Riley Rogerson

Shadows, Strings & Other Things: The Enchanting Theater of Puppets

by

RMR

By Gwyneira Isaac, National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution & Riley Rogerson, George Washington University.

During a time in which many museums have had to entirely shift to the digital realm in order to engage with the public, the website and online exhibit project Shadows, Strings & Other Things, curated by Nicola Levell and assistant curators Anna Nielsen and Erika Balcombe, presents a fascinating digital window into the art of puppetry. The website originated out of a larger project and collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in which Shadows, Strings & Other Things was conceived as not only a physical exhibit of over 230 handmade puppets displayed at MOA (16 May–14 October 2019) but also a research project spanning seven modes through which visitors can experience the diverse cultural heritage of puppetry (Figure 1). This multimodal project is now accessed via the website (Figure 2) and includes a digital 3D scan of the exhibit, videos, podcasts, virtual reality, an open access gallery guide, and the publication of the book Bodies of Enchantment: Puppets from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas (Levell 2021a).1

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.

This review focuses on the website and online exhibition but necessarily positions them within the larger project, which has been recognized for its groundbreaking approach and innovative development of a foundation for scholars interested in designing websites for experimental museum projects. The on-site and online rendering of the exhibition received the award of Outstanding Achievement in the Exhibition–Cultural Heritage category from the Canadian Museum Association in 2020, and subsequently in 2021, Levell was awarded the Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology from the Council of Museum Anthropology.

The ShadowStringThings.com website not only lures you into the enchanted world of puppets, their makers, performances, and audiences but also provides you with a resourceful study of the creative processes behind the making of the exhibit. Although the online exhibition is centered around a digital scan or “digital twin” of the prior on-site physical exhibition, the website is much more than an exhibit walkthrough and uses the multiple modes and media (video, podcasts, catalog, etc.) to provide a captivating “front of house” and “behind the scenes” look at the art of puppetry and exhibit making. This ingenious approach plays with the idea that the magic of puppets lies in how they dance between their onstage animation and their enactment by the hidden puppeteer—with the website acting as the alluring portal that reconnects these material and immaterial, real and imaginary worlds of both puppetry and exhibit-making. By also exploring the work of the curators and designers whose efforts behind the scenes brought the exhibition to life, the website animates a complex and often unseen network of people and things that are part of museum work but are never visible within the museum gallery. Levell’s decision to digitally materialize this creative aspect of the project provides an important model for curators whosimilarly want to use the digital realm to unpack for audiences the processual aspects of making exhibits. This facet of the website and online exhibit also emphasizes the performative nature of museum work—celebrating how the museum gallery can be a space where objects come to life through storytelling—with the website also acting as an oral history archive for this process.

By taking advantage of the range of media that Shadows, Strings & Other Things provides, including podcasts and videos, you will gain intriguing insights into the world of puppetry, such as why the puppeteers behind Punch and Judy are referred to as “professors,” as well as the origins of the term punch line. You will also discover how “water puppeteers” in Vietnam wear full body waders to prevent rheumatism as they stand immersed for hours during each performance. In effect, the digitized exhibit and carefully curated videos and podcasts lift a curtain to reveal the inner workings behind puppeteers and their art, as well as what it takes to reimagine a puppetry exhibition in the virtual realm.

Enter Center Stage

You are welcomed into the website Shadows, Strings & Other Things through a 3D gallery map and a digital 3D Matterport scan of the MOA on-site exhibition. Your first encounter at the entrance is a breathtaking 12-foot-tall First Nations puppet called Meh, whose name translates as “grandpa” or elder (Levell 2019: 37). Meh is the outcome of a collaboration between the Mortal Coil Performance Society and Tsatsu Stalqayu (a multigenerational Coast Salish dance group). Meh’s arms are raised in the Indigenous Northwest Coast gesture of welcome such that this “positioning and pose were in accordance with the territorial protocol of local First Nations” so “visitors to MOA are welcomed to the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the hәn,q,әmin,әm,-speaking Musqueam peoples” (personal communication, 2021).

