Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play

David Currell

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781785000621
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play is a comprehensive guide to the design, construction and manipulation and presentation of shadow puppets, considered by many to be the oldest puppet theatre tradition. Traditional shadow play techniques, together with modern materials and methods and recent explorations into theatre of shadows, are explained with precision and clarity, and illustrated by photographs that include the work of some of the finest shadow players in the world. Topics covered include an introduction to shadow play, its traditions and the principles of shadow puppet design; advice on materials and methods for constructing and controlling traditional shadow puppets and scenery; step-by-step instructions for adding detail and decoration and creating transculent figures in full-colour; detailed methods for constructing shadow theatres using a wide range of lighting techniques; techniques of shadow puppet performance and contemporary explorations with shadow play; and instructions for making animated, silhouette films with digital photography. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play sets out detailed instructions for making and presenting shadow puppets by traditional methods and with the latest materials and techniques. Superbly illustrated with 420 colour photographs and helpful tips and suggestions.

1 SHADOWS AND SHADOW PUPPETS

SHADOWS

A shadow is an image cast by an object intercepting or impeding light or the comparative darkness formed when such an object causes a difference in intensity of light on any surface. A shadow, however, does not have a separate existence but depends for its existence, its nature and its form upon the source of light that creates it and the surface upon which it is cast.

A figure from the DaSilva Puppet Company’s production of Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself.

Your inseparable companion, you cannot touch your shadow nor feel it; it may be on the ground in front of you but you cannot jump over it; turn around and suddenly it is behind you; you cannot shake it off nor outrun it. Sometimes it is long and thin, sometimes shorter and fatter; sometimes it is dark and crisp, at other times faint and hazy. Shadows can appear elegant, lively, playful or grotesque, mysterious and sinister. The shadow has given inspiration to many writers, among them Edgar Allan Poe (Shadows), Hans Christian Andersen (The Shadow), Oscar Wilde (The Fisherman and His Soul) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose fascination with the phenomenon of coloured shadows informed his Theory of Colour and whose literary works used the shadow as a strong image.

Shadows have often been regarded as having magical qualities and have strong cultural, religious and scientific dimensions. Our distant ancestors had shadows from the sun during the day and from their fires at night. Their cave paintings indicate the significance of the shadow even then – this intangible, mysterious figure that undergoes transformations in its appearance and has no substance yet is visible for all to see. How were they to regard it? Was it associated with life or with death? Did it belong to this world or the next?

The shadow has been viewed at times as a disembodied spirit, a phantom or one’s double and the shadow was how the ancient Egyptians envisaged the soul. Greek and Roman literature makes many references to the shadow as the soul after death and the shades was how they referred to hell, or Hades. In folklore only the dead, the dying or ghosts have no shadow and the Bible abounds with references to the shadow both as protective (for instance, ‘under the shadow of thy wings’) and as the shadow of death. Even today in Indonesia, where the shadow puppets represent ancestral spirits, gods and demons, the dalang, or puppeteer, still performs a semi-priestly function.

Cinderella by Lotte Reiniger.

Pliny (Natural History, xxxv 15) cites Egyptian and Greek myths suggesting that tracing around the outline of a person’s shadow was a precursor to painting and (in Natural History, xxxv 43) he recounts a myth that links the shadow to the origins of sculpture. It tells of a potter’s daughter who wanted to preserve the image of her lover who was travelling abroad, and so, on a wall by lamplight, she traced around the shadow of his head. The potter, Butades, used this outline to create a clay image in relief and then fired it; thus sculpture was said to have begun. Later Athenagoras draws upon the same myth to explain the origins of doll-making.

Although occasionally referred to as the poor relation of reflection, the shadow has long been a significant element in pictorial art and photography. Leonardo da Vinci identified the link between the shadow and the perception of space and many artists have suggested that the shadow is as significant as the real object, while the Surrealists use the shadow as an independent motif. In photography and film too, light and shade are essential structural elements. This is particularly evident in some of the renowned films produced around 1920 (Dr Caligari’s Cabinet, Nosferatu, The Shadow), where shadows are used to hugely expressive effect.

The shadow is deeply imbedded in science too. As well as being used as a monitor of time, it was the shadow of the Earth on the surface of the moon that led Aristotle to deduce that the Earth is spherical and larger than the moon. The changing length of shadows led to the deduction that the Earth’s axis is inclined and shadows were again used to calculate its circumference and the height of the pyramids.

The shadow of a Javanese wayang kulit puppet exhibited at Shadowstring Theatre.

These examples highlight how perceptions of the shadow have intrigued us and become woven into faiths, literature and the fabric of daily lives, providing a metaphor for human existence:

For in and out, above, about, below,
Life’s nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Played in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

Edward FitzGerald (1859), translation from the twelfth-century poem, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A Javanese wayang kulit shadow puppet.

THE SHADOW PUPPET

A broad definition of a traditional shadow puppet would be a two-dimensional figure held against a translucent screen and lit so that an audience on the opposite side of the screen can see the shadows thus created. However, as will be apparent in the following chapters, this has become a rather limited definition in relation to the wide spectrum of shadow theatre today.

Traditionally made of parchment or hide, shadow puppets are now usually made of strong card, thin plywood, acetate, occasionally wire or sheet metal, but there is scope for experimentation with all manner of materials. They need not be difficult to make and can look surprisingly delicate and intricate on the screen.

A shadow puppet cut in thin plywood by Steve and Chris Clarke (Wychwood Puppets) for Shadowstring Theatre.

When we think of shadows we tend to envisage solid black images, but shadow play often incorporates translucent figures that cast coloured shadows. The colourful, translucent, traditional Chinese ‘shadow’ puppets fall into this category and similar figures made with modern materials are commonly used to create colourful images. Some performers use card from which shapes have been cut to project ‘white shadows’ and flexible, reflective surfaces are illuminated with powerful lamps to bounce light images on to shadow screens.

Matsu, a figure cut in metal from lighting gobo material by DHA-Rosco for Paper Tiger, by the DaSilva Puppet Company.

An owl created in X-ray film by Paul Doran for a Shadowstring production of Witch Is Which.

Figures created with galvanized wire.

Translucent figures created by Jessica Souhami from white card, coloured and oiled.

One should also distinguish shadows from silhouettes. The silhouette takes its name from the Marquis Etienne de Silhouette (1709–67) who was Controller-General in France in 1759. His severe measures to deal with the French economy gave rise to anything mean or cheap being referred to as à la silhouette. At this time black, cut-out portraits became immensely popular, particularly with the Marquis. They were so much cheaper than miniature oil paintings that they became widely known as ‘silhouettes’ and part of the standard French vocabulary, a term later to be adopted more widely.

A print of an eighteenth-century silhouette chair.

A silhouette, unlike a shadow, exists in its own right and cannot be distorted; it is an image, usually in solid black,...