<font color="red">Play In A Palm: Taiwanese Glove Puppetry</font>

Play In A Palm: Taiwanese Glove Puppetry

Author: * Jia Li Shen Chi - 66 Posts on this thread out of 798 Posts sitewide.
Date: Oct 17, 2007 - 15:04

Afternoon at the Village Fair

For the children it’s been a day of adventure, for the adults, a time to re-embrace old traditions. Now, however, the afternoon is becoming evening. It’s not late. Not yet. But the angle of light is already ushering in the final part of the holiday. The children feel this shifting of light to dark far more strongly than do the adults, since children are far more ruled by the oscillation of “daylight” and “bedtime.”

Soon this day will turn into night and their freedom into bedtime. But that’s still a few hours away. And because it’s a special festival night, they’ll probably get to stay out even after it gets dark. Besides, there are still a lot of things to do. For instance, that music from across the green means that in a few minutes the Lucky Fortune Good Time Theatre Group will be performing a glove puppet play.

Glove puppet theatre, an integral part of the Taiwanese culture, is widely used to show plays involving gods, morals, ethics, and legendary heroes. Tonight’s play, The Nose Master, is highly valued among both adults and children specifically because it deals with none of these things.

The stage, about 12 feet long by seven feet high, is ornate, and brightly coloured. As the villagers find places to sit on the grass in front of the stage, behind it the father and son who own the troupe make their final preparations. The father is a master puppeteer. His cast of puppets is creative, sturdy, visual, and often complex. Some of his primary puppets have faces divided into four parts in order to portray more expression.

In the Taiwanese puppetry tradition, there are several main categories of puppets, each with its own name. For instance, the central character in The Nose Master is, of course, the Nose Master who is a comic character, and therefore portrayed by Ch’ou, the puppet used for all comic characters. The male villagers, fishermen, royal advisors, and the farmer who appear in the play will be played by the versatile Sheng puppets, which are much like extras from central casting. The Tan puppets are used in a similar way for all generalised female characters. And the emperor is played by Liu-Pei, a stock character representing the emperor of the Shu dynasty during the three kingdom period.

Behind and under the stage floor, the father and his son motion to the musicians that they’re just about ready to begin. There are three musicians, although six would be ideal. One plays the erhu (two-stringed violin), one plays percussion instruments such as the ba (cymbals), gong (luo), drum (gu) and castanets (paiban), and the third plays the suona, which is a trumpet-like instrument. The drummer controls the pacing and tries to match the music to the action.

At the final signal from the master puppeteer, the musicians break off their piece and begin playing the music for the opening of the play. The audience becomes hushed; even the children. As they watch, the curtains open to reveal a male and female puppet standing in a kitchen.