What Is Puppetry? Making an Audience Believe an Object Is Alive

Puppets are usually classified by how they are controlled, and each method has characteristic strengths:

• •Marionettes, worked from above by strings, which walk and gesture convincingly and are difficult to manipulate with precision
• •Rod puppets, held and worked from below or behind by rods, which give strong control of the head and arms and dominate several Asian traditions
• •Glove or hand puppets, worn on the hand, which are immediate, fast and expressive and are the form of Punch and Judy and countless street traditions
• •Shadow puppets, flat figures held against a translucent screen and lit from behind, seen in Javanese wayang kulit, Chinese shadow theatre and Turkish karagoz
• •Bunraku-style puppets, large figures operated in view of the audience by three visible performers working together, one for the head and right arm, one for the left arm and one for the feet
• •Object and found-object puppetry, animating everyday things, and body puppetry where a performer's own limbs become the character

The technique rests on a small number of principles that puppeteers teach explicitly. Breath is the first: a puppet that rises and falls slightly, as though breathing, reads as alive even when doing nothing, and one that is perfectly still reads as an object. Focus is the second: the audience follows where the puppet appears to look, so the direction of the head and eyes carries most of the character's attention and intention, and a puppet that looks at another character creates a relationship instantly. Weight is the third, since an object has no mass to speak of and a living thing does, so the puppeteer must fake the effort of lifting, the settling of a body into a chair and the momentum of a limb. Fixed point is the fourth, meaning that a joint the audience reads as anchored must not drift. When several performers operate one figure, as in bunraku, the coordination required is such that the three roles are traditionally learned in sequence over many years, with the feet first and the head last.

Several traditions treat puppetry as the principal dramatic form rather than a lesser one. Javanese and Balinese wayang kulit performs episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata through the night, with a single dalang voicing every character, manipulating all the figures and cueing the gamelan orchestra, a role that is religious as well as artistic and requires an enormous memorised repertoire. Japanese bunraku developed in the seventeenth century alongside kabuki and shares its repertoire, with the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon writing major works for puppets before they were adapted for actors, which reverses the usual assumption. Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Sicilian and Czech traditions all carry comparable weight. In Europe the form was frequently the vehicle for material that human actors could not safely perform, since a puppet could mock a ruler or a bishop with a degree of deniability, and travelling puppet theatres operated under lighter licensing than playhouses, which is part of why Punch survived centuries of official disapproval.

Puppetry adapted to broadcasting rather than being displaced by it. Television gave puppets a frame that hides the operator without requiring a stage, and the medium's close-up made small facial detail readable, which produced the work of Jim Henson and a generation of children's television across many countries. Film effects used puppets and animatronics for creatures until computer imagery displaced them, and there has been a marked return to physical puppetry in film and theatre on the grounds that an object that genuinely exists in the light behaves in ways audiences accept more readily. The clearest recent demonstration is the stage adaptation of War Horse, where full-size horse puppets operated visibly by three performers each produced a response from audiences that no concealed mechanism achieved, which supports the recurring claim in the field that seeing the puppeteer does not break the illusion and frequently strengthens it, because the audience is actively doing the work of belief rather than being tricked.

Puppetry classifies by control method, from marionettes on strings and rods worked from below to shadow figures on a lit screen and large bunraku puppets operated by three visible performers. The illusion rests on breath, focus, weight and fixed points rather than on realistic construction. Wayang kulit and bunraku are major dramatic traditions with adult audiences and religious weight, and European puppet theatre carried satire that human actors could not safely perform. Visible puppeteers tend to strengthen the effect rather than spoil it.