Shadow play

[3][4][5][6] Shadow play probably developed from "par" shows with narrative scenes painted on a large cloth and the story further related through song.

The puppets are held close to the screen and lit from behind, while hands and arms are manipulated with attached canes and lower legs swinging freely from the knee.

The most significant historical centers of shadow play theatre have been China, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

[10] The shadow puppet play, states Banham, probably came into vogue in the Middle East after the Mongol invasions and thereafter it incorporated local innovations by the 16th century.

[11] As European merchant ships sailed in the search of sea routes to India and China, they helped diffuse popular entertainment arts and cultural practices into Europe.

[13][14] According to Stephen Herbert, the popular shadow theatre evolved nonlinearly into projected slides and ultimately into cinematography.

[15] According to Olive Cook, there are many parallels in the development of shadow play and modern cinema, such as their use of music, voice, attempts to introduce colors and mass popularity.

[17] Bradshaw's puppetry has been featured in television programs made by Jim Henson as well as the long-running ABC children's TV series Play School.

The Shadow Theatre of Anaphoria[18] (relocated to Australia from California) combines a mixture of reconstructed and original puppets with multiple sources of lights.

Unlike their Javanese counterparts, Cambodian shadow puppets are usually not articulated, rendering the figure's hands unmovable, and are left uncolored, retaining the original color of the leather.

[24] Although there are many earlier records of all kinds of puppetry in China, clear mention of Chinese shadow play does not occur until the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127).

[27] Today, puppets made of leather and moved on sticks are used to tell dramatic versions of traditional fairy tales and myths.

A large repertoire of some 300 scripts of the southern school of drama used in shadow puppetry and dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been preserved in Taiwan and is considered to be a priceless cultural asset.

This was an imaginative illustration of ideas about (false or limited) the relations between knowledge, education and a truthful understanding of reality.

Plato compared a wall that screens off the people who carry the figures to the kind of partitions used by puppet (marionette) players to hide behind.

[32][33] French missionaries brought the shadow show from China to France in 1767 and put on performances in Paris and Marseilles, causing quite a stir.

[37] The cabaret Le Chat noir ("The Black Cat") produced 45[38] Théatre d'ombres shows between 1885 and 1896 under the management of Rodolphe Salis.

Behind a screen on the second floor of the establishment, the artist Henri Rivière worked with up to 20 assistants in a large, oxy-hydrogen back-lit performance area and used a double optical lantern to project backgrounds.

[31][39][40][41] In Italy, the Museum of Precinema collezione Minici Zotti in Padua houses a collection of 70 French shadow puppets, similar to those used in the cabaret Le Chat Noir, together with an original theatre and painted backdrops, as well as two magic lanterns for projecting scenes.

Shadow puppets are an ancient part of India's culture, particularly regionally as the keelu bomme and Tholu bommalata of Andhra Pradesh, the Togalu gombeyaata in Karnataka, the charma bahuli natya in Maharashtra, the Ravana chhaya in Odisha, the Tholpavakoothu in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

[46] In many regions, the puppet drama play is performed by itinerant artist families on temporary stages during major temple festivals.

[47] In the 1930s and thereafter, states Stuart Blackburn, these fears of its extinction were found to be false as evidence emerged that shadow puppetry had remained a vigorous rural tradition in central Kerala mountains, most of Karnataka, northern Andhra Pradesh, parts of Tamil Nadu, Odisha and southern Maharashtra.

[47] The Marathi people, particularly of low caste, had preserved and vigorously performed the legends of Hindu epics as a folk tradition.

[47] According to Beth Osnes, the tholu bommalata shadow puppet theatre dates back to the 3rd century BCE, and has attracted patronage ever since.

[50] The puppets used in a tholu bommalata performance, states Phyllis Dircks, are "translucent, lusciously multicolored leather figures four to five feet tall, and feature one or two articulated arms".

[57][58] Around 860 CE an Old Javanese charter issued by Maharaja Sri Lokapala mentions three sorts of performers: atapukan, aringgit, and abanol.

[55] The complete wayang kulit troupes include dalang (puppet master), nayaga (gamelan players), and sinden (female choral singer).

Nang drama has influenced modern Thai cinema, including filmmakers like Cherd Songsri and Payut Ngaokrachang.

[64] The Karagöz theatre consisted of a three sided booth covered with a curtain printed with branches and roses and a white cotton screen by about three feet by four which was inserted in the front.

They had movable limbs and were jointed with waxed thread at the neck, arms, waist and knees and manipulated from rods in their back and held by the finger of the puppet master.