Puppetry

• 1. Introduction

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  Puppetry depends on a contradiction. A puppet is an inanimate object, often resembling a human or animal figure, that has no life of its own until a human called a puppeteer gives it one. The puppeteer moves hands and arms to control rods or strings that drive the body, head, limbs, and sometimes the mouth and eyes. Sometimes the puppeteer speaks in the character's voice. At other times they perform to a recorded soundtrack. This is one of the oldest forms of theatre, first recorded in the 5th century BC in Ancient Greece, with some forms thought to reach back as far as 3000 years BCE. Some historians even claim puppets pre-date actors in theatre. The questions are how a sock or a piece of carved wood came to carry sacred meaning, why puppeteers were so often treated as a lower social stratum, and how this art spread into almost every human society on earth.

• 2. Anatomy Of A Puppet

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  Finger puppets are the simplest of all, tiny figures that fit onto a single finger. A sock puppet is formed from a sock and operated by inserting one's hand inside, the opening and closing of the hand simulating the movement of the puppet's mouth. A hand or glove puppet is controlled by one hand that occupies the interior of the figure and moves it around, with Punch and Judy as familiar examples. Larger hand puppets can require two puppeteers for a single puppet, as the Japanese bunraku puppets do. Marionettes hang from a number of strings, sometimes with a central rod attached to a control bar held from above. Rod puppets begin with a head fixed to a central rod, then a body form with arms worked by separate rods, which gives them more movement than a simple glove puppet. Whatever the method, every variety shares one process: animating inanimate performing objects to tell a story. That process serves entertainment, sacred ritual, symbolic effigies in carnivals, and a catalyst for social and psychological change in transformative arts.

• 3. Ancient Origins

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  In Egypt as early as 2000 BCE, string-operated wooden figures were manipulated to perform the action of kneading bread. Wire-controlled articulated puppets made of clay and ivory have been found in Egyptian tombs, and hieroglyphs describe walking statues used in religious dramas. The oldest written records of puppetry survive in the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, dating from the 5th century BC in Greece. The Greek word for puppet, nevrospastos, literally means drawn by strings, and Aristotle referred to pulling strings to control heads, hands, eyes, shoulders and legs. The Iliad and the Odyssey were both presented using puppetry, and by the 3rd century BC such plays appeared in the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis. In children's tombs across ancient Greece and Rome, clay and ivory dolls dated from around 500 BC have been found with articulated arms and legs. Some had an iron rod extending up from the tops of their heads to manipulate them from above, the same method still used today in Sicilian puppetry, though some researchers believe these small figures were toys rather than puppets.

• 4. Sacred And Secret Functions

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  Sub-Saharan Africa may have inherited some of the puppet traditions of ancient Egypt. Secret societies in many African ethnic groups still use puppets in ritual dramas as well as in healing and hunting ceremonies. In the 2010s throughout rural Africa, puppetry still carried the work of transmitting cultural values, a role that in large African cities is increasingly handled by formal education, books, cinema, and television. In India, the making of a tholu bommalata puppet is itself an elaborate ritual: artist families pray, go into seclusion, produce the required artwork, then celebrate the metaphorical birth of a puppet with flowers and incense. In the Philippines, higantes are giant papier-mache puppets paraded through town during the Higantes Festival, made as a devotion to San Clemente and as a mockery against colonial-era land owners who discriminated against Filipinos. The first puppeteers to reach Mexico arrived early: in 1519, two of them accompanied Hernando Cortez on his first journey there.

• 5. The Many Forms Of Asia

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  China has a history of puppetry dating back 3000 years, beginning with pi-yung xi, the theatre of the lantern shadows, known today as Chinese shadow theatre. By the Song dynasty, between 960 and 1279 AD, puppets played to all social classes including the courts, yet puppeteers were still considered to be from a lower social stratum. In Japan, bunraku developed out of Shinto temple rites, and Chikamatsu Monzaemon, considered by many Japan's greatest playwright, gave up writing kabuki to focus exclusively on puppet-only bunraku plays. By 1730 three puppeteers worked each bunraku puppet in full view, dressed all in black so they vanished against a black background while torches lit only the carved wooden figures. Indonesia's wayang kulit is an elaborate form of shadow puppetry popular in Java and Bali. Vietnam developed water puppetry, unique to that country, performed in a waist-high pool where a large rod under the water controls puppets that appear to move over water; the form dates back 700 years to flooded rice fields where villagers entertained each other. In Burma, now Myanmar, the marionette form Yoke the probably originated around 1780 during the reign of King Singu Min, credited to U Thaw, the Minister of Royal Entertainment.

