From the First Foreign Performance of the Sunbeam Puppet Ensemble from Békéscsaba until the Organization of the First International Puppet Festival (1961-1968) The career of The Sunbeam Puppet ...Theater of Békéscsaba has been shaped even more by the experience of international competitions, active participation in the international puppetry scene and foreign performances than the domestic success. These hard-earned relationships brought them growth, confidence and last but not least, conscious development. In my research, I examine the exact period of time when The Sunbeam Puppet Theater becomes a member of UNIMA to the first international puppet festival organised by them. These creative years, from 1961 to 1968 are the prime example of the support and recognition that an amateur theater can gain with committed work and solid artistic conception. The importance of this period is also supported by the fact that the international relationship network established during these times significantly shaped the international and professional career of The Sunbeam Puppet Theater for nearly three decades, all the way to the 1995 passing of Mr Konrád Lenkefi. Last but not least, a new initiative, the International Childrens’ Puppet Festival of Békéscsaba, was established, which was the first to bring international puppet shows for children to Hungary after 1945.
What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? ...Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of »technical others« and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material.
Linking actual instances of language use with structures of social power in francophone Belgium, Gross outlines the history and contemporary configuration of rod puppetry in Liège. The analysis of ...this working classperformance art moves between what occurs on and off stage. As puppeteers speak in other voices, sometimes in Walloon and sometimes in French, they create a sociolinguistic model based on 19th century renditions of medieval texts, the voices of past puppeteers, and the language that surrounds them. The high level of linguistic reflexivity created by the regional language movement has led to frequent metalinguistic and metapragmatic commentaries within the puppet shows. This complex speech genre embedded in social context shows the influence of identity struggles: from local class oppositions to imperial designs abroad. Keeping a tight focus on language, Speaking in Other Voices examines the process of entextualization and recontextualization as stories of war and religion are transmitted to succeeding generations.
In this fascinating and colorful book, researcher and performer John McCormick focuses on the marionette world of Victorian Britain between its heyday after 1860 and its waning years from 1895 to ...1914. Situating the rich and diverse puppet theatre in the context of entertainment culture, he explores both the aesthetics of these dancing dolls and their sociocultural significance in their life and time.
The history of marionette performances is interwoven with live-actor performances and with the entire gamut of annual fairs, portable and permanent theatres, music halls, magic lantern shows, waxworks, panoramas, and sideshows. McCormick has drawn upon advertisements in theEra, an entertainment paper, between the 1860s and World War I, and articles in theWorld's Fair, a paper for showpeople, in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, as well as interviews with descendants of the marionette showpeople and close examinations of many of the surviving puppets.
McCormick begins his study with an exploration of the Victorian marionette theatre in the context of other theatrical events of the day, with proprietors and puppeteers, and with the venues where they performed. He further examines the marionette's position as an actor not quite human but imitating humans closely enough to be considered empathetic; the ways that physical attributes were created with wood, paint, and cloth; and the dramas and melodramas that the dolls performed. A discussion of the trick figures and specialized acts that each company possessed, as well as an exploration of the theatre's staging, lighting, and costuming, follows in later chapters. McCormick concludes with a description of the last days of marionette theatre in the wake of changing audience expectations and the increasing popularity of moving pictures.
This highly enjoyable and readable study, often illuminated by intriguing anecdotes such as that of the Armenian photographer who fell in love with and abducted the Holden company's Cinderella marionette in 1881, will appeal to everyone fascinated by the magic of nineteenth-century theatre, many of whom will discover how much the marionette could contribute to that magic.
How educational media can support learning is a growing concern. This study examined the impact of age (4-year-olds vs. 6-year-olds) and informants (human vs. animal puppet vs. anthropomorphic ...language animal puppet) on children’s animal knowledge learning and anthropomorphic generalization. A total of 210 children aged 4 and 6 participated. Children learned equally well from each of the three types of informants. Six-year-olds learned more than did 4-year-olds and were also more curious to learn more about the animal after watching the videos. Four-year-olds were more likely to generalize anthropomorphic traits in animals than were older children. Finally, 4-year-olds in the animal puppet group showed a significantly higher preference for the informant than did 4-year-olds in the human and anthropomorphic language animal puppet groups. Overall, the findings showed that watching animal educational videos can promote children’s acquisition of animal knowledge and that children learn equally well from human and puppet informants. Additionally, younger children may enjoy learning from non-anthropomorphic language animal puppets more than from humans and anthropomorphic language animal puppets, but there are no significant differences in their learning.
•This paper looks at children's animal knowledge learning from human and puppet informants.•Children learned equally well from different informants.•Watching the anthropomorphic language video appeared to hinder children's generalization of anthropomorphic traits.•There were no differences in children’s learning despite differences in subjective liking toward informants.
