Despite the proliferation of modern forms of entertainment, many Taiwanese continue to feel a special fondness for traditional-style puppet theater.

BY MARK CALTONHILL

With the construction of mass rapid transit systems, the growing use of English on everything from public buildings to packaging, and the increasing availability of fine cuisine from all corners of the world, the culture-shock element of the Taiwan expatriate experience is not what it once was.

But there is still plenty of local color left to interest, amaze, and sometimes perplex even the most long-term of overseas residents. One continuing curiosity in Taiwan's cultural landscape is the broad popularity of puppet shows. What is generally regarded in the West as children's entertainment (and often as not very good children's entertainment) is fondly, even passionately, enjoyed by people of all ages in Taiwan.

Despite the establishment of movie theaters in every town, KTV parlors and Internet cafés seemingly on almost every block, and dozens of cable television stations broadcasting around the clock, puppet shows have maintained their traditional appeal.

In fact, puppetry has also been developed and adapted to these new media. Pili International Multimedia (霹靂國際多媒體, for example, which was established by the Huang brothers, third-generation puppeteers, now has its own dedicated cable TV channel; a full-length movie performed by puppets, The Legend of the Sacred Stone, cost NT$300 million to make and broke box office records island-wide in 2000, and youths in video arcades will occasionally break off from their usual games of death and destruction to play one with a puppet theme (albeit one that may also involve death and destruction).

A newly arrived expat flicking channels late at night to discover foot-high puppets with rakish hair and garish costumes enacting martial arts techniques against a background that should rightly belong to a model train set might well wonder just what kind of phenomenon he has stumbled upon. Ample help is available to answer the question, as Taipei alone has not one but two museums of puppetry, the National Center for Traditional Arts in Ilan has yet another (as well as puppet performances and two puppet shops), and most museums of folk arts or traditional culture have displays on the theme.

For those without the museum habit, director Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1993 movie The Puppetmaster, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year, is still widely available in video stores and is an excellent introduction to the topic. The movie focuses on the life of Lee Tien-lu, a national Folk Arts Master famous in the 1950s and 60s for his puppet dramas based on kungfu novels. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the film also provides a wealth of incidental detail about Taiwanese life at the end of the Qing Dynasty (1683-1895 in Taiwan), through the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945), and into the ROC era (1945 to the present).

Throughout that time, Taiwan had hundreds of puppet troupes ranging in size from two persons (one playing the music and one manipulating the puppets and speaking the lines) to the "standard" troupe of seven (of which, perhaps surprisingly, only two were puppeteers, with five playing the music) or even more members. Lee is seen in the movie traveling around rural Taiwan. Before the advent of cinemas, touring puppet shows, martial arts displays, and operatic performances - Taiwan has its own form called gedaisi, literally "song plays" - were three of very few forms of entertainment found in the countryside where the vast majority of people lived.

That this situation lasted until fairly recently might partially answer the question of puppetry's enduring popularity. Even those people living Taiwan's modern urban lifestyle, with the world and its myriad forms of entertainment at their fingertips, are only one generation, if that, removed from a very traditional rural life.

Taipei's foremost museum of puppetry (until next month at least) is the Puppet Art Center of Taipei (PACT), which opened in 2004. A BOT partnership between the Taipei City Government' Department of Cultural Affairs and the Song Song Song Children's Puppet Theater, which now manages the center, the museum is located in the modern eastern part of Taipei, next to the Core Pacific City Living Mall (99 Civic Boulevard, Sec. 5; tel. 02-25287955; www.pact. org.tw). While PACT's local audience is predominantly children, of whom around 40,000 visited in the first year, the center is of great value to anyone wishing to comprehend this intriguing part of local culture. The museum's collection of more than 5,000 exhibits is divided into three sections on the basis of the three forms of puppetry found in Taiwan: shadow, string, and glove.



