While in Hanoi, we spent an evening watching a traditional water puppet show. Vietnamese water puppetry dates back as far as the 11th century, when farmers in northern Vietnam would put on shows in flooded rice fields to entertain their villages.
Today, the modern water puppet performance takes place in a square pool of water. This pool (or “stage”) is flanked by an orchestra and has a wall at the back – behind the wall, performers control puppets via submerged bamboo poles. The puppets themselves are made of wood, with some being very elaborate and articulated. The way puppets are manipulated from behind the stage, the appear to be dancing on top of the water!
We saw this show in a building with a specifically built pool/stage for this purpose; however you can also find traveling water puppet troupes (and stages) or even performances set up in rice fields in Vietnam these days.
All in all the performance we saw lasted about an hour, so you just get a snippet here. Anybody who speaks Vietnamese is welcome to tell us what exactly was happening in the show – the entire performance was in Vietnamese, and we didn’t purchase the audio guide. Nonetheless, this was still a very cool and unique performance to witness.
Enjoy!
P.S. After the show, I touched one of the puppets they had setup outside the venue around a Christmas tree. A security guard quickly wagged his finger at me, so I settled for this photo – at the bottom is the “up close” puppet shown above:
