Pulling the strings for cultural treats
Ancient style of puppetry enchants and educates a new audience as those behind the screen find rewarding role and sense of achievement, Yang Feiyue reports.
Behind a gray curtain in Beijing’s Mentougou district at the end of January, people moved to the music as they adeptly maneuvered a cast of cowhide puppets.
The twists and turns of the plot were narrated in expressive, attention-grabbing tones as the puppets vividly reenacted scenes, featuring firefighters, village heads, volunteers and startled victims, that tugged at the heartstrings of the audience, who had filled this makeshift theater in the capital city’s western suburbs to bursting.
“That was exactly how it happened,” some of the villagers whispered during the show.
Fierce rain and flooding wreaked havoc on the district in late July, but local residents fought their way back to normality.
When the show ended, the puppeteers stepped out from behind the curtain to meet the audience and were greeted by thunderous applause.
“We get that a lot,” says Wang Lijuan, who organized the show to commemorate the touching stories of the natural disaster.
The puppeteers, who are mostly in their 20s and generally about 1.3 meters tall, all have pituitary stalk interruption syndrome, which can inhibit growth. They have been able to find jobs that show off their talents with Wang’s help.
It took three months of interviewing local residents about their flood experiences, developing the script, fashioning puppets and rehearsing, before the show was ready.
“The audience has usually expressed a strong sense of admiration mixed with a touch of curiosity,” says the woman who is carrying forward puppet shows with characteristic Jingxi (western Beijing) cultural elements.
Shadow puppetry play is over 2,000 years old. It originated in the Shaanxi region of ancient China during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), making it one of the oldest traditional theatrical forms in China.
It is composed of five main stages: making the puppet parts, carving, dyeing and mounting them, and then performing, using the interplay of light and shadow to tell stories. The Museum of the Cinema in Paris has referred to Chinese shadow plays as the “ancestors” of film and animation.
“Shadow puppetry varies with regions, such as the performing dialects,” Wang explains.
The Jingxi style stands out for its use of Peking Opera facial makeup and distinct personas, portraying both good and evil roles, while its vocal style integrates elements from both Peking Opera and Kunqu Opera, she says.
When the puppeteers infuse emotion into their performance, the shadow puppets seem to have a life of their own. Shadow puppetry integrates multiple folk traditions, ranging from paper-cutting and carving, to oral skills and drama, and was listed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011.
Wang was born into a shadow puppetry family in Shandong province.
“I grew up watching my grandfather perform, and my parents designing and making puppets,” she says, adding that her grandfather’s grandfather used to perform in Beijing.
It was Wang’s childhood interest in the art that led her to tie the knot with her husband Lin Zhonghua, who also shares a love of puppet shows, albeit for the one from his hometown in Chifeng city in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
The couple were both working in Beijing when they met, Wang at a multinational company and Lin at a media organization.
In 2006, Lin decided to launch his own career. “We figured it should be something to do with our shared passion, and so the idea of promoting Jingxi puppet shows came up,” Wang says.
Initial research revealed that the number of experienced performers was on the wane and very few young people were interested in the art form. So, the couple decided it was time to take action.
Lin resigned and rented a 1,000square-meter space in Qianmen and then spent nearly 200,000 yuan ($27,780) turning it into a shadow puppet museum, which opened to the public in 2007.
After this, they began looking around for experienced artists, who were mostly in their 50s and from Inner Mongolia, and the provinces of Hebei and Heilongjiang. However, problems soon ensued.
“Young visitors barely understood what the performers were saying, and those performers wanted to leave after just a short while to rejoin their families,” Wang says.
The audience for the shows was also disappearing. At their lowest moment, Wang had to use her salary to fill in the financial holes but they still fell short of the rent. So, the museum shut a year later, as the couple looked for answers to the problems that had led to the failure of their first attempt.
