Shadows And Strings: Puppetry From Around The Globe

GREENWICH — Puppetry is a fusion of art forms. It incorporates all elements of the visual and performing arts including painting, sculpture, text, music, movement, and technology. By removing the need for traditional language, the art of puppetry has consistently crossed national borders and bridged cultural gaps through a universal language of movement and emotion.

As early as 5th Century BC, Herodotus documented puppetry performances. An exhibition currently being presented in Greenwich celebrates this unique art form, exploring its storytelling power and historic role as a means of handing down sacred stories and epics, while defining and preserving cultural and religious heritage.

The Bruce Museum of Arts & Science is presenting “Shadows & Strings: Puppetry Around the Globe” through February 29. The exhibition highlights the wide range of styles and cultures where the ancient art of puppetry has emerged and thrived over the centuries.

Puppet theater remains a vibrant contemporary art form. Current examples abound from San Francisco to Broadway. But to fully appreciate the contemporary explosion and its international interest it is helpful to understand some of the powerful origins of puppetry.

Organized by The Bruce Museum (with media sponsorship from The Advocate/Greenwich Time and additional support from Susan Bevan, Anthony Daddino, and Catherine and William Benedict), “Shadows & Strings” was guest curated by Leslee Asch, a recognized expert in the field of puppet theater. For more than 20 years Ms Asch worked as director of exhibitions for The Jim Henson Company and as executive director of The Jim Henson Foundation. Ms Asch is currently an independent curator and a frequent writer and lecturer on the subject of puppetry.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, puppets from around the globe –– Africa, China, Southeast Asia, Japan, Egypt, Turkey, Europe, and the Americas –– are on view. An extraordinary example of a Native American transformation mask is on loan from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. African figures include rod puppets from Mali and examples from the Gelede and Yoruba traditions.

From Europe, the heavily armored marionettes of Sicily and English Punch figures are on display. A large and strikingly elegant Bunraku figure from Japan is also featured; the four-foot-high figure requires three hooded operators. Such figures are rarely on display outside of Japan.

The Chinese shadow figures in the exhibition were originally part of Pauline Benton’s extensive collection. Chinese shadows are made of treated hide and lacquered with translucent dyes. Their semitransparent hues allow their brilliant colors to show through the screen. Ms Benton’s work inspired others including Jo Humphrey, whose Yueh Lung Shadow Theater performed from 1975 through 2000.

Ms Humphrey rescued and refurbished the Benson collection, and then passed them on to Chinese Theatre Works, led by Kuang-yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin.

Examples of Chinese opera hand puppets and Chinese marionettes are also on display.

As early as 200 BC, leather puppets are mentioned in the ancient scriptures. As old as civilization itself, puppetry in India developed six different styles of leather shadow puppets in six different regions –– some opaque, some small and colored, and some of the largest colored shadows in the world. The figures included in “Shadows & Strings” are presumed to be from the central Andhra Pradesh and southern regions. Rajasthani marionettes are also on display.

Indonesian puppetry is represented by three forms: Wayan Kulit, or shadow puppets; Wayand Golek, or rod puppets; and Wayand Klitik, or flat, wooden figures.

Indonesian shadow puppets are made of water buffalo hide. They are opaque, and the shadow image is seen as black with light passing through intricately cut patterns.

According to scholar Richard Brandon, the existence of shadow puppets in Java is first hinted at in two royal charters, establishing freeholds, inscribed on copper plates, dated 840 and 907. In Java and Bali, wayang (shadow) Kulit (leather) theater is an ancient form that is still widely performed today.

“It is one of the world’s most complex and refined dramatic and theatrical forms,” writes Mr Brandon, “having developed through an unbroken succession of artists, generation by generation, for more than 1,000 years.”

With Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula situated along the trade routes between India and China, influences freely traveled back and forth. The forms of the puppets and the characters of the Indian epics took regional names and characteristics as they migrated.

The exhibition offers a look at a giant Nang Yei figure from Thailand and a series of older Malay puppets. Figures from Cambodia are part of a large collection that was built in 1989 in the Cambodia refugee camp Site 2, on the Thai-Cambodian border.

The figures, the only set of its kind in the United States, were based on the memory of the Venerable Pin Sem, head monk of Prasat Serei Temple. A 15-year effort to revive and archive the art form, initiated and directed by The Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, is part of an ongoing project within US-Cambodian communities in Massachusetts.

Shadow puppetry may have spread from the Far East through Persia into Turkey, but once established in Turkey it took on a completely new form. It is believed that the Karagöz tradition originated in Turkey and spread through the Ottoman Empire to Egypt and Greece.

Karagöz, the beloved and irreverent shadow puppet clown, was the principal theatrical figure of the Ottoman Empire and the only character to have an entire puppet form named for him. Generally the figures are one foot tall, with strong colors including sienna and earth tones.

Like the Chinese shadows, the skin is treated until it is almost transparent and then stained with translucent dyes so the colors seem to glow through the screen. The exhibition features exceptional examples from Turkey and rare Egypt figures.

Figures for the exhibition have been loaned from The American Museum of Natural History, The Jo Humphrey Collection of Chinese Theatre Works in New York, The Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, Alan Cook and The Conservatory of Puppetry Arts in Los Angeles, and a number of private collections.

The Bruce Museum of Arts & Science is at 1 Museum Drive. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm, and Sunday from 1 to 5 pm (the museum store closes 30 minutes earlier than the museum on all days).

Tours of museum exhibitions are offered each Friday at 12:30.

Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and students, and free for ages 5 and under. Admission is free every Tuesday. The museum is handicapped accessible. Call 203-869-0376 or visit www.BruceMuseum.org for additional information.