Kansas-born Pauline Benton (1898-1974) was encouraged by her father, one of America's earliest feminist male educators, to reach for the stars. Instead, she reached for shadows. In 1920s Beijing, she ...discovered shadow theatre (piyingxi), a performance art where translucent painted puppets are manipulated by highly trained masters to cast coloured shadows against an illuminated screen. Finding that this thousand-year-old forerunner of motion pictures was declining in China, Benton believed she could save the tradition by taking it to America. Mastering the male-dominated art form in China, Benton enchanted audiences eager for the exotic in Depression-era America. Her touring company, Red Gate Shadow Theatre, was lauded by theatre and art critics and even performed at Franklin Roosevelt's White House. Grant Hayter-Menzies traces Benton's performance history and her efforts to preserve shadow theatre as a global cultural treasure by drawing on her unpublished writings, the recollections of her colleagues, the testimonies of shadow masters who survived China's Cultural Revolution, as well as young innovators who have carried on Benton's pioneering work.
While puppets have been used to test infants’ and young children’s understanding of agency, social cognition, and learning in developmental psychology labs, most research does not include a critical ...component of puppets for children: movement. In addition to various cognitive affordances, puppets can be used and interacted with in active, physicalized, embodied ways. A wide variety of fields, including theatre, education, and therapy have long used interactive and physicalized puppet play to help children learn, experience art, and express themselves. In developmental science, embodiment and physicalizing of knowledge, particularly through gesture, is known to enhance children’s learning. However, research on whether and how children engage with puppets using embodiment and gesture is missing. Without knowing the levels and types of gesture children use with puppets, theories of puppets cannot be inclusive of both passive and active methodologies. Here, we compare preschool aged children’s puppet play to their costumed role play and their physically passive watching of puppets or media. We ask if children show more gesture while using puppets, if so, what kinds, and whether that gesture affects their learning from vignettes. We find regardless of age or sex, children gesture significantly more while playing with puppets than when watching puppets or media. This level of gesture is similar to when they are role playing in costume. While more gesturing does not predict learning directly, types of gesture, which also differ in puppet play uniquely, do predict learning. These findings have implications for the use of puppets as passive theatrical shows meant to test children’s learning and understanding, and for the use of puppets in developmental research beyond infancy. Taking cues from the applications of puppets in other childhood contexts, children’s movements should be integrated as additional prospects for puppet-based developmental methods.
•Children’s natural out-of-lab engagement with puppets is embodied.•Children gesture more with puppets than when watching narratives.•Children’s puppet play gestures are closer to role play.•Some puppet gesture is associated with learning.
Puppets, a kind of wooden figure whose movements are manipulated by artists, were frequently used in ancient Chinese singing and dancing activities and dramas. The uniqueness of substituting human ...beings for puppets has drawn tremendous attention from scholars. However, despite previous research on the long development process of puppet dramas, a considerable number of details remain neglected, and behind these details lies an abundance of complicated religious factors. Therefore, this paper uses several fragments as entry points in terms of puppet dramas’ modeling, materials, craft, rites, function, artists, organization, and other aspects to comprehensively analyze the influence of witchcraft, Daoism, and Buddhism on China’s puppet dramas. This research first unveils that a ferocious appearance and mahogany as a material, both used in puppets, are outer manifestations to reveal the magical power of witchcraft. Next, the rites performed in Li Yuan Jiao using ritual puppets were characterized by mystery in their implication and ambiguity in their religious sect, which was related to the attempt to hide their notorious identities as wizards on the part of the artists. Third, general puppet artists enjoyed a fairly high social status, conferred by their semi-religionist identity and the puppet dramas’ historical status. Finally, the improvement in the puppet-making process and the emergence of skeleton-style puppets embody the secularization of the spread of Buddhism.
Although adults generally prefer helpful behaviors and those who perform them, there are situations (in particular, when the target of an action is disliked) in which overt antisocial acts are seen ...as appropriate, and those who perform them are viewed positively. The current studies explore the developmental origins of this capacity for selective social evaluation. We find that although 5-mo-old infants uniformly prefer individuals who act positively toward others regardless of the status of the target, 8-mo-old infants selectively prefer characters who act positively toward prosocial individuals and characters who act negatively toward antisocial individuals. Additionally, young toddlers direct positive behaviors toward prosocial others and negative behaviors toward antisocial others. These findings constitute evidence that the nuanced social judgments and actions readily observable in human adults have their foundations in early developing cognitive mechanisms.
That of the Iena di San Giorgio is a popular legend that has become part of the repertoires of several families of puppeteers. Among the plays published around the story of the murderous butcher, the ...one by Gualberto Niemen reconstructs, at the end of the century, the memory of the puppet show he used to take on tour in the first half of the twentieth century. It was precisely one of his shows that inspired Guido Ceronetti to make a modern rewrite of it, which became the first text performed by the Teatro dei Sensibili (1970). Also in the early 1970s, Giuliano Scabia revisits the legend to make it a mythical tale of a world destroyed by consumerism. A comparison between the two versions will show how the story, over the course of a century, is transformed from a moralizing story to an affirmation of the inevitability of evil.
Traditions of wayang puppetry in Indonesia realize what Philippe Descola refers to as an «animist ontology». Not only human figures, but also what Tim Ingold calls «nonhuman persons», including ...personal possessions, landforms, and animals, possess consciousness and interiority. Among wayang’s diverse story sources, the Ramayana stands out for its animistic qualities. Episodes depict interactions between humans, ogres, monkeys, deities, and other nonhuman persons, activating the potential of the medium for representing transformation and theatrically mining the suspension of natural laws. This essay, based on ongoing research into the wayang collection of Yale University Art Gallery, examines how the characters of the Ramayana reflect shifting theatrical styles and animistic beliefs. Analysis of these historical puppets is followed by an exploration of an experimental 2023 Ramayana production originated at the University of Con-necticut hybridizing wayang with the tholpavakoothu shadow puppet tradition of Kerala, India, in which the epic is retold from the perspective of the trees and wood inhabiting it.
This contribution calls attention to Malian masquerades that reinterpret narrative material drawn from the epic of Bamana Segu through puppets and masks. After providing a general overview of African ...puppetry, the essay zooms in specifically on the Malian village of Kirango, located on the bank of the Niger River about 35 kilometers northeast of the city of Ségou. The inhabitants of this village (Bamana farmers and Bozo fishermen) celebrate masquerades in which puppets and masks are made to dance by puppeteers whose performance is accompanied by drum-mers and singers. In this context, no difference is made between puppets and masks: both are called sogo (‘animal’), because many of them represent animals such as the hippopotamus, the crocodile, various types of fish (Bozo), antelopes and the buffalo (Bamana). The essay then introduces two characters from the epic of Bamana Segu, Faaro (water spirit and creator god) and Biton (Mamari Coulibaly, a historical Bamana king who, according to a widespread legend, acquired power with the help of Faaro); and it goes on to discuss Faaro’s role in Bozo and Bamana masquerades and explain how a 2009 Bozo performance recreated the legend of Faaro and Biton. The final sections of the essay reflect on the masquerades’ significance with respect to collective memory and cultural identity as well as their possible evolution in the future.
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