Out of the shadows

Shadow puppetry, generally known in Mandarin as "leather shadow plays" and in Taiwanese as "leather monkey plays" or "lantern shadow plays," is traditionally traced back to the reign of the Wu Di Emperor (157-87 BCE) of the Western Han dynasty, although it is probably much older. According to legend, following the early death of his favorite concubine, Madame Li, Wu Di became so grief-stricken that he neglected court affairs. Not knowing what to do, his courtiers summoned wandering magician Li Shao-wong, who used a lantern to project lifelike images of the concubine onto a sheet, thus convincing the emperor that her soul had returned to the mortal world.

Puppets were traditionally cut from cow, goat, pig, or donkey hide (elsewhere in China, shadow puppetry is known as "donkey-leather plays") but are now generally made from paper. Measuring about one to two feet in height and with heads nearly always shown in profile, the puppets' bodies can be dismantled as can their weapons and other implements, enabling them to be reassembled as a play requires. Compared with other genres of theater, shadow puppetry follows less rigid formulations, relying more on a puppet master's own aesthetic sensibilities. Good puppeteers are capable of creating top-quality plots, manipulating their puppets in a lifelike manner and also performing music.

Visitors to Taiwan are often surprised to learn that the main sponsors of theater, including puppetry, opera, and dance, are local temples. This is because performances are believed to have originated as tribute for gods or to guide the spirits of the dead back to the community, with human enjoyment being a distant third priority. Shows were therefore booked for their length (two hours or longer was typical) and noise level (hence the five musicians for only two puppeteers), rather than for the quality or interest of their plots or puppet manipulation.

This is also said to explain the origin of the Chinese word for puppet (魁 kui), which itself is composed of the characters for a person 人 and a ghost 鬼. The general term for puppet, kui-lei (魁儡), is now usually reserved for string puppets. Also measuring about two feet in height, these are carved from wood to resemble humans as closely as possible. Between six and 30 strings are then attached to the head and limbs, the number depending on the range of movements required, as well as such factors as gender, age, status, and personality. Martial figures who stomp across the stage with stylized and exaggerated actions need fewer strings than the protagonists who perform more intricate, graceful, or subtle movements.

String puppetry in Taiwan is divided into northern and southern schools. The former, centered on Ilan, has finer strings to allow more graceful and symbolic movements to fit the accompanying operatic music. It also features more meticulous clothing. The southern variety, centered on Tainan, uses puppets with more expressive facial features.

Shadow and string puppetry of both schools cannot compare to the status enjoyed in Taiwan by glove puppetry. These are known as "cloth-bag plays" (布袋戲), either because the puppets rest in a bag at the back of the stage when not being used or because they resemble a small bag into which the puppeteer's hand is inserted. Glove puppetry in China is said to have originated with itinerant performers who wandered the lanes of the southern provinces during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. A single puppeteer would speak or, more commonly, sing all the lines, and the stage was a small hand-carved wooden booth that could be dismantled and carried on the back.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's film captures the atmosphere of this itinerant tradition, although Lee Tien-lu went on to develop the art form beyond its original roots, a legacy that endures to this day. With his two sons, Lee formed two well-known children's puppet troupes, while his own troupe, Yi Wan Ran (亦宛然) performed widely throughout Asia, the United States, and Europe - and still does despite Lee's death in 1998 at the age of 90.

The Siaosiyuan (小西園; "Little Western Garden") troupe formed by puppeteer Hsu Wang (許王) also performs widely abroad as well as around Taiwan. Probably best known at home, however, is the Huang family. Now in its third generation of puppeteers, the family's Pili company has adapted traditional stories of chivalry, a major genre in Chinese literature, for television and now the big screen. The use of music, lighting, and visual effects keeps their art in the public eye.

The company's retail outlets, such as the one at the National Center for Traditional Arts in Ilan (http://www.ncfta.gov.tw /en/01.htm), are filled with customers of all ages buying everything from puppets to puppet-patterned crockery, cellphone accessories, and DVDs. The center also has a shop selling more traditional puppets ranging in price from NT$300 to collectors' items worth NT$10,000 or more. Puppet shows are performed regularly (tel. 03-970-5815 for up-to-date information), while the center's permanent museum space includes good displays on the three different forms of puppetry, as well as just about every other traditional Taiwanese art form.



