Divinities,
Demons, Kings and Clowns:
Puppetry of India and and Southeast Asia
Curated by Kathy Foley with assistance of Michael Schuster
Exhibition Dates: February 13- March 27, 2004
This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Indo-Pacific Council, the Music Department, the Asian Studies Center, and the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh.
This exhibit attempts
to show how South and Southeast Asian puppet theatres have consistency in the
stories, iconography, and character types. While the puppet theatre in
Southeast Asia is, today, a higher status art and more consistently practiced
than in India, many of the initial ideas of equivalency between the microcosm
and macrocosm, iconographical details, and ritual uses of puppets are intertwined
with religious and cultural ideas that are also found in South Asia. Through
trade and travel, ideas have continually moved back and forth from one area
to the other.
The figures that you see here represent traditions going
back up to a thousand years and a number of these traditions have impacted European
puppetry either in the past or in the 20th century. Some aspects of the
traditional puppet clowns of Europe can be related to the South and Southeast
Asian clown characters and some hypothesize the Asian clown-type may have migrated
with the Gypsies from India into Europe in the medieval period. The rod
puppet technique of Indonesia was refined in Europe in the beginning of this
century, and may have helped Jim Henson conceptualize the rod technique for
his work. Julie Taymor's version of Lion King which is currently on Broadway,
is influenced by her time studying puppetry in Java and Bali. While the
ideas presented here relate most clearly to South and Southeast Asian puppet
practice, they participate in worldwide patterns that have influenced
object theatre of the past and present.
Understanding the Macrocosm through the Microcosm
How can a single individual experience full human potential,
expanding past the given circumstances of one life? If born
to low status how can one know what is to be royal; if male, female; when young,
how can we understand age? And, if we only dimly comprehend
other humans, how can we pretend to know other beings - animals, plants,
gods or demons?
In South and Southeast Asia from for over a thousand years
men solved these conundrums using the puppet as a tool. The lively doll
theatre traditions found throughout South and Southeast Asia today are the legacy
of men who shrunk the cosmos into a miniature world of figures.
The vast expanse of the earth could be reduced to the few feet of a puppet
stage. The puppeteer's lamp became the sun, throwing light on myriad creatures
who, in their nobility or baseness, represented the world. The greatest
stories ever told could be sung with one voice and battles which shook
the world could be fought by two hands. By using the small world to represent
the large, the puppet master could stretch himself and those who watched to
understand the forces, seen and unseen, which make up the universe