Chinese shadow theatre Chen, Fan-Pen Li
Chinese shadow theatre,
2007, 20070621, 2007-06-21
eBook
Chinese Shadow Theatre includes several rare transcriptions of oral performances, including a didactic play on the Eighteen Levels of Hell, and Investiture of the Gods, a sacred saga, and ...translations of three rare, hand-copied shadow plays featuring religious themes and women warrior characters.
The article shows the value of the presence of the puppet as the protagonist of television broadcasts. Its presence on the small screen focuses on two segments with various functions and roles. ...Primo, the doll who comes to promote the most Avant‑Garde idea or as a parody of the political personalities of the time, trying to steer attention to some major concepts and phenomena. Duo, the doll is successfully used in television broadcasts for children. The author will follow the evolution of the puppet‑actors, starting with those created by Jim Henson, American actor and director, for various shows, as well as for the cycle of didactic‑fun programs Sesame Street (1968). The gallery of these characters will be used for the British‑American show Mappet‑Show (1976‑1981), which inspired several shows, such as the British Spitting Image (ITV), the French Le Bebete show, Les arenas de l’Info (Canal +), Les Guignols, Russian Куклы (HTB) and others. The exposed theses will be argued with examples taken from the broadcasts of foreign televisions as well as those from Moldova: The Evening Story, the Munchkin (Prichindel) televised theatre, etc. Keywords: puppet, puppet‑actor, televised puppet Munchkin (Prichindel), show, political show
Although expressions of aging and old age differ across other identity categories, they most often yoke aging to notions of deterioration and loss. Young audiences are exposed to this narrative of ...decline through wide-ranging cultural references in advertising, cartoons, fairy tales, children’s books, and theatre. However, various forms of theatre can also reimagine age narratives in positive ways. In this article, Henderson uses close performance analysis, analysis of archival video, and an interview with Vancouver theatre artist Chris McGregor to examine the Vancouver-based TYA puppet plays The Little Old Man by Theatre Bagger Arts Society and Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch by Axis Theatre. Both plays share a number of age-related themes and establish nuanced, positive messages about aging, older age, and intergenerational relations. By drawing on Steve Tillis’s theory of puppetry and Anne Davis Basting’s depth model of aging, Henderson argues that puppets can be used to interrupt negative age stereotypes and hostile age-related narrative tropes, and encourage children to reimagine old age, aging, and relationships with older people in complex and hopeful ways. In the case of these two plays, Henderson contends that they interrupt age stereotypes by portraying children and older characters as having agency, foregrounding positive intergenerational relations, and reimagining decline. They do this, Henderson argues, through their themes, aesthetics and performance styles, and the embodied performances of the handlers in conjunction with their animation of the puppets.
Anurupa Roy, director of a troupe of puppeteers in Delhi, India, discusses with Paula Richman, emerita professor at Oberlin College (USA), various facets in the creation of her puppet play About Ram. ...Roy wanted the audience to experience the diversity of the Ramayana tradition as a tragic love story about a hero (first a prince and later a king) who feels duty-bound to banish his wife with the result that he remains alone for the rest of his life. The play is filled with images of the hero’s past life through animation of his memories and weapons on a screen mounted on stage and music with no words but with a percussion emphasis that draws upon different musical instruments from various regions. Over the period of improvisation by which the performance developed, Roy made the war scenes very stylized and the animator contemporized the weapons to include jet propulsion and machine guns. As part of her goal to develop an embodied language for contemporary puppet practice in India, Roy incorporated dances based on martial arts, which led to a grammar of movement for the puppet performance that was contemporary and engaging.
Traditional art forms often face rapid decline if they are not able to keep pace with a changing society. This article will examine puppet theater as performed by Chinese descent groups in temples ...and public spaces in Singapore as a case study of the adaptation of particular ethnic traditions at a time of an intense process of modernization. The island state of Singapore comprises various ethnic groups from different religious backgrounds living together in an advanced economy. On the one hand, the government ensures that the ethno-religious framework is protected through policies and laws. On the other, it seeks to maintain social cohesion by not favoring any religious group and by downplaying religious and ethnic divides. As discussed here, notions of “Chineseness” need to be accommodated within state policies based on the “harmonization” of racial and religious differences. The traditional art form investigated here, Chinese puppet theater, is characteristically linked to ethnicity and religion. How, then, does this ritual art form “negotiate” with a state that emphasizes secularism and seeks to elide multiracial and multi-religious differences? This study proposes a distinction between the “state-regulated realm” and the “state-tolerated realm” to suggest how Chinese puppet theater has engaged in negotiation with the Singaporean state to enable it to survive and even flourish. The focus will be on the Sin Hoe Ping Puppet Troupe, which has demonstrated considerable flexibility in adapting to secularized Singapore.
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