SHADOW puppets flitting across screens and reliving age old stories have fascinated Chinese people for some 2,000 years, but with falling audiences troupes are having to be creative to stay on the stage. On a translucent screen in a Beijing classroom, a child with a cosmic ring takes on the son of the dragon king, attacking him with huge thrusts of his lance. Behind the screen, puppeteers use rods to move the figures, to the joy of the schoolchildren watching. The legends of the past are the bedrock of shadow theatre — a tradition still popular in the countryside, though it has lost much ground in large cities over the last few decades. Shadow theatre was celebrated up until the 1960s when it was targeted as part of the Cultural Revolution. It had something of a renaissance in the 1980s and in 2011 was included on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

While the theatre struggles to attract young peoples’ interest, a troupe in a Beijing suburb — whose performers have an average age of 22 — has managed to survive. It is made up of 60 or so puppeteers with one of them. He was struggling to find work several years ago, before he discovered the troupe online dwarfism, who present themselves as having an average height of 1.26 metres. Jin Xinchun is and moved to Beijing to join it where he was employed as a puppet maker.

Wang Xi, a puppeteer founded the troupe with her husband in 2008 after meeting with the national association of dwarves. The puppeteers now perform regularly in schools. But Wang Xi said she is nervous about the future: “Our masters are all older than 80 and they obviously won’t be able to go on stage in 10 years.” State support is key to keeping shadow theatre alive, Lu said.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2019