The Art of Chinese Shadow Puppet Theater
From Arts & Activities Magazine January 2002
By:
Kyle Okada, Beacon Hill Elementary School Teacher
& Susan Olivier-Hirasawa, Art Educator and President of Pentewa Interactive

The 2000 year old art of Chinese shadow puppetry provides a wonderful vehicle for bringing together art and literature. At Beacon Hill Elementary School in Seattle we embarked on a month long exploration of the world of Asian puppetry and folktales. We made arts the centerpiece of our project and it was not only great fun, but proved to be a very effective tool in getting students excited about reading and writing. Our students read dozens of stories, learned about Chinese shadow puppets through an interactive CD-ROM, kept notebooks for play ideas, created numerous puppets, designed a theater and stage sets, wrote plays and put on a series of performances. From the beginning there was an extremely high level of interest in the project; the students were particularly excited by the arts component – creating the puppets, scenery and theater. And this excitement proved to be a powerful motivator; reluctant writers became enthusiastic authors once they had puppets in need of a play.

Chinese Shadow Puppets
The art of shadow puppetry evolved as a unique form of theater in Asia. India and China each claim to be the birthplace of shadow puppets and both cultures developed a rich tradition of vibrant puppetry that in turn influenced puppets in many other Asian countries. In China, shadow puppet theater was a form of popular entertainment in busy night markets, where crowds of merchants, peasants and travelers would gather to see performances based on myths, local legends and religious parables.

The puppets themselves are intricately carved and vividly painted with a style that evolved from the traditional Chinese art of papercutting. Each region of China has a distinct style, identified by the intricacy of the cut designs and the size of the puppets.

Creating Asian puppets was a perfect arts project for Beacon Hill Elementary School, a richly diverse community where Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish are as common as English. Thus, incorporating a multicultural curriculum was vital in enriching the learning of our students. The 24 4th and 5th grade students involved in the puppet project came from India, Vietnam, China, Japan, Mexico, Cambodia, Guatemala and the United States.

Introducing the Puppet Project
We began our exploration by viewing "Chinese Shadow Puppet Theater", an award winning CD-ROM by Pentewa Interactive. The students were clearly entranced with the animated puppet play, "The Honest Farmer", and it gave them a chance to see the puppets in action. Other resource materials that we used to acquaint students with shadow puppets were three beautifully illustrated books; "Chinese Folk Art" by Nancy Zeng Berliner, "Chinese Shadow Puppet Plays", by Liu Jilin, and "Asian Puppets - Wall of the World", by The University of California.

Next came the folktales. The students were able to choose from dozens of books on Asian folktales that we’d checked out from the library. (A detailed bibliography of the books we enjoyed is available on www.MulticulturalArts.com.) Children enjoyed the folk tales and the fact that most of them were short encouraged readers at all levels of proficiency to read numerous stories. Each student kept a notebook in which they wrote short synopses of stories, assessed how well each story could be adapted as a play and noted characters, plots and acts.

The classroom had 6 iMac computers and the students had the opportunity to use the "Chinese Shadow Puppet Theater" program on their own to learn about the history and construction of puppets and to use the interactive design features to create a variety of puppets on-screen. Over the next week, students spent time every day either reading folktales or using the computers. They kept notes in their workbooks.

Writing the Plays
Theater, of course, is a collective endeavor and cooperative group work was one of our objectives. The students were divided into groups, each student presenting his or her favorite folktale to the group. Then the discussions and lively negotiations began as the groups had to decide whether to write an original play, choose a story to adapt, or some combination of the two. It was a pleasure to see students excitedly sharing ideas for plots and characters. Next, we moved on to the fun stuff – making the puppets.

Puppet-Making
Today we looked at examples of Chinese shadow puppets for inspiration and discussed how traditional puppets are made. The "Chinese Shadow Puppet Theater" CD-ROM allows the user to mix and match traditional puppet parts to create a unique puppet and then print-out the pieces in black and white, color and assemble them. Some of the students chose to do that, but we first encouraged the students to use the blank forms provided by the program to draw their own puppets. This approach most successfully combined children’s creativity with workable puppets. You can also create your puppet blanks by tracing outlines for the wide variety of puppets shown in the three books listed above. Many students also needed characters, such as a phoenix, a panda and a mouse for which we had no blank forms. Working with tracing paper and looking carefully at the assembly of classic puppets, kids created some of the most beautiful puppets to appear on the stage.

Classic Chinese shadow puppets are made of brightly painted and intricately carved leather and shown behind a lighted screen. We used a simplified approach to both the construction of the puppets and the performance of the plays without sacrificing much of the flavor of this puppetry tradition. The puppets were drawn or printed out on heavy paper and decorated using fine and medium point markers. The exquisite detail, an important piece of the visual iconography of shadow puppets is achieved with the fine point markers. The puppets are presented in a puppet theater with no screen, allowing the detail work to be clearly visible and eliminating the need for special lighting. Once you get four kids under a stage manipulating puppets, remembering their parts and changing scenery; adding lights and the necessity of screen contact could easily tip the performance from just on the creative edge to total chaos.

A traditional puppet has six or seven separate parts, manipulated by two or three rods. This complexity was too challenging for some of the student. We used two techniques to expedite the assembly of the puppets. First, since the puppets are generally designed in profile we encouraged the kids to use only one complete arm assembly. This also eliminates one of the rods and simplifies manipulation of the puppets. The only special tool that is useful for putting the puppets together is a single hole paper punch. The puppet parts are then attached to each other with paper brads and then mounted on rods made of straws. Again we simplified by using only two straws per puppet; one attached to the main body and one to the forearm.

Designing Stage Sets & Building our Theater
In the meantime, each group continued to write their plays. The end of the first writing cycle found the students with complex plots pieced together from every idea that anyone had. We developed several mini-workshops, a worksheet and some exercises to help the groups work together effectively in writing their plays.
The scripts were almost complete with final edits and contests (who could write in the best parts for their characters) in full play. It was time to build the theater and make the scenery. The theater was constructed from a cardboard box approximately 4’ long by 3’ high by 2.5’ deep. The students used poster paints to paint the exterior of the box. Their designs were simple but effective. We used the words "Chinese Shadow Puppet Theater" in the wide variety of languages spoken by our kids as decorative elements on the box. Scenery is an important visual element in setting the location for each act and the students went all out creating elaborate stage sets. Again, the students turned to the books on shadow puppetry and folktales. The resulting stage designs all successfully placed the audience in Asia. We introduced a series of inexpensive Chinese instruments including cymbals, a drum, rhythm sticks, and bells and demonstrated their use for the class. We had the kids experiment making different sounds with found objects, pencils, crumpled paper, etc and got them thinking of creative ways to use sound to enhance their stories.
Our next step was to create posters announcing our Chinese Theater Festival and begin dress rehearsals.

A Chinese Theater Festival
The day of the festival arrived. A large group of students made up our audience. Finally, the curtain went up! Magic horses galloped, kindly farmers were saved, evil brothers plotted, thieves connived, beautiful princesses went to battle, dragons breathed fire and a panda saved the world! It was a great success. After the last play we all gathered "backstage" for a well- deserved cast party complete with cake and juice.