Interesting Facts About Puppets and Puppetry

Puppets and rich traditions of puppetry have been a facet of world cultural expression in an astonishing number of variations. Puppets can be as simple as a sock drawn over the hand and painted with a face, or as complicated as the moving dragons, operated simultaneously by many puppeteers, used in street processions in China. Their purposes can be as diverse as ritual celebration, children's play, slapstick comedy, or high art.

Although their origins are lost in history, elaborate puppets have been preserved in India and China going back some 4,000 years. Early performance themes included religious subjects and mythology, and in many cases inanimate puppets instead of actors were used for dramatic narratives because of a prohibition on humans engaging in dramatic personification. Thus, early styles of puppetry have influenced many later performance traditions, making stylized marionette-like movements a feature of classical Chinese opera, Burmese dance, and other later theatrical arts. In Japan, Bunraku, utilizing an elaborate form of rod puppet with multiple operators, gained immense popularity in the 18th century, temporarily displacing the traditional No and Kabuki theater as the most popular entertainment forms. Human actors only regained their predominance by adopting certain styles and forms of their puppet competitors.

One of the most developed forms of narrative puppetry is the wayang kulit tradition of Java and other Indonesian islands. Performances are regularly presented on holidays, religious festivals, and ceremonial occasions such as weddings and circumcisions. By tradition performances begin in the evening and continue until dawn, featuring intricate shadow puppets that represent highly stylized human and animal forms, with backlighting to cast the puppets' images onto a translucent screen. At their finest, wayang kulit puppets are extraordinary works of art made of elaborately painted and gilded buffalo hide. Small village productions, while no less traditional, often feature simpler puppets made from cardboard and other, more humble materials.

The Javanese puppeteer, known as the dalang, must be an accomplished entertainer as well as a dedicated artist performing a ceremonial function. Although the traditional plays are not scripted and can vary from performance to performance, the stories themselves are descended from the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; both the characters and the plotlines are thus already well known to the audience.

Puppetry has at times ascended to the level of high art in Europe as well--Franz Josef Haydn's 1773 opera Philemon and Baucis, for example, was originally written for the puppet theater--but it has more often been a staple of popular and children's entertainment. In the English-speaking world, the dominant player in traditional puppet theater is Punch (or Mr. Punch), who finds his roots in the Italian commedia dell'arte character Pulcinella. The first recorded mention of the character in England was by the noted diarist Samuel Pepys, who described a 1662 performance in London. Punch is traditionally a racy and irreverent rascal with a big red nose and a potbelly. Despite his acid sense of humor and the traditional story in which he kills his wife, Judy, and outwits the hangman, he remains a popular hero, the underdog who always outfoxes the authorities. Our word slapstick is derived from a noisemaking device of the early Punch and Judy shows.

Puppets in all their forms are still with us and retain their popularity, including the amiable and educational Muppets of television's Sesame Street, the ventriloquists' dummies who always seem smarter than their sidekicks and masters, and older, more classical forms of puppetry, such as the Japanese Bunraku, which in 1985 found a new home with the opening of the National Bunraku Theater in Osaka.