You move into the gallery space through an entryway with large, black curtains held back by gold cords that emphasize the theatrical nature of the displays awaiting inside. String lights hang from the ceiling creating a carnivalesque ambience, with each section of the exhibition revealing differently textured and designed flooring and lighting that highlight each specific genre of puppetry (string, shadow, rod, hand, and stop motion). Playful wall graphics using the hands of puppeteers portray a feeling of wonder and childlike curiosity. Once in the darkened gallery, you are irresistibly drawn to luminous stages and vitrines that glow with the soft stage lighting that is used to indicate to the audience that the show is about to commence. As you move around the gallery, you encounter a wide array of brightly colored puppets, some are gilded and eye-catching, while others are suspended as if caught mid-flight and mid-performance.

Using the 3D map digital walkthrough and navigation tools, you can tour the galleries, gliding through them also as if in flight, alighting where you chose to pause and take in the detailed artistry of shadow puppets or to peek at majestic stages crowded with vibrant casts of puppets dressed in resplendent attire (Figure 2). The 3D walkthrough is designed in a manner like Google Maps Street View, but by hovering over small colored circles, you can also enlarge and read the wall texts. Levell describes how these digital labels differed from those in the on-site gallery, as the digital ones had to be redesigned specifically for the online exhibit: “They were radically edited (to reduce the word count), photographs were removed and replaced with cut-out ‘icon’ puppets, thereby making them accessible and readable for the Matterport scan” (2021b: 38). This decision elevates the online exhibit above the many gallery 3D scans for which label copy is not readable. In addition to accessing exhibit texts, the benefit of the high-resolution 3D scan is that it provides you with generous zooming abilities to explore details in the displays that otherwise would be absent. Beneath the portal to the 3D scan are five-minute mini tours via YouTube videos that are narrated by Levell and give a more in-depth guide to exploring the exhibition. A playful “Puppet Hide & Seek” game—which is like a treasure hunt for young viewers—is also provided to help children look for and connect directly with specific items in the online exhibition.

There is not a fixed or prescribed order that users must follow to experience the 3D exhibition model; however, the gallery is organized by puppetry typologies with the two theatrical stages situated closest to the entrance dedicated to the string and shadow puppets. Beyond these are hand and rod puppets, after which the visitor reaches the most recently developed puppetry art—the stop-motion stage. Rich red curtains pulled back to the sides with golden cords grace each stage, and gold clamshell footlights illuminate the puppets, with the inclusion of theater chairs for the accompanying videos, evoking classical theater design and setting the stage for an overall playful, theatrical aesthetic to the exhibition.

All aspects of the online exhibit are rendered remarkably well in the digital model, giving a whimsical feeling to the virtual space, with each stage catching your eye and holding your attention. The creatively designed zig-zag hallway created by the theater walls also keep your senses sharp, as you move from stage to stage, hall to hall, maintaining strong visual interest without overwhelming or confusing you. Levell has also added a clever analogy to the “front of house” and “behind the scenes” structure by providing a display of puppets behind each stage, shown as they would be when stored and waiting for their cue to join the others on stage. With these behind the curtain vignettes, you are also provided with further texts that give further context and explanation of each puppet tradition.

Another experimental aspect of the website and digital exhibit is the use of virtual reality. If visitors have the newest version of the Oculus Quest VR gaming system or other similar headsets with controllers, the digital version of the exhibition can be viewed in VR for a fuller immersion than the base 3D model. Repeated attempts made to access and load the VR exhibition with an older Oculus model failed, however, and the newer more compatible models can be priced at $300 or more. While the ability to experience the exhibition in VR is a great idea, this reality is probably inaccessible to many, leaving the 3D model the realistic option for most visitors.2 Despite this setback, the online 3D scan of the exhibition and associated media makes the all-around experience a highly rewarding one, nonetheless.

Spotlight

There are puppet characters that come to life via the website that not only are memorable but transcend the screen and quickly find a home in your heart—revealing that the intimate joy of puppetry is not lost in the digital realm. One such character is the Garbage Monster from Turkish puppeteer Cengiz Özek, whom you can watch via one of the YouTube videos.3 The shadow puppeteer in this performance uses a clever layering of different puppets and props to allow the Garbage Monster to swallow boots and bottles to the delight of an audible audience of children, whose laughter you can hear as the objects are seen to go down the monster’s gullet and into its stomach. There are magical scenes of an underwater world with schools of fish and turtles who swim across the stage. In the finale, the Garbage Monster swallows a drunken fisherman who had thrown his bottle into the water and awoken the monster. The fisherman’s final moments inside the monster end the performance via a clever shift to a closing scene, revealing what it might look like from the inside of the belly of a beast.