• 6. India's String Country

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  Archaeologists working on the Indus Valley civilization unearthed a terracotta doll with a detachable head capable of manipulation by a string, dating to 2500 BC. The ancient epic Mahabharata contains references to puppets, and a Tamil classic, the Silappadikaaram, written around the 1st or 2nd century BC, gives another early reference. Some scholars trace the origin of puppets to India 4000 years ago, where the main character in Sanskrit plays was the Sutradhara, the holder of strings. The marionettes of Rajasthan are known as Kathputli, carved from a single piece of wood and colourfully dressed; Orissa's string puppets are called Kundhei, Karnataka's are Gombeyatta, and Tamil Nadu's Bommalattam combine rod and string techniques. According to Beth Osnes, the tholu bommalata shadow theatre dates back to the 3rd century BCE, using translucent, lusciously multicolored leather figures four to five feet tall with one or two articulated arms. A complete shadow performance of the epic in Kerala's tholu pava koothu can take forty-one nights, while an abridged version lasts as few as seven days. Indologists during the colonial era believed shadow puppetry had become extinct in India, but in the 1930s, as Stuart Blackburn records, evidence emerged that it had survived as a rural tradition, preserved especially by low-caste Marathi people who spoke Marathi even in non-Marathi states.

• 7. Punch And His European Cousins

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  The Christian church once used marionettes to perform morality plays, and it is believed the word marionette comes from little figures of the Virgin Mary, the Mary doll. Comedy crept in, an edict banned puppetry, and puppeteers simply moved their stages outside cathedrals and grew more ribald, which helped give rise to the Italian Commedia dell'arte. From the character Pulcinella came the British Punch, Anglicized to Punchinello, whose wife was originally Joan before she became Judy. The same root spread and shifted: Jan Klaassen in the Netherlands, Mester Jackel in Denmark, Petrushka in Russia, Vasilache in Romania, and Kasperle in Germany, where Judy is called Grete. In France, Laurent Mourguet fell on hard times during the Revolution and turned to dentistry in 1797, setting up a puppet show before his chair to attract patients. By 1804 he had abandoned dentistry to become a professional puppeteer, creating Gnafron the wine-loving cobbler and, in 1808, Guignol himself, whose victory is the triumph of good over evil. The Sicilian Opera dei pupi, enacting Frankish tales like The Song of Roland, is rooted in the Provencal troubadour tradition during the reign of Frederick II in the first half of the 13th century.

• 8. Puppets For Grown-Ups

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  In 1810, Heinrich von Kleist wrote an essay On the Marionette Theatre, admiring the lack of self-consciousness of the puppet. That idea, that puppet theatre could speak to adults with an experimental voice, ran through the 20th century. Sergei Obraztsov explored the concept of kukolnost, or puppetness, while Edward Gordon Craig's concept of the ubermarionette, in which the director treats actors like objects, shaped contemporary object theatre and physical theatre. Maeterlinck, Shaw, Lorca and others wrote puppet plays, and artists such as Picasso, Jarry, and Leger began to work in theatre. In the United States, Howdy Doody became a notable television marionette as early as the 1940s, and Jim Henson created soft foam-rubber and cloth puppets known collectively as Muppets, first through Sesame Street and later The Muppet Show. Henson branched into animatronics with his Creature Shop, seen in The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, and puppets reached the Star Wars films through Yoda, whose voice and manipulation were provided by Frank Oz. The Jim Henson Foundation, created to promote puppetry in the United States, has bestowed 440 grants to innovative puppet theatre artists. In 2016, Czech and Slovak puppetry was added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists, a formal recognition for an art that long performed at fairs and markets, its makers once classified alongside bandits.