One aspect of ventriloquism is to involve your audience in your act. There are several ways to do this. We have all seen the face mask that is put over a willing victims face so that you the vent can control his/her mouth movement and voice. This is a good way to use someone and get a good laugh from the audience.
This can be the most effective when the person that you use is well known and liked by the audience. To do this, you need to do a bit of homework before the show starts and ask some questions as to the type of person you want to ask to “volunteer” for your victim.
If you don’t have the face mask, you can with a little practice find a victim and teach them to open and close their mouth as you squeeze on their arm or the back of their shoulder. This works best if you get a few minutes to practice with your victim before the show starts.
Once they get the knack that the harder you pinch, your wider they should open their mouth you can get plenty of movement and great laughs from this. The key is practice. Without practice you can just end up looking like a novice.
On good variation to this is to have your puppet on your hand and use your hand on your volunteers shoulder so that your puppet and your volunteer carry on a conversation while you just look on “innocently”.
As you get better at this, your puppet can talk to the person, the person can talk back as you squeeze the shoulder and then you can interject comments to and from both of them.
Don’t try to use this arrangement as your entire act. Use is for just a part of the show and continue to interact with your puppet and yourself as the main part of the show.
This is just something new and different for you to add to the show to enrich your act.
That’s all for now. We will talk again next week.
Steve and JET
All great advice. I use two ventriloquist face masks for part of our INTERACTIVE show and two HUMAN DUMMY volunteers who agree to let me tap them on the shoulder when I want them to open their mouth.