Another highlight is the behind-the-scenes video taken during one of Professor Richard Coombs’s Punch and Judy shows in which Punch and the crocodile fight over a long link of sausages. The charm here is Coombs himself, and you discover how this puppeteer must work two characters at once, which requires each hand to operate two personae independently from the other in terms of speed, voice, tone, and style. Quite literally, one hand does not know what the other is doing—a saying that must come from the puppet world. With this intimate behind-the-scenes viewpoint, you find that this art of hand puppetry must be like having one hand dancing the waltz while the other does the rumba. The artistry and skill of Coombes takes center stage, and he becomes the mesmerizing magic of the show.

There is also a video of a puppet show from Sri Lanka in which the head of the dancing puppet in traditional dress has the side-to-side motion characteristic of this kind of traditional dance. While the puppet and her movements are transfixing, a close-up of the puppeteer working with her behind the scenes is an equally enthralling partner to the show. The video exposes the puppeteer’s feet graced with bells and dancing along with the puppet (Figure 3). This perspective helps the viewer understand that while a curtain separates puppet and puppeteer, the dance between the two is seamless: they are inextricably linked with one becoming the other. This brings to mind critical questions about agency, animacy, and the dynamics between people as objects and objects as people (Gell 1998; Gosden 2005; Strathern 1999) especially within the digital realm (Isaac 2022). In this absorbing video, however, it is not about an analytical inquiry that separates the two but the ways in which these are experienced together, and where the lines between the two are blurred.

Figure 3.
Figure 3.

Another highlight is the stop-motion section of the exhibit, which allows you to see how artists use film to create fantastic illusions, such as puppets breathing warm air into a cold winter night, as can be seen in Amanda Strong’s (2019) remarkable stop-motion short film Biidaaban (Figure 4). The smooth flow of a thousand well-executed stop-motion shots allows audiences to forget the role of the artist, and a team of hands meticulously controlling every moving piece, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. Interestingly, the stop-motion stage stands out from the others—just as the technology behind this kind of animation is in itself rather distinct and kept hidden from its audiences. Unlike other puppetry forms in the exhibition, stop motion wholly hinges on photographic and video technology. In the exhibition, the stop-motion stage does not contain the same theatrical elements as the others: there is a bench but no classic theater chairs, no red velvet curtain with golden cords, no clamshell lights. We are reminded that these performances take place not in a theater but in a mediated studio. While puppeteers are literally joined to their puppets via strings, stop motion is animation via recorded movement—the audience only sees what happens after the artist has removed themselves. In another of Strong’s (2017) stop-motion films, Four Faces of the Moon: Canada’s Dark Colonial Past, she uses an intersection of past and present trauma to address what has been lost and what has been retained by Indigenous people over time. Her films not only master but poignantly embody this art form.

Figure 4.
Figure 4.

Playbill

The website for Shadows, Strings & Other Things also operates as an educational hub for research on puppetry. There are a wide range of downloadable materials, such as a PDF booklet of the exhibition (42 pages; 58 color images), which highlights the voices of puppet makers and puppeteers whose artistic works and practices were acquired, commissioned, or loaned for the exhibition. Strong graphic design elements from designer Cody Rocko mirror those from the on-site exhibition and depict puppets suspended by strings that go beyond the limits of the page, integrating them into the metaphorical exhibit themes about the liminal space between puppet and puppeteer (Figure 1).

Podcasts are also used to explain the union between the on-site and online versions of the exhibition. In these Levell introduces herself as the curator in charge of “all things material,” and Anna Nielsen as the assistant curator in charge of “all things digital.” These “take you behind the scenes to meet with the creative individuals who helped make the exhibition,” including the exhibition designer Skooker Broome and an exhibition team that includes Erika Balcombe, who, along with Nielsen, are graduate students working with Levell in museum anthropology—showing how the exhibition also proved to be successful as a research program for UBC students (Levell and Nielsen 2020a, 2020b). Other team members include the manager for fabrication, Kate Melkert, and Gerry Larson, who provided audiovisual design. These podcast conversations reinforce how the physical and virtual exhibitions are inextricably linked and at the same time exist independently. This also helps communicate to the visitor that developing the virtual exhibition comes with its own unique aspects and challenges that differentiated it from the physical exhibit, thereby providing unique lessons for scholars interested in these kinds of multimodal digital projects (for critical insight into the process of curating the virtual exhibit, see Levell 2021b).

