| All the tour buses in Hanoi congregate outside the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre on the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake, and virtually every tourist in town spends at least one hour of his or her trip in the theatre’s misty interior, watching a succession of little wooden puppets splash around in a pool of water. While raging popularity isn’t necessarily a selling point for any attraction, in this case it is entirely justified: water puppetry is magic.
What immediately distinguishes the Thang Long Theatre from any other is its cool, humid interior, caused by the slightly murky pool of water that substitutes for a stage. To the rear of this small, rectangular lake stands a small temple with dragons dancing on its roof. To its right is a palm tree and to its left is a musicians’ stand. Eight puppeteers stand waist-deep in water under the temple roof, hidden from the audience by bamboo screens. Using poles and strings, the puppeteers make their little characters cavort and dance in the water, performing scenes of rural life and traditional Vietnamese folklore.
Most of the puppets – built of brightly lacquered wood – are made to look like people, but there are also fish, foxes, dragons, unicorns, boats, frogs and water buffalo, all illuminated by coloured lights and firecrackers. Even the character of the water alters according to the activity taking place: calm and placid for a fairy dance, frothing madly during a boat race, and misty and still for a tale from the life of Vietnamese hero Le Loi, a mandarin who defeated Ming Chinese invaders in 1427.
Water puppetry (roi nuoc in Vietnamese) originated around the 12th century in the rice paddies of the Red River Delta. It was usually performed in spring, during the flood season. Puppeteering skills were kept secret and passed down along paternal lines until relatively recently, when it became clear that knowledge would have to be shared more freely if the art form was to survive. At the Thang Long Theatre – the best-known venue for water puppetry in Vietnam – nearly half of the performers are women.
Most contemporary water-puppet exhibitions are accompanied by performances of traditional music, and hearing and seeing Vietnamese instruments played is reason enough to see a show. On the night I attended, there were eight singers and musicians, all plucking, thumping or breathing into some extraordinary device: a Vietnamese lute, coin clappers, a gong, flute, rice drum and a dan bau, an instrument comprised of a single silk string stretched across a sounding box, with an ornate whammy bar at one end. It looks a bit like a theramin and sounds like a human voice.
The Thang Long Water Puppet Troupe was formed in 1969 and has since taken its show to folk art festivals in such diverse places as Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong and Denmark. The sound-and-light spectacle presented these days is a far slicker affair than it once would have been. Originally, production values were considerably lower (no coloured spotlights and comfy chairs for the audience, for a start), and the only instruments used were gongs and drums.
Water puppetry is enchanting to observe. The whimsical wooden people and animals have enormous charm, and the individual scenes – despite uninspired program descriptions like " fishing" and "agriculture" – are riveting. While it seems a pity that such an interesting indigenous art form should now be performed almost exclusively for foreigners, it’s a far better fate than total extinction. |
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