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Puppets are dolls that come alive, imitating life
and reality, giving meaning to the creator’s ideology. This art
from which is believed to have originated in India is still vibrantly
alive in a variety of style.
Puppetry is often
confused with the play of dolls. Ironically in most countries as in
India the word for puppet is derived from the world doll. But while
the doll gives some personal satisfaction to the child plying with
it, the puppet is far removed from this. It remains a doll while
being made and when packed in boxes and trunks, but as soon as it
springs to life and breathes its creator’s ideas and images, it
supercedes the human being who conceived it. Puppetry is a projected
play. It needs its own language and animation to come to life and
transmit its message.
The puppet is the essence
of its creator’s idea. Its character lies in its grotesque
imitations of reality without which it would be of little use. This
sharp reality that the figures transmits is what holds and attracts
the viewer to this small and fragile figure. Its movements need the
automation of either the human being or electronic gadgetry as the
case may be.
The division between the
animate and the inanimate has drawn generations of artists, poets,
writers and actors to the puppet theatre. Puppetry has co-existed
with its allied arts of theatre, music, dance and design, without
which the art would not be what it has developed into today. And
while it borrows from these art forms it also lends to them its own
values of objectivity, stylization and movement.
The puppet play has a
function- it is religious of entertaining, political or abstract, an
imitation of reality to a glimpse of the unknown. As soon as this
function of projecting an idea fades, so does the art-form. However,
it somehow appears again in another form-not as we may know it but as
contemporary puppet theatre.
Though puppetry has
existed in most ancient civilizations due to the many references in
ancient Indian texts, scholars consider India to be the birthplace of
this art. It has much to do with the term Sutradhar, these
days the narrator in a theatre performance, literally meaning the
holder of strings, or the universal holder and guider of
life-Antaryami.
India has a wealthy of
puppet styles and techniques-rod puppets, string puppets, glove
puppets and shadow puppets. In fact these styles encompass all the
known forms of puppetry. Besides these, we also have the use of large
figures covering the human body and exaggerating it akin to some
contemporary puppet theatres.
Most traditional Indian
puppetry can be broadly divided into religious or balladic forms,
encompassing court life as many of the puppet theatres of Asia and
Japan do, or religious epics from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, to
local classics and social themes. Each style bears the imprint of its
area or state it comes from-the use of colours, forms, materials used
and the idiom of movement and sounds. The art has always been an
itenerant one and puppeteers have traveled long distance performing
at religious festivals, thanksgivings, harvests and other joyous
occasions.
The puppet theatre of
today is definitely a progression of its older family-the figure
exists, the colour may be there, the sound and movement matter, but
from there on its boundaries are limitless. Contemporary puppet
theatre does have its own idiom- the puppeteer designs the figure and
idea much in the same way as a poet or artist may or for that matter
even a dancer. The basics have to be through for fantasy and
reality-dreams and visions to fascinate an unsuspecting audience.
It is this new trend in
puppetry-that the contemporary puppeteer is involved with, around the
globe and, much like its traditional cousin his themes deal with the
times, an anguish, repression and a search for the unattainable
beauty.
For audiences that are
used to categorizing puppets with little figures-Punch and Judy in
England or the often seen Rajasthani marionette in India, are in for
a big surprise, as no longer is the figure a few inches tall, it can
be larger than life, it may use the human body with the mask or a
piece of cloth animated. The materials used could be from natural to
synthetic, the everyday to the highly sophisticated.
Amongst the recent
festivals of performing arts, India hosted an International Puppet
Festival in 1990. The variety of styles an puppets presented was
astounding-from the very traditional and naïve to the highly
stylized and poetic.
The audiences as well as
the groups participating got a glimpse of an art as it has and can
evolve in the future. A theatre of ideas and figures without egos and
boundaries speaking a universal language of friendship
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