A Crash Course in Asian Puppetry
/by Chad Williams of WonderSpark Puppets
Last February my brother got married in Thailand. We went early (always vacation for two weeks if you can) and took the advice of our good friend Carol Sterling to visit an amazing little puppet theater on the outskirts of Bangkok: Semathai Marionettes. We met Nimit who runs the theater, Piewnam who runs the administrative side and watched a performance by young puppeteers in training for a Thai Pre-K class and some of their parents.
Five months later we found out that Nimit doesn't just run a theater. Like Manuel Moran in NYC, Nimit is the head of a giant international puppetry festival. He asked us to come back to Thailand and perform in it. We would be representing our 'American style' of hand puppets in a booth. We said yes.
Christina Rodriguez and I arrived in downtown Bangkok a few days before Halloween to soak in the sights, adjust to the time zone difference (13 hours) and visit some temples before the Siam Paragon World Puppet Festival began. It was one piece of a much larger ASEAN summit happening that month and took place in the Siam Paragon Mall. We were told that at the last minute, the Thai Minister of Culture decided to drop the festival, so the gigantic Siam Paragon picked it up and our performances were literally in between luxury goods stores with escalators full of tourists visible behind the stage.
It sounds wild, but we and the other 13 puppet companies were treated like rock stars. We had our flights and hotel comped, we were fed and given a daily food stipend plus our fee for performing, and the huge staff running the festival were ultra-supportive. We hung out with some of the other puppeteers who could speak English very well, like Benjamin from Paper Monkey Theatre in Singapore. Each group mostly kept to themselves, but we did make one outing as a massive group of 100 puppeteers to The Artist's House. It is an ancient temple converted into a rod puppet theater on a pier over a river. More young puppeteers in training showed off their intense daily exercises and put on a performance that will eventually be as polished as their adult counterparts.
The festival finally began and everyone settled into the ritual of piling into 16-passenger vans to drive 2 hours to a location literally 10 minutes away. Bangkok traffic is crazy! Christina and I preferred to walk, which brought us past local street food, a huge bridge with speedy ferries running under it, up and over a 3-story high pedestrian walkway, and through 3 of 5 mega malls to get to our specific mall where the performances took place. The festival area was packed with local families, curious tourists, and staff that was running tech and coordinating tons of Thai media (including Thai PBS that had us perform a bit in their studios).
Do Thai children know English? I was confident from a previous festival performance in Taiwan that they would and did not change our English-only show to a non-verbal piece. The result was that from inside our booth, the audience could have been from NYC or Philly or anywhere else - they responded to everything I was saying in the exact same way. Many of the other shows were in English as well, including our friends from Singapore.
It was incredible to represent our country in what was mostly an Asian festival. Thailand, Vietnam, New Zealand, Japan, Cambodia, Myanmar, etc all brought their own cultural/traditional styles and some workshops for after each performance. Being at the festival was like a crash course in Asian puppetry but with modern practitioners. We even got to see some of the very little kids from Semathai Marionettes' training program on stage manipulating shadow puppet figures that were literally bigger than them. It was inspiring being surrounded by all these different styles with puppeteers from countries whose governments support the arts.
After a week of being 'somebody' at an international festival, it was time to go home. We said our goodbyes, checked our carnet at the airport and flew back to NYC. In Thailand, I was an American puppeteer with skill, recognized by my peers! It was a great feeling. Back in New York, it was time to apply what I had learned and spread the word about this amazing festival.
