![]() Roosevelt.īenton continued to perform until the final two years of her life, when brain cancer forced her to retire. Their performance was enthusiastically received, even earning them an invitation to perform at the White House, in front of President Franklin D. To bring these tales to life, the troupe’s performers sang the original lyrics and tunes composed using traditional Chinese instruments such as the yueqin or moon zither, the erhu or two-stringed fiddle, and the gong. The troupe staged English-language productions of a number of traditional Chinese plays, relying in part on translated scripts either funded by Benton’s aunt or carried out by Laufer and partly on story elements written to appeal to American tastes. Over the course of the Great Depression and World War II, the Red Gate Shadow Players toured all over the United States. ![]() In 1932, Benton established the Red Gate Shadow Players in New York and in 1936, as she left China for what would prove to be the last time, she took with her hundreds of made-to-order shadow puppets and a complete set of props and instruments. ![]() She pledged that she would carry on the tradition, which even then was beginning to show signs of decline. Li, a native of the nearby coastal town of Luanzhou in Northern China’s Heibei province and a master of shadow puppetry, taught Benton the craft and she soon became the only female performer in what was a traditionally male-dominated field. With her aunt’s help, Benton was introduced to an English-speaking Christian convert by the name of Li Tuochen. In the courtyard of Konantz’s home, Benton first witnessed a shadow puppet performance – a retelling of the play “The Burning of the Bamboo Grove.” The sight of the protagonist, a female general, flying across the screen in front of lifelike smoke effects enraptured Benton and stayed with her for the rest of her life. In 1923, she travelled to Beijing to visit her aunt, Emma Konantz, a professor of mathematics at Yenching University in Beijing and a lover of Chinese culture. When Benton was a child, she followed her father, a university scholar of some repute, across Europe and Asia. In 1923, he brought his collection together for an exhibit titled “Oriental Theatricals.” Headlined by his collection of Chinese shadow puppets, the exhibition caused a sensation and drew the attention of Pauline Benton, a woman who would take the alluring images of China’s puppeteers off the museum shelves and resurrect them for a new century and a new country. He spent the first 15 years in the role traveling across China, collecting an estimated 19,000 cultural artifacts from various time periods in the country’s history. He also used wax phonograph cylinders to record puppetry performances.īetween 19, Laufer served as the lead anthropologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. During his travels, he spent the then considerable sum of $600 on a near-bankrupt Beijing puppetry troupe, acquiring all its screens, scripts, and mannequins in the process. In 1902, Laufer, who knew many East Asian languages, explored China at the behest of the American Museum of Natural History. by Berthold Laufer, an American Orientalist. Shadow puppet shows were first brought to the U.S. The remarkable story of how this happened begins with a man, before becoming inextricably entwined with the lives of three women. ![]() Practitioners in the United States, however, managed to preserve the art form throughout the last century and into the present. Although it was added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2011, it is rare to see an authentic performance in China. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the rise of movies and television, and later the attacks on traditional folk arts during the Cultural Revolution, have sent the popularity of shadow puppet performance into a gradual decline. Behind a large screen, backlit so that it’s translucently illuminated, handmade donkey-hide puppets dance across the stage, acting out a wide range of stories from China’s formidable canon of classics. Traditional Chinese shadow puppetry is one of the country’s most spectacular folk arts.
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