Taiwan has a glorious tradition of puppetry. And while cultural commentators often seem eager to wring their hands at the erosion of the country’s traditional culture, efforts to preserve, and build upon, this tradition have not been without success. And for one puppeteer at least, Taiwan is an oasis in a world where puppetry is increasingly marginalized.
Massimo Godoli Peli came to Taiwan first as a performer with Teatro del Drago, an Italian puppet troupe. For the past 11 years, he has remained here as a member of the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company (台原偶戲團). While living in Taiwan, he has created his own interpretation of Italian puppetry for local audiences, which is currently being showcased in Pulcinella. The performance is playing at the Natou Theater of the Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theater Museum (林柳新紀念偶戲博物館) every Saturday until April 28.
As a professional puppeteer from a very different tradition to that of Taiwan’s, Peli has found much to love here. More than anything else, he applauds the wide appeal of puppetry in Taiwan.
Photo Courtesy of Taiyuan Puppet Theater
“When you make a traditional puppet show [in Italy], only children watched. It is difficult to play this kind of show for university students or grown-ups, as you can in Taiwan,” Peli said. “ In Italy, the children would watch, but the grown-ups would go to the back and chat or have a drink. In Taiwan, even the adults watch the show.”
Working with the Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company, Peli has found a role helping to develop shows like Pulcinella, one in a series of Italian-themed performances that he has adapted for Taiwan.
Pulcinella is a character from traditional Neapolitan puppet theater and is a distant relation to the Punch of England’s Punch and Judy. Stupid and lazy, Pulcinella is constantly getting into trouble with his wife, who wants him to pull his socks up and earn a proper living. The humor is broad and there is a good deal of comic violence; there is also plenty of room for improvisation.
Although the Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company is best known for its bold experimental puppet theater productions that span East and West and mix multimedia with many kinds of traditional and innovative new puppets, it does much more than simply create experimental theater for the art house crowd. As a museum, it aims to develop interest in traditional puppet theater as well.
Peli’s productions provide a different perspective on traditional puppetry, but calibrated as they are to appeal to Taiwanese families, they are a long way from Italian tradition.
“If they [old school Italian puppeteers] saw my show, they would probably kill me,” Peli said. The audience of families with young children at last week’s show had no such thoughts, delighting in the action as Pulcinella gets beaten by his wife for napping when he should be working, and for seeking out the services of a fortune-teller to show him the way to easy riches.
The puppets are carved by craftsmen at the Lin Liu-Hsin Puppet Theater Museum based on pictures provided by Peli. They are quite different from the fine-featured puppet heads of Taiwanese opera, and have a character uniquely their own. With plenty of broad humor and gags that even the youngest children have little trouble responding to, the mood of Peli’s shows is also very different to what most Taiwanese audiences are used to. Peli does all the dialogue, switching between Mandarin, English and Italian, mixing it up in all sorts of ways to give a unique atmosphere of multicultural fun.
Peli came to puppetry by accident. A childhood friend in his hometown of Ravenna came from an established puppeteering family. This friend took over the family trade from his grandfather to prevent the tradition dying out, and Peli went along for the ride. He had been an avid fan of puppet art as a young child, and with this move he embarked on a course that would make puppetry his profession.
In Taiwan, he has helped out as both actor and puppeteer in many of Taiyuan’s art house productions, picking up some tricks from local puppet masters along the way. As his Chinese language skills are still limited, he said he has little patience with the “talk, talk, talk” of some traditional shows that depend on highly sophisticated crosstalk, (相聲), a form of comedy developed in the Qing Dynasty featuring rapid-fire, complex banter between performers, but greatly enjoyed the technical challenges of learning how to manipulate puppets in complex fighting or roughhouse action sequences.
Pulcinella is a hybrid production that on one level at least relies on Peli’s foreignness as part of its appeal. The puppets and the kinds of stories they tell are different from both traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry and the televised puppet art of the Pili (霹靂布袋戲) and Jinguang (金光布袋戲) traditions. It has a simplicity and innocence that Taiwan’s sophisticated puppet culture has long put behind it, and provides a visceral thrill that was evident in the quick response Peli got from his young audience last week.
Peli said he hoped to present a traditional Punch and Judy show one day, to provide an insight into another related tradition. Currently he has two new shows in pre-production, one based on the story of Red Riding Hood. For this Italian puppeteer, there are still plenty of stories to tell.
Commenting on the state of puppetry in Italy, Peli said that traditional companies there are struggling. In Taiwan, he says the situation is a little better, because “there are still many puppeteers, and puppet masters are given respect ... In Italy, playing puppets is just a part-time job at best.”
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