The upper section of the screen is slightly tilted towards the public. A strip of felt is struck to a horizontal table, at its foot, to prevent the scenario and the puppets from slipping and to ensure they remain standing when not in active usage. The source of light is provided by a lamp in the middle of the screen and deploying a lampshade to keep the glare down or, alternatively, neon strip lights at the upper and lower ends of the screen. Electric lighting, which has now replaced oil lamps, does enable the screen to be darkened in order to change the scenario.

 

The puppets are handled through recourse to three rods. One is attached to the upper section of the body with a small strip of parchment glued or sewn onto the figure, and with the puppeteer holding it in his right hand while using his left to manipulate the two rods commanding the character’s hands.

 

The orchestra, sat behind the puppeteer, is similar to the basic orchestras playing for all types of opera. The group includes string instruments and perhaps a flute to accompany the singing, a drum and a ban, a variety of castanets serving to set the pace and in addition to percussion instruments, gongs and cymbals to provide rhythm to the movements. However, the music and singing do vary by region. In the short humorous pieces, the sung sections are less numerous but, even in the dialogues, the voices are specifically projected in order to demonstrate that even in the realistic scenes, the audience is in the theatrical universe and not in the real world.

 

The repertoire is the same as the operas performed by real actors even though there are certain differences and especially given the clear preferences for those pieces that best adapt to the shadow theatre genre. Paradoxically, this enables greater realism when dealing with stories that are not at all realist, narratives purely from the imaginary with characters displaying magic powers; in this case, actors are only able to make recourse to 《artistic means》 such as dance and restrained by the limitations inherent to the human body. However, in shadow theatre such dimensions may be conveyed genuinely; there is no issue with showing animals such as unicorns, scenes of torture in hells, characters capable of rising to the clouds or divinities descending to the earth in order to undertake extraordinary miracles. This is what explains the success of shadow theatre plays based on the story of The Investiture of the Gods (feng shen yanyi). This work represents a historical story that portends to convey how the Shang Dynasty was overthrown by the Zhou in the middle of the 9th century B.C. even while the majority of the characters ride fantasy mounts and are endowed with unimaginable abilities such as being able to burrow through the earth like moles and otherwise hold magical weapons, with some more powerful than others. In the end, all of the characters, following their respective deaths, are divinized and take up functions in the celestial administration. There are also numerous plays adapted from episodes from the story Voyage to the West (xi you ji) about a priest who sets off for India in search for sutras but encountering along the way monsters that try to kill him but on every occasion he gets released by his loyal companions, the monkey Sun Wugong(the Monkey King) and the Eight Voiced Pig(Zhu Bajie). In the same way as the myths, the legends provide shadow theatre with narratives that may be explored in different ways. Throughout China, the legend of the White Serpent tells how she transforms into a beautiful girl who then marries a human. The scene in which, after her true form had been revealed by a priest, and helped by the aquatic animals, she attempts to attack the monastery located on an island in the Yangtze in order to save her husband, cannot really be acted out apart from in shadow theatre. This genre also easily incorporates into its repertoire the plays in which judges such as Bao Zheng (Bao gong) has to take decisions about judicial processes and is only able to do by descending into the hells in order to question the dead. In shadow theatre, such a scene results in a visit to the underworld and a vision of the type of punishment awaiting miscreants.

 

The same principle applies to the war scenes: only in this theatrical genre are we able to see the cavalry appear on the scene and engage in battle with heads flying off and falling to the floor. This is thus why plays portray the conquests of the Xue family throughout Central Asia during the Tang Dynasty or the struggles of the Yang family against barbarian invaders during the Tang Dynasty, which very often involve flashes of magic and requiring specific member of shadow theatre companies specialized in the performance of battle scenes.

 

Furthermore, there are certain plays with particular connections to certain places, which endows them with a particular in the host region that in others. Such is the case, for example, with The Lotus Shaped Magic Lamp (bao lian deng): the goddess of Huashan mountain couples with a mortal and bears a son. However, her brother, the god Erlang, on learning of her behaviour, entraps her beneath a mountain. Already adult, the son of this union between man and goddess, learns from an old wise man how to wield magic weapons and engages the god Erlang in combat and releases his mother. This piece is above all performed in Xianxim province, the location of the Huashan mountain.

 

Despite these shared generalities, there are many regional differences. The figures themselves come in one of two styles: Hebei and Xianxim. The Hebei style is made in extremely fine and flexible donkey skin while Xianxim puppets are in bovine leather, significantly thicker and thus more durable. The faces of the Hebei figures are generally more elongated and with broader profiles than those of Xianxim, which are finer although with wider eyes and with slightly convex foreheads. The colours are brighter and livelier in Xianxim whilst those of Hebei tend to opt more for browns and dark reds. The Hebei style is centred on Luanzhou, and hence there are references to the Luanzhou style; it spread throughout the northeast and into Inner Mongolia. The Xianxim style contains its own variant within the region that features thicker figures, with the cruder profiles appropriate to pieces that perform in the numerous battle scenes that became the local speciality. The style from the west, undoubtedly the most beautiful in all of China due to the delicacy in the cutting and the brightness of the colours, spread to Henan province, we would highlight certain unique characteristics: the hairstyles are moveable and the two arms are connected to the same part of the body and not placed on either side.

 

Whilst shadow theatre spread along the Yellow River valley, in fact, it also exists to the south. The figures common to Hunan province differ in scale; they are traditionally made from cardboard, with coloured cloth affixed to the cut sections, which is equally certainly due to the persistence of the oldest style of shadow theatre living on in this isolated region. However, for the last few dozen years, the heads have been made out of sheets of painted Rhodoid plastic. In Fujian province, shadow theatre has practically disappeared even though two or three companies still perform in the south of the island neighbouring Taiwan. Here, the particularