Honorary Memberships

WAPASA from time to time recognizes and gives honorary memberships to those in their elder years who have contributed a lifetime of work to the puppetry and storytelling arts through the lens of Rudolf Steiner’s indications. 

We all have learned so much from these puppeteers and storytellers and are inspired by the beauty, truth and goodness that they created in their life’s work. 

Estelle Bryer

Adola McWilliam

Nancy Mellon

Susannah White

Monique Grund

Estelle Bryer

- honorary member since 2021

Estelle was one of the founders of the Constantia Waldorf School in Cape Town, South Africa where she worked as a kindergarten teacher, puppeteer and both artistic and curative Eurythmist. Her puppetry has been seen by more than a million people primarily through her hand puppet fairytale performances she created and performed in schools, shopping malls, birthday parties and the Rainbow Puppet Theatre she helped found in Capetown. Estelle is now in her 90’s, a nonagenarian, and continues to share her love, warmth, humor, and enthusiasm for puppetry through her story aprons and her sweet little monkey hand puppet named Suzu. Estelle lives in Capetown, South Africa and she is an inspiration to all her know her.


Estelle is the author of several books including:

  • The Rainbow Puppet Theatre Book – 14 Plays (WECAN)

  • Movement for the Young Child a handbook for Kindergarten Teachers and Eurythmists (WECAN)

  • Advent and Christmas Stories (Hawthorne Press)

  • Whispey (Wynstones Press)

Films made by Green Renaissance about Estelle Bryer when she was 88: 

Because it Helps

Love Life

‘BE KIND’ - It’s The Size of Your Heart That Matters. (short clips of Estelle in the video)

Adola McWilliam

-honorary member since 2023

I was born in Amsterdam, Holland , in 1933. My father was Polish, my mother Dutch. They both were devoted anthroposophist’s. My father was a wonderful artist, composer, painter, writer. He gave lectures on Spiritual science. But also was a consul, to earn money. My mother was quiet and shy. Their marriage was a very happy one and harmonious. We had a happy childhood. I had a younger sister, Mila, very gifted musically and artistically. I lacked these gifts. She was also highly intelligent.

My father was transferred to France at the beginning of the Second World War. So we grew up in three languages, Dutch, Polish and French. I did my whole lower school in France. Later, back in the Netherlands I went to a Waldorf School. I loved it. I was very connected to all three countries and later also to Scotland.

As a child I was very connected to swans and still am to the image of the swan. I am now working on the puppet show of Lohengrin, with Hannah Hidson, she is the producer.

My main interest in life was the HUMAN BEING. I wanted to study medicine but instead ended up in Camphill Scotland and became a devoted student of Dr. Karl Koenig .

I gave my whole life to living with special needs children and later also adults. It was the gift of the special needs person that helped us understand what a human being is and how to build up Community. By living in Community, serving anthroposophy we prepare for the future, the 6th post Atlantean period.

I discovered the healing effects of puppets especially when working with Autistic children. The classical autistic person shies away from the light that we all shed as humans. The puppet has the human form and is brought to life by the puppeteer, it is an expression of what Rudolf Steiner calls the Spirit germ. And thus the whole world is opened up to the child by taking in a puppet show. Even if you use your own voice, it is screened by the puppet. I could have whole conversations with a severely autistic child via a puppet. It was a miraculous experience.

I married the only Scotsman that worked in Camphill at that time. We had three sons and moved to the United States. Later to start a Camphill initiative on the West coast of Canada.

So this is my life in short and my relation to puppetry.

 

Nancy Mellon, MA

-honorary member since 2022

Nancy Mellon, MA is a counselor, mentor and former Waldorf teacher whose work specializes in storytelling as a healing art which awakens the goodness, truth and beauty of the spoken and written word.  Beginning in the 1980’s Nancy began following the path of storytelling deep into physiological processes, pioneering new awareness of the relationship between language, imagination, and well-being. Nancy’s early interest with puppetry was inspired by puppeteer, Gisela Biddleston. Nancy offers many workshops and courses during the year.

Nancy is author of:

Please check out Nancy’s website http://www.healingstory.com for a delightful podcast series where Nancy speaks about the storytelling arts. Plus much more.

 

Susannah White

-honorary member since 2026

Puppets have always been a part of my life. I remember lying on my back in a meadow looking at the blue of the sky and watching the flower heads of the clovers and daisies sway above me and “listening” to their conversations. When my father would travel, he would bring us puppets back from all over the world. He built me a puppet theater that fit into our red radio flyer wagon, and we would wheel it around the neighborhood (We lived in Buffalo, NY.) presenting puppet shows. Friends and neighbors would get involved, and we would all make puppets, create scenery and write our own scripts. 

Later, while studying textile design, I became interested in felt making and realized the potential that traditionally felted wool had for solving one of my childhood puppet conundrums--what, as a child, I labeled, “dead puppet syndrome”.  Handmade felt maintains its living structural integrity even when not in contact with a puppeteer. I also became enthralled with dyeing with plants; adding shimmer and sparkle and a vibrancy that comes alive in the wool. And so, over 50 years ago now, I became a puppet builder, making puppets and performing objects for families and Waldorf Schools all over the world. There are now 3 generations of felt makers/puppeteers in our family, and we often work together. I still work with wool right off of the sheep- skirting, picking, washing, dyeing, carding, and felting. I grow the majority of my plants, and process them in my home. All of my puppets are original designs and hand sewn. I believe that everyone who picks up a puppet should have nothing less than a carefully crafted ally: sturdy, beautiful, and ready to work. There are no short cuts.

I am blessed to belong to a very special community of revolving students, fellow performers, and audiences. I can look out and see the faces of the children as they watch and listen. Each character, every gesture, the melody of speech and song, are all reflected in their rapt attention and innocent smiles. It is such a gift to see this. 

Encouraging others, (pretty much everyone I meet) to tell stories/be a puppeteer/make puppets, has resulted in a stream of enthusiasts that then set off on their own. Anyone can do it. And the venue can be as casual as a street corner, farmer’s market, a living room; as well as a formal performance space. I like to encourage the audience to participate through song and gesture, as well as send them home with their own newly created puppet.  I hope to keep doing this work all of my life. 

One of my favorite stories involves a country mouse and a city mouse. We all have our place on this earth. I am not a traveler. I am not a writer or photographer. I am not leading a movement. Chances are, we will never meet. I am most likely found in my own home, working with the wool and finding who lives in the felt. I am the quintessential country mouse. 

But you may at some point come across one of my puppets. When I complete a puppet, even a tiny finger puppet, I look at it and smile. If it smiles back at me, I know it is ready to head off on its own adventures. There are so many stories to tell.

Monique Grund

-honorary member since 2026

To meet Monique is to meet joy, wonder, kindness, courage, love, hope, truth, creativity, imagination and beauty — qualities she helped instill in countless children, families and colleagues during her decades as a founding teacher of École Perçeval in Chatou, France and of San Francisco Waldorf School.

Born in Breslau in 1938, Monique spent part of her childhood in Dornach with her aunts, a eurythmist and a stage actress. Living so close to the Goetheanum shaped her deeply: she recalled the excitement of being on stage as a child in a production of Faust, and all she learned from her aunts in speech, movement, color and gesture. She loved to play in the forest and formed a lasting connection with nature, though the war years brought great difficulty.

She attended the Waldorf School in Basel and lived for a time in England, where she met her dear friend and mentor René Querido, who invited her to help found École Perçeval. She taught there twenty years as a class and language teacher, recalling those years with immense joy — especially summers with a beloved school family in the seaside town of Arcachon.

Destiny brought Monique to San Francisco in 1978 for a sabbatical, where she again met René, then director of Rudolf Steiner College. His encouragement led to her extraordinary life as the founding teacher of San Francisco Waldorf School. Dagmar Eisele, her first kindergarten assistant, recalls that Monique lived at first in the home of Virgilia Dakin, forming deep and lasting connections with families, many of whom became teachers and remain her friends to this day. In those early years she returned each summer to the Goetheanum for guidance from Elizabeth von Grunellius, the first Steiner kindergarten teacher. Her exceptional eye for beauty made her classroom the subject of a special book by renowned photographer Michael Kenna, Monique's Kindergarten.

Puppetry began as outreach and as an antidote to television, when Monique realized how little Waldorf education was known in San Francisco. She formed The Magic Lantern Traveling Marionette Troupe with early childhood teachers, board members, music and class teachers, parents and a few lucky faculty children, aided immensely over the years by Cory Powers and Michael Garrett, whose professional lighting and staging elevated the productions. For more than forty years the troupe brought fairy and folk tales to festivals and fairs, libraries and farmer's markets — among them Nya-Nya Bulembu/The Moss-Green Princess from South Africa, the Aztec-inspired The Flame of Peace, The Enchanted Tapestry from Guangxi, and the Mi'kmaq story The Invisible Hunter. The marionettes and table puppets were hand-sewn under Monique's guidance, each created for a certain story and dressed in colors chosen with deeply symbolic meaning. Full concentration was required at all times, as was coming to fully inhabit one's puppet, be they a frog or a miller's daughter — with live music, and Monique always as the storyteller, her clear, strong, vibrant voice resounding the truth of the fairy tale.

She also wrote her own stories for the children in front of her and for particular seasons. "The inspiration comes from the children," she often said. Dagmar recalls how she would set up puppet shows in class while the children played, deliberate in every gesture, in the choosing and placing of the cloths, tucking under the corners — all of it later imitated with great reverence by the children in their own puppet shows, and even in how they cleaned the play yard.

After a short retirement to Big Sur, Monique returned to support the SFWS preschool for a number of years, gifting the children with beautiful puppet shows and delicious soup. She is now visited each week by the preschool and kindergarten children in her garden flat across the street from the school.

Andacht zum Kleinen — reverence for the small things: gestures, speech, and the care that flows into everything. This defines Monique's work in the kindergarten and in her puppetry. As a founding teacher of two schools, she has to this day an extraordinary ability to make things happen through her deep interest in others and her constant advocacy for the children and the school.

We invite you to hear from Monique herself in The Art of Puppetry and Performance with Monique Grund, a wonderful mini-documentary produced by Michael Garrett and freely available online, in which she shares the inspiration for a new story she wrote in 2013 and a new form of marionette presentation. The premiere of The Princess Mermaid is also freely available thanks to The Movement Academy Project by Valerie Baadh, filmed by Michael Garrett.

Monique is now retired after 57 years of Waldorf teaching, and just celebrated her 88th birthday on July 20 — the same day Marjorie Rehbach's puppetry summer camp in Los Osos began working with The Princess Mermaid. Each new puppetry endeavor is a treasure, and it will be such a joy to share with Monique how the children receive and work with the story she wrote.