“We were not going to give up,” she says. That was when her husband Lin came up with the idea of training people with pituitary stalk interruption syndrome in the traditional art. “He had interviewed a girl of short stature with the syndrome, and had been impressed by her positive attitude and singing talent,” Wang says.
Since others in a similar position also had trouble finding jobs, the couple felt they might have found potential trainees for shadow puppetry.
They found four actors with the syndrome and offered them free training for three months. “These actors were very intelligent and hardworking,” Wang says.
Given their stature and size of their hands, she made the wooden rods used to manipulate the shadow puppets thinner to facilitate performances.
It didn’t take long before Wang noticed the actors’ other merits. “They have a certain charm for children, who treat them as if they are one of their own. At the same time, they possess the wisdom of adults and are good at keeping children amused,” Wang says, talking about the backstage interactions after each performance.
This initial success led to more people with the syndrome knocking on her door and to date, 300 people have been given training.
“The puppet show is an ideal way for them to build confidence step by step,” Wang says.
Out of timidity, the puppeteers perform behind the screen but as the audience recognition grows, many have developed greater confidence.
Many of the trainees have either gone on to start shows in their hometowns or have become teachers promoting the art form.
There are now about 30 actors in Wang’s troupe.
As business got on the right track, Wang also quit her job to fully commit to puppetry.
In addition to the hiring of short puppeteers, other innovations have played key roles in the revitalization of the art.
Wang and her team have created many children’s plays featuring plots based on classic Chinese fairy tales and novels. Plays based on real life have also been introduced, including about COVID-19 prevention and control, and the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
Innovation in content inevitably leads to innovation in form. “Compared to traditional shadow puppet shows, we have incorporated new elements, making significant changes to the appearance of the characters, their costumes, stage settings and props,” Wang says.
So, for example, elements like ambulances during COVID-19 and pet dogs have all been presented true to life.
The puppeteers also have to put in a little extra effort. “For example, to accurately portray figure skating, the performers need to carefully study the movements of figure skaters in videos before being able to execute all
the lifts, jumps and spins with precision,” Wang explains.
In 2018, Wang opened a Douyin account to promote the shows. “We got 290 million views in three days, which was unbelievable,” she says, adding that so far, topics related to the shows by Wang and her team have been viewed over 69 billion times.
The couple have also visited more than 1,000 primary and middle schools to draw attention to the art, and have set up puppetry clubs in 20 schools.
In 2022, they wrote Chinese Shadow Puppetry, a book to help students better appreciate the culture and craftsmanship behind the art.
Hou Yangjun, a senior member of the Chinese Folk Literature and Arts Association, says the book is a good fit for children, and demonstrates the professionalism and pragmatism of the authors.
Huang Panwei, an official at the People’s Education Press, says the work done by Wang and her team is a creative transformation and an innovative development in traditional folk art, adding that the publishing of the book is also a good example of the inheritance of traditional Chinese culture.
During their years of involvement, Wang and her husband have built up a collection of around 20,000 shadow puppets from the Ming and Qing dynasties (13681911), and have caught the attention of the local government in the process.
To make full use of these cultural treasures, with favorable policies from the government, the couple set up a shadow puppetry museum in the capital’s Haidian district which opened to the public last November.
“For the first time, the museum has put on display more than 500 ancient shadow puppet collections from various schools, including those of Beijing, and Shaanxi, Gansu, Henan, Hebei and Zhejiang provinces, as well as many shadow puppetry artifacts from the Ming and Qing dynasties,” says Lin, who is the museum’s curator.
Wang says shadow puppetry is not her family’s art but the country’s.
“We will be happy if the shows are appreciated by more people as a result of our efforts,” she says.
They have taken part in a number of Spring Festival celebrations and are now working on creating multilingual shows.
“We are working with the Beijing Foreign Studies University now, and we have come up with shows in English and Russian,” she says. “Japanese, German and French versions are in the works too, so, hopefully, this traditional Chinese culture will go global.”