The video section is one of the most culturally diverse and includes 18 archival and contemporary audiovisual clips from independent filmmakers and organizations around the world. These provide an ethnographically curated showcase of puppetry and behind-the-scenes work of artists and traditions and serve as case studies for interested students. Moreover, these videos are in a diverse range of languages with subtitles, thereby opening a much-needed global view on puppetry that considers the practice beyond how it is understood in the English language. As Levell has pointed out, the exhibit was also designed to rethink the conventional focus that has been on European and Asian puppets, and she actively sought out and included puppet traditions and concepts from Africa, as well as Indigenous communities of the Americas—especially from communities that are part of the Vancouver area and traditional territories of the Musqueam peoples. The vast range of audiovisual clips from different cultures also ask the viewer to resituate their prior understanding of puppets as entertainment and consider the spiritual and philosophical aspects in which many of these traditions are grounded. As a result, these videos, podcasts, and educational resources provide a fascinating window into not only puppets but also the cultural values and knowledge systems that animate them.

Exit Stage Left

A website and online virtual exhibition of this detail and magnitude prompts the question of what it means to have “visited” it. Neither of us was able to travel to see the now-dismantled on-site exhibition, instead exploring Shadows, Strings & Other Things through the project dedicated website. The attention to detail across the online exhibition and digital 3D scan of the galleries and the myriad of digital resources, however, left us feeling we had experienced key aspects of the original exhibition. Moreover, if you spend time exploring all the multiple integrated facets, the website reveals itself as this layered and complex research project that also interrogates what it means to be a digital exhibit. As Levell said, the 3D scan once accompanied by the myriad resources became a “digital twin-no-more.” What began for Levell “as an attempt to capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of an exhibition and extend its public lifespan” evolved into an ongoing research project (2021a: 39). Moreover, Levell (2019) also fittingly argues that the digital version of the exhibition is “not only a legacy, it’s a catalyst … a catalyst for creating an awareness and interest in puppetry.”

Before viewing this website and online exhibit, we had not experienced a digital museum project that has so elegantly and artistically succeeded in spanning the multimodal platform approach (digital walkthrough, podcasts, video, exhibit catalog). Shadows, Strings & Other Things does this in a way that provides a critical and theoretically engaged lens on the relationship between tangible and intangible cultural heritage and pushes past the conventional gallery walls to open up exhibit-making, setting the standard for future multimodal museum anthropology projects. According to Levell, this approach was designed to interrogate “the artificial boundaries between tangible and intangible cultural heritage, material and digital exhibitions, inanimate and animate bodies or, more generally, the ontology of things/belongings/beings and their relation to story work and the imagination.” Arguably, the most significant move to decolonize institutional structures and representational practices was the inclusion and foregrounding of First Nations puppetry and the presence of first voices. World puppetry exhibitions and related catalogs “have tended to focus on Asian and/or European traditions and overlook Africa and the Americas, especially Indigenous traditions” (personal correspondence, 2021).

Shadows, Strings & Other Things takes advantage of its online habitation with a wide array of media that distinguishes and enhances its inherently digital nature, offering a window through which to experience the animacy of puppets and their makers. As a result, the website, online exhibition, and larger project take advantage of the digital format by paying homage to the tangible world of puppets and, at the same time, evoking the intangible aspects—such as the relationships between puppeteer and puppet, curators and designers. In this way, it adroitly brings to life a network of relationships that are not normally visible within a museum gallery, setting an important precedent for future curators interested in revealing to viewers what is behind the making of an exhibition. This aspect also emphasizes how museum exhibitions are in and of themselves performances, with the intangible aspects not seen by the visitor but which, if made visible, enhance the experience and understanding of who is pulling whose strings.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Alex Wescott for the generous use of his time and virtual reality equipment in testing the website’s VR feature, and to the editorial staff of Museum Worlds for their support in the preparation of this review.

Notes

1 The virtual exhibit can be viewed at https://www.shadowstringthings.com.

2 We have also learned that the virtual reality features of the online exhibit can be accessed and used via cell phones and a Google Cardboard VR viewing device.

3 Videos can be found at https://www.shadowstringthings.com/videos.

References

Virtual exhibit review, published on 01 July 2022 in Museum Worlds Vol. 10, Issue 1.

Download the PDF containing the entirety of the journal issue here and start at page 249.

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