living-writing: Taiwanese Puppetry

Glove Puppet Theater

Puppet Master

My brother took us to visit a Puppet Theatre Museum in Taipei, whose mission is to preserve and promote Asian puppet theatre traditions and cultures. What a fun place it was and we got to meet some very interesting people there as well. The style of puppetry which I grew up with is Glove Puppetry - the puppets are made of carved and painted wooden heads, palms, and feet and little elaborate costumes as torsos and limbs. Here is a video clip on YouTube of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company's performance in Prague. In addition to glove puppets, the museum has a large collection of other forms of Asian puppetry including marionettes, stick, shadow, and water puppets. We were also taken to see the museum's highly-valuable puppet collection in a climate-controlled room, currently maintained by a young college student from Leiden University in the Netherlands. She has been in Taiwan for two years and can speak, read, and write in Chinese. Very impressive! We also met the resident puppet carver, who told us about the guardian of the puppeteers, whose wish is always consulted as to whether he would like to travel with the companies on tours, and the Performance Coordinator, Wu Shan-Shan, who has extensive training and experience in Western theater and dance. The Director of the Museum, Robin Ruizendaal, who is a friend of Michael's but was away on vacation, is also Dutch and holds a Ph.D in Sinology from Leiden University. There seems to be a deep cultural connection between the Taiwanese and the Dutch people. There is a fort, Fort Zeelandia, built by the Dutch in the 1600's in my home town, Anping; I grew up scaling its thick walls.