A veteran puppeteer will help residents bring cloth and wire to life through a five-week course on puppetry set to start this month.

Kathryn Mullen, a veteran puppeteer who worked on projects including The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, Star Wars and The Dark Crystal, is set to lead the “From Pencil to Puppet” course, guiding participants through crafting and performing with puppets.

Holding a fluffy, light purple puppet, Mrs Mullen said: “They will make one of these guys. They can do whatever colour, whatever fur, but it will be the basic pattern. We are all doing it together at the same time.

“The first half of the workshop is building and the second half is going to be performance.

“I am going to be teaching them to lip-sync, how to move the puppet and eventually, I pray and hope, we will get to be able to do a little performance.”

Mrs Mullen said her dream was for the course to bring together a local puppet troupe who could perform regularly.

She added: “I hope there are one or two or maybe three people in this workshop that really say ‘I love this, I want to do this, I want to carry this on, how do we start a puppet group in Bermuda that will be ongoing and do shows’.

“You have to commit to something like that. It’s not easy to do but I think in Bermuda there is a real opportunity to do something like that because people will help.”

Mrs Mullen, a trained actress, fell into the world of puppeteering by accident.

She said: “I did a little bit of live puppetry in my twenties in New Orleans because I met someone who was doing puppets. I had a little bit of that but I was basically acting.

“Then I got to New York and that same friend got me a job in the Muppet workshop one summer because I needed a job.

“That's where I started meeting people and I guess she pushed Jim Henson to audition me, which he did, and he hired me.”

In 1979 she worked for Henson on The Muppet Movie before moving on to The Muppet Show, the Muppet Caper and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, where she worked with Frank Oz to bring the iconic character of Yoda to life.

Mrs Mullen said that she was assigned to Star Wars because Henson was developing The Dark Crystal and wanted the team to gain experience with a less “puppety” character.

She said: “It was research and development for us. We had no interest in Star Wars otherwise.”

Mrs Mullen said that while there was a “steep learning curve”, the lessons proved useful when work began on The Dark Crystal, where she portrayed the main female character, Kira.

She and her husband, Michael Frith, later went on to work together on Fraggle Rock, Between the Lions and other projects before launching No Strings International, a charity aimed at using puppets to deliver often serious messages to children.

Mrs Mullen said that one of the main differences in acting and puppeteering was the use of monitors, which allow puppeteers to watch their own performance live.

She said: “An actor doesn’t do that. An actor doesn’t watch himself perform either on stage or on film. You can look at it afterwards but not while you are doing it. It can be extremely distracting.”

Mrs Mullen urged those who are interested to sign up,: “There are a lot of reasons to come. I would hope that people would come because they are interested in puppetry and want to explore their own creativity.

“I didn’t know I wanted to be a puppeteer when I started this. I didn’t know this would be something that would challenge me the way it did, and oh my God, did it. It took me to a place I never thought about. It surprised me hugely and I never looked back.”

Those who are interested in taking part in the course can register online at the Bermuda National Gallery website.