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The Angry Summer: bringing Welsh history to life through puppetry
Students from across the College are bringing ‘The Angry Summer’ to new audiences through puppetry, film, and visual storytelling.
Reimagining a Welsh story
Inspired by Idris Davies’s poetry collection about the 1926 miners’ strike, the project combines specialist craft skills with community engagement, with the work touring to the Victoria and Albert Museum and venues across Wales.
Created at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, ‘The Angry Summer’ project is a documentary about the creation of a puppetry show inspired by Idris Davies’ poems about the 1926 miners’ strike. Instead of trying to tell the story in one fixed way, the team focused on smaller moments - glimpses of everyday life in a mining community during a long and difficult time in Welsh history.
Research formed an important part of the process, with the wider project team visiting Big Pit National Coal Museum to better understand the communities, environments and lived experiences connected to the story they were telling.
From the beginning, it was a fully collaborative project. Students worked across design, making, music and performance, often stepping into roles they hadn’t tried before.
For Ryan Dai, that meant learning puppetry from scratch:
‘Before this project, I had little experience in puppetry. It pushed me to step outside my comfort zone… not only learning how to construct a puppet but also how to perform with it.’Ryan DaiPuppet Maker/Puppeteer
That sense of figuring things out as they went runs through the whole project. One of the biggest challenges was turning 2D designs into working 3D puppets.
Simona Roeva describes it as a key learning moment ‘adapting a 2D design into a 3D piece was one of the most challenging but also very crucial learning experiences.’
It wasn’t just about how the puppets looked, but how they moved. For Puppet Maker/Puppeter, Elowen Packer, who made and performed two characters, that changed how they approached design: ‘It taught me the importance of prioritising movement… so it is effective in performance.’
At the same time, everything had to feel consistent. Different students were building different elements, but it all needed to sit in the same world. That meant constant communication, sharing ideas, adjusting, and working closely as a team throughout the process.
Finding connection with puppetry
The choice of puppetry was vital to shaping how the story could be told, and director Hazel Pring explains how it allowed the team to approach a real and still-relevant history, without creating it too literally.
‘We knew we were creating an abstraction of an abstraction… the history is real, the people were real, and the impact is still very real.’Hazel PringDirector
Puppetry creates some distance, but also a different kind of connection. It allows audiences to engage with the emotions of the story, rather than focusing only on realism.
The visual style draws on the work of Paul Peter Piech, but it’s grounded in research and a clear sense of responsibility to the material. One of the things that stands out is how much of the learning happened in real time. Students weren’t just applying skills - they were developing them through the process.
Shelly Wang describes studying puppetry as more than technical training:
'It’s not a mechanical skill… it’s a process to understand and interpret. We create puppets with our own understanding.’Shelly WangPuppet Maker/Puppeteer
That balance between structure and creative freedom is a big part of the experience. Students are encouraged to experiment while also being supported when things don’t go to plan.
Shelly reflects on how important that support was: ‘when I met tough problems, my supervisor guided me patiently… it made me feel the joy and motivation of puppet making.’
Sharing the work with communities
As the project expanded to include workshops and an education pack, it brought new challenges and helped students to develop new skills beyond performance and making.
Taking the work into schools and communities meant learning how to distil and communicate ideas clearly and create engaging and inspiring workshops for young people.
‘Communicating with children was something I wasn’t used to… we had to adapt to their interests. One of the boys was really into football, so we showed him how to make a footballer puppet with a kicking movement.
It’s a small detail, but it shows how the project connects — meeting people where they are and using creativity as a way in.’Elowen PackerDesign for Performance student
When the story came to life
When reflecting on the project, the standout moments aren’t always the final performances. Often, they’re the points where everything comes together.
For Simona it was ‘having our set and music ready… it was inspiring to see all that hard work come together.’
‘When I got the movement right… it really felt like the puppet came to life,’ said Ryan Dai.
And for Hazel, it was an audience response during an early sharing: ‘someone recognised a street from our research as where her grandparents had lived… it was a reminder that this history is still very much alive.’
The story lives on
The project has been shown at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Library of Wales, but for the students, the impact goes beyond where it travels.
It’s about what they’ve learned — how to collaborate, how to adapt, and how to take an idea all the way through to something real.
And maybe most importantly, how design can carry meaning.
As Ryan puts it: ‘I hope audiences feel a genuine emotional connection to the work.’
That connection between the people who made it and the people who experience it sits at the centre of ‘The Angry Summer’ project, and is something these students will take with them long after the project ends and into their future creative practice.