Getting a new home

Taipei City's second puppetry museum is the Toa-Thiu-Thia Puppet Center (台原大稻埕偶戲館; www.taiyuan.org.tw), usually referred to simply as TTT. In contrast to the PACT location in the modern eastern district, the TTT chose to be based in "old Taipei," in the heart of the old theater district of Dadaocheng ("Toathiuthia" in Taiwanese pronunciation and old romanization, hence its name), on the east bank of the Danshui River to the north of Taipei Railway Station.

After five years of cramming its collection and staff of nine into an old two-story building on MinLe Street that for performances could seat only some 50 people on old wooden benches, the TTT in mid-November will move to a new home - the Lin Liu-hsin Memorial Puppet Theater - at 79 XiNing North Road, close to the historic Hsiahai City God Temple. The facility will include a dedicated 100-seat theater.

Backed by the private Taiyuan Foundation, the museum claims to have the largest collection of Asian puppet artifacts in the world. This collection continues to expand at around 500 items per year as traditional puppet theaters close (particularly in China) and antique artifacts come on the market. Around 12% of the collection will be on show at any one time, including five hand-carved nineteenth-century wooden stages.

The TTT's heart is in puppetry as a living art, however, and the organization's two companies perform around 250 shows per year. Last year, after being in existence for only four years, the TTT was selected to perform at the annual Traditional Puppet Theater Demonstration, an honor accorded only the top 10 companies in Taiwan. It took the opportunity to perform its show Marco Polo with, for the first time, a full orchestra.

The two companies divide themselves between maintaining tradition and promoting new developments. The latest production, Only Daughter, about divorce, single motherhood, and corrupt police, falls into the latter category, and would have been considered "too weird" for funding by regular puppet sponsors. Of course weirdness is relative; one puppet in the TTT's collection, although hailing from supposedly more traditional southern Taiwan, portrays a female striptease artist. It was included in the first ever puppetry feature in Playboy Magazine (Taiwan edition, June 2003).

Only around five shows each year are temple-sponsored. The rest rely on a combination of public and private sponsorship, plus ticket sales. The TTT's rising reputation also means that it is increasingly in demand overseas as a cultural ambassador for Taiwan. Last year the troupe visited 12 countries, but this year because of the demands of opening the new building, only five. The zenith of the TTT's ambassadorial role was in 2003 when it accompanied President Chen Shui-bian to Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama, performing for heads of state and mountain peasants alike.

One final surprise in this puppetry tale is that the TTT director, one of the people most influential in keeping puppetry alive in Taiwan, is not an aging puppet master from the hills of central Taiwan, but a relatively youthful foreigner from the flatlands of the Netherlands. This does not mean he has not "gone native," however. Robin Ruizendaal arrives for the interview clutching a bag of betel nuts, sucking on a bottle of oolong tea, and switching back and forth between Mandarin and Taiwanese when talking to his staff.

His knowledge of puppetry is immense. After graduating university with a degree in Chinese language and literature in 1982, he spent many years in China doing postgraduate research into this traditional art as a window on grassroots Chinese society in general. This study brought him to Taiwan in 1993 and, after a stint at the Su Ho Paper Museum, to the Taiyuan Foundation, which was then preparing to set up a puppetry museum. He completed his Ph.D. in 1999 but decided to stay on. Asked if he regretted leaving academic life, Ruizendaal responds: "No, never. I escaped. This is fun!"

It is not all fun and games, however. "Getting an audience for any performance in Taiwan is difficult," he explains, "not least for an art form that people are used to watching for free at their local temple. Abroad, we do much better. At the V and A [Victoria and Albert Museum in London] we got audiences of 600 or 700; the same in the Purcell Room [on London's South Bank]. Here we are very happy with 200 or 250."

Does Ruizendaal think Taiwanese puppetry will survive? "Yes, most definitely," he replies with conviction and without hesitation. "It is part of Taiwan's identity, irrespective of blue or green," he adds, referring to Taiwan's two main political camps, the former pro-unification, the latter pro-independence. "It will always be on the periphery of the art scene, never mainstream, but if done well, it is beautiful theater."