By - 3 Mar 2011
"A scrawny adolescent wades into a fertile stream teeming with the buzzing of sentimental dragonflies, and carp and cod and pink green water lilies."
Review by Zhou Ting-Fung
Read this review on The Big Idea
"His sullied sodden singlet clings to his skinny chest, his
sinewy forearms tensing as he raises the tattered bamboo basket
above his head. He sweeps down in a single movement.
There is a loud splash as the basket hits the water, and then a
second, more majestic one as he slips, plunging into the
water. The cunning cod escapes. A girl on the bank
giggles.
The miracle is not that what I have described above was enacted
by puppets, but that, in reliving the evening's events, I am not
sure whether it really happened, or if I simply imagined
it. From the moment we sat down in the open air Garden
Theatre, there was alchemy: the conspirators of Vietnamese
Water Puppets brought not only a stage filled with water that
resembled a rice paddy, but a meandering Vietnamese monsoon with
them, a warm summer shower leaving fragile droplets of water on
sardonic faces. Prepared for the downpour, the Festival
provided us with translucent plastic ponchos, and as children and
septuagenarians alike huddled in to their foldout seats of the
open-air Garden Theatre, in our transient guises, we looked rather
like a tribe of nomadic travellers.
It was appropriate, because over the next fifty minutes, the
Thang Long Troupe took us on a journey. Taking simple
observations of everyday village life in Vietnam as its subject,
the mundane rhythms of ploughing, rice planting, fishing, frog
catching, and a wedding are re-enacted with an innocent wonder that
brims with humour and visual mischievousness. There is a
primitiveness to the hand-made, hand-painted puppets that gives
them life, disarming us to laugh and love the brutish baffled
buffalo locked in a battle, or a flittering, infatuated couple,
using an umbrella to steal a kiss.
What carries the show is its sentiment. This is folk art
in its true sense - quite apart from the obligatory traditional
uniforms of the musicians that accompany the puppetry, in their
shimmering banquet robes - it is a resurrection and affirmation of
a way of life, in which the staging of such performances was to
celebrate the coming and going of the seasons: the end of the rice
harvest, weddings, religious festivals. Successful puppetry
depends on the ability of a performance to coax the audience into
suspending its disbelief, going beyond an imitation of life to
attain the characteristics of living. Though the puppets were
made of wood and bamboo and paper, in watching the performance, I
became absorbed in the reality of the rural lives that the water
puppets represented, and in their performance, enacted. Then,
as now, such performances give the struggle of their ordinary lives
meaning, and despite the doubtless hardship of such a way of living
- joy. This significance was not lost on the Thang Long
Troupe, who began the show with the musicians playing three Maori
folksongs, the last of which was Hine E Hine; a touching gesture of
cultural translation, and an acknowledgement of the necessity of
preserving, in living forms, our cultural histories, no matter
where we are from.
Vietnamese Water Puppets is an enchanting, and
completely authentic experience. It eschews narrative for
folksong and puppetry, and is delivered completely in
Vietnamese. Perhaps at times plodding in failing to rise to
the level of spectacle, and suffering slightly from the lack of a
cohesive thread between each vignette - it makes up for it in its
sincerity, and in the imaginative excursions it invites us on,
quite beyond the capabilities of a wooden puppet, attached to a
stick. Indeed, the lack of narrative cohesion may be its very
point. It is devoted to how, and why, such a performance
would have been made and the lives it depicts, and despite the
barrier of language, the show sings. A charming
diversion."