Life of the Marionettes 5/6

This is one of my spanning-over-ten-year-long Sunday full-page columns published, for a major newspaper, a decade back!

And now. Let's go digital and make it a Sunday column too, read on...

Photographed/Written by Don Schumann

(Originally published in traditional Chinese) 

An array of variety of puppets emerge from the rear of the bamboo curtain. As I compared to the on-hand program found a total of 17 plays: such as celebrations, water dragons, buffalo shepherds, busy farming, fishermen fishing, catching frogs, catching foxes, village children playing water, lion dance, boat racing, fairy group dance, tortoise and sword, celebrate the harvest, Phoenix and so on... Those all are based on the prosaic content of the rural weekday life and Vietnamese folklore, in the seemingly boring plot, but they would cleverly add some humorous turns beyond the language and cultural barriers to the estrangement. That guarantees bringing the audience constant surprises in addition to the heart of laughter, at the same time overwhelmed by the puppet master's manipulation skills. The atmosphere throughout the scene runs through a fairly tight tempo.

Behind the Scenes 

In order to make the puppets look like floating and moving on the water. That pivots resting on the long bamboo pole to support from the bottom, a serial of hidden tricky mechanisms and the wooden puppet body has a lot of moving joints. The maximum weight of the puppet can be up to 15 kilograms while the puppet Masters standing in the waist-level water hiding behind the emerald colored bamboo curtain, allowing the puppets making entrance from the rear curtain. The whole actions is delicately consummated with the strings, not only the puppets can do jumps, boating, walking, they even are able to perform picking up things, and the broken arms falling off... all sorts of magical stunts. No wonder, they never fail to win over the theater's 300 guests' hearts and applauds.

各種造型的木偶從竹簾後方現身，我對照手中的演出單發現一共有17個劇目，不外乎像是慶典、水上蛟龍、水牛牧童、農忙、漁夫捕魚、捉青蛙、捉狐狸、村童戲水、舞獅、賽船、仙女群舞、金龜還劍、慶豐收、鳳求凰等，雖然都是一些取材於農村平日的生活和越南民間傳說的簡單內容，在看似無趣的情節，適時地加入幽默轉折，超越語言、文化障礙的隔閡，讓觀衆們親身感受到迭起不斷的驚喜，除了會心ㄧ笑之外，同時折服於木偶師父的操縱技巧，整個現場氣氛貫穿相當緊湊。

幕後
為了讓木偶看起來像是浮在水面上移動，得依賴底部長竹竿支撐著並且隱藏著許多精細串連機構，木頭雕刻的戲偶身上有很多活動的關節，最重可達15公斤，操縱木偶的操縱師父站在水深及腰的竹簾後方，讓木偶由簾幕後方進出，活動自如地操控細繩，甚至還可以做出跳躍、划船、行走、甚至取物、斷臂等特技表演，博得戲院裏約300位賓客的鼓掌叫好。

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