Puppet Beings Theater Company (偶偶偶劇團) has earned a reputation for creative puppet performances using a simple object: paper. Large and small sheets are folded, twisted or bent during shows to create characters used to tell simple morality tales to family-oriented audiences.
With its latest work, Paper Play 2 (紙有你真好), Puppet Beings has taken its craft in a different direction by adding prefabricated puppets, which are still made from paper. The play begins tonight at the National Taiwan Arts Education Center.
“This time we’re performing in a large theater so we wanted to create larger puppets,” said Sun Chen-chieh (孫成傑), the company’s artistic director. “One puppet is over 3m tall,” he noted.
The company uses another puppetry technique, called “box puppets,” for the story’s other main characters. When the curtain lifts the puppets appear as simple boxes on the stage. In the hands of the black-cad puppeteers, the boxes are transformed into human or animal shape, “just like the movie Transformers,” Sun said.
Paper Play 2 is a story of friendship between two animals. It is also a tale of how man’s encroachment disrupts the forest’s natural order. A hunter enters the woods in search of big game and stumbles upon a fox and a bear. But the cunning fox tricks the hunter and the bear manages to escape.
The fox, however, is captured by the hunter who brings him home as a pet for his daughter. Although the hunter’s daughter treats the fox with kindness, the furry creature still misses the forest and his friend the bear. Eventually the bear hatches a plan to spring his companion from the hunter’s home.
The bear hovers over the stage and is a gargantuan 3m tall, requiring three puppeteers to manipulate its arms, head and legs. Two puppeteers each manipulate the fox, hunter and daughter; one maneuvers the head, the other the body. “With more puppeteers, the possibilities of movement are much greater,” Sun said.
Paper Play 2 will be performed at National Taiwan Arts Education Center (國立台灣藝術教育館), 47 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路47號), today and tomorrow at 7:30pm, tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm and Sunday at 10:30am.
NT$300 to NT$600 tickets are available through NTCH ticketing.
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