Reinventing the tradition
“Since glove puppetry’s earliest days, its audiences have focused on listening to the opera and listening to the narration. Nobody used to pay much attention to the puppets themselves,” says Chen.
But the number of people who understand the Taiwanese narration has plummeted in recent years, and the glove puppetry market has become very small, prompting the 60-something Chen to innovate. “I’ve dumped some not-so-good parts of the tradition, and added some good stuff to make the performances more enjoyable to watch.”
To enable foreign audience members who don’t understand Taiwanese to follow the narration, he reworked his signature A Chance Encounter Leads to Marriage by removing the narration and telling the story through movement alone. The three puppet roles—sheng (young man), dan (young woman), and chou (clown)—win the audience over, while the finer points of the performance highlight Chen’s innovations to the art form.
His sheng character is elegant and romantic. He strolls, fans himself, and even uses his puppet fingers to unfurl the fan.
Chen enlivens his dan character with even more intricate and difficult movements, making the puppet pull her long black hair over her shoulders so she can comb it, and then flip it behind her back again in a very lifelike way.
His chou holds a fan, skips when he walks, sits with his legs crossed, puffs on a pipe, and scratches and taps his head, revealing his personality through his movements.
The main focus of Chen’s puppetry is “life.” He wants his puppets to resemble people in all respects, including their postures, expressions and movements. He also has a habit of describing what he wants from his puppets in terms of “asking” them, revealing a master’s deep respect for the art he practices.
Chen Hsi-huang recalls a recent show at which a graduating apprentice named Chen Guanlin had the headlining spot on the program, and at which he himself had a guest slot performing a plate spinning routine with puppets. Ever the professional, Chen Hsi-huang kept the audience on the edges of their seats by pretending to nearly drop the heavy ceramic plates he held precariously balanced on sticks. “It made for a better show,” says Chen, a veteran of innumerable outdoor performances who knows well how to make them entertaining.
Chen formed the Chen Hsi-huang Traditional Puppet Troupe and resumed performing at the age of 77. “Traditional culture was rapidly disappearing, so I thought I should put together a troupe to promote some traditional things.”
Traditional puppetry began its decline when the jinguang (“golden light”) style took over the mainstream in the 1970s, and continued its decline with the emergence of the pili (“thunderbolt”) style. Beginning in 1984, Chen and his younger brother Li Chuan-tsan spent 13 years teaching traditional puppetry in schools. A number of Chen’s students have gone on to create their own offshoots of the I Wan Jan family, with Wu Rongchang establishing the Hong Oan Jian Classical Puppet Troupe, Huang Wushan establishing the Shan Puppet Theater, and France’s Lucie Cunningham (née Kelche) also applying the skills she learned from Chen both as a puppet maker and a puppeteer.
Chen holds nothing back from those willing to study. Believing that traditional puppetry is still a vibrant art form, and that students need the practical experience of performing to hone their skills, he has also been hoping for financial support from the private sector.
Xu Zhengzong pulls out his family’s script for The Eagle Claw King. Worn nearly ragged, the script must be at least 50 years old.