Puppets' Characters

I thought that the Hiroshima Maidens made by the American puppet artist Dan Hurlin in 2004 were really cool. He used broken-eggshell shapes for the heads to represent young woman disfigured by th atomic bomb. I found this to be fasinating because who would think of broken egg shells to represent people. I think it makes perfect sense i mean the egg shape would almost make it look like a bomb that was broke which is what the atomic bomb was. The purpose of these puppets was to demonstrate the damage and mutilation caused by the atomic bomb. Their traits were basically mishappen girls as the result of the atomic bomb.

I also thought this was kind of cool because back in middle school we put on a mock trial for my history class, and our topic was the bombing of Hiroshima. I was a witness and i was suppose to be a Japenese survivor of the atomic bomb. I had to have a whole ton of paste aplied to my face to make me look really mishapen. I thought that it was a different and unique technique to use broken egg shapes to represent the damage. I just felt a personal connection to this type of character.

Types of American Puppetry

Well at the very beggining of the video the man was holding a puppet that was connected by strings. This type of puppet form is a marionette form. This form is used widely throughout the world from Egypt and Greece to India and sub-Saharan Africa. This is a form where the puppets have strings or rods connected to parts of the puppet to help them move like they have joints. Many cultures became very good at perfecting this form so as to enhance movement and hide the strings and rods better.

In the video when they were moving those cloths through the water with the rods i feel that it was a mixture of several different art forms. First i think it had aspects of the marionette such as the rod that was used for the majority of the movement. The rods where most commonly used in Asia. The performers would be under the stage using the rods to move the puppet. In the video however they used the rods to stir and cycle the cloths in the water to make them look alive. They also used the lighting and such to make the puppets or cloth stick out more much like Shadow puppets that were most common in places like China, Java, and other places in Asia. This helped give it a two or three dimensional look to it.

I also caught a glimps of a rubber octopus in the film which is a custum to the swiss and was developed by Mummenschanz. They use the foam and rubber to bend it and fold it in amazing ways while controlling it from the inside. It quite reminded me of the other video we watched in class about the human slinky. I think it is a fascinating art form and i love how they can do such amazing things with the puppets. The video contained many forms of puppetry and i think it is fascinating how all the forms can be blended together to create anything you can imagine. It's like being able to create a whole knew world and bring it to life.

Let's Discuss!!!

Briefly explain the relationship between religion/ritual and puppets??? Well puppets are used as a form of interpreting especially things that people can't comprehend or do, and religion fits right into that category.