in the hospital<

What do puppet shows in hospitals for pediatric patients look like?

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We do not play in therapy and treatment, we try to convey humor, the head of the non-profit organization Medical Clown Jarčevský approaches

In hospitals, you usually walk around the rooms and play with smaller puppets. We are balancing on the edge - we have come to visit or we are playing a theater for you. I quite enjoy trying the border, because a fairy tale about a budulin is played, for example, only that as a result the plush toys play with the budulin, the story goes somewhere else and the child forgets that he is sick. Or they play in the playroom, the children sit at the table and watch. It is possible to interrupt it at any time, wait and start again. And then there are often theaters in the hospitals in the rooms where the performance can be performed. Especially in psychiatric hospitals, children have mental and physical problems and it is a big event for them, so they remember it. The work makes a lot of sense when we bring enlightenment there.

And what does working with doctors look like to make your visit part of the treatment process?

Sometimes we can make close contact. In some places, now for example in the Motol hospital for rehabilitation, we get an assignment and we try to work with it. So in the morning I find out that there will be a child who moves his left hand badly and it is not known exactly why. The child sees a puppet that also cannot move the hand, and the child begins to tell the puppet how to train. And it has a beneficial effect that he trains better for the next few days. Or we had an injection event where the child cried hysterically at the injection. When we injected the puppets one after the other and laughed at it, the next day the hysteria passed. Of course it hurts, but the child did it. So these are mini miracles.

Other puppeteers also collaborate with your members of the ensemble. Why does the Puppets in Hospital ensemble have been going to hospitals and helping hospitalized children for 16 years? So they can have fun and laugh again?

Because it works. It wasn't so obvious at first, you just think that children like puppets and that they will enjoy them. But over time, it turns out that the puppet, which is similar to a toy, opens up the possibility of communication. Often, when you play with children, the children match the little puppet, they are able to tell her that something hurts. That one starts to verbalize helps in retrospect. I remember a baby who didn't speak at all after some surgery. When the doll started asking him questions, he suddenly said something to him, but he didn't say a word to us adults, because there was a jam. That's why it helps.