Puppets: magic world in miniature
Puppets: magic world in miniature
There seems to be an unfortunate prejudice today that puppet shows are merely a form of entertainment for children. While it is true that children and youngsters make an ideal audience since they are more apt to accept fantasies as perfectly natural, the scope of the puppet is much wider. What a pity to want to limit it to juvenile entertainment.
The puppet theatre is of universal appeal and can offer rich nourishment to people of all ages, to the ordinary citizen as well as to the highly cultivated. In the Far East, puppetry has for many hundreds of years been considered on a par with the highest forms of theatrical art. In the past quarter of a century a great puppetry revival has been taking place in Western Europe and in North and South America. Professional showmen are today touring their own and foreign countries with fully equipped theatres in which serious, full-length adult dramas are staged, sometimes with many hundreds of puppets.
In ever-increasing numbers adults are coming to recognize the puppet theatre's unique quality as a versatile form of art and entertainment. The moving figures often transcend human actors. They can be shaped to play any role. They can be realistic, expressionistic, fantastic or satirical. They can present classical drama, ballet, comedy or farce. They are being used in hospitals as a form of therapeutic treatment for children and adults. They are an excellent drawing-card in shop windows and for advertisements generally. And they have found new, sparkling roles in the cinema and in television. Their possibilities are as vast as they themselves may be small. Puppet shows exist today for almost every occasion and every type of audience.
Perhaps the most recent development of puppetry has been its widespread adoption by schools in many countries as a handicrait subject. Teachers who have pulled strings or manipulated fists and fingers realize the power of puppetry in freeing the student from self-consciousness and physical limitations, and in releasing untapped depths of emotion and imagination. Puppetry is a unifying factor in the school curriculum. Through it. pupils gain both in their social relationships and in knowledge and skills. Making a puppet and building a puppet theatre develops skill in drawing, cutting, carving, modelling, embroidering, and painting. Staging a puppet play develops imagination and writing ability and is excellent training for the eye and the ear.
At the university level puppets can be used to present plays which cannot be performed as successfully by human actors. For experiments where the real stage is too expensive or unwieldy, the puppet theatre is usually ideal. Scenes acted out on a stage are much more forceful than if read from a book. Puppets have been used in foreign language courses, in history classes and for improvising current social and political events.
Unesco is today using the puppet theatre at its two fundamental education centres in Mexico and Egypt as well as in Thailand to dramatize the advantages of reading'and writing, oí brushing one's teeth and keeping clean. Where other educational methods have failed, the puppet has often succeeded in getting results. Jules Romains foresaw the versatility of puppets when he wrote: "The day puppets resume their proper place among us, those people who dismissed them will be amazed to see how much they are really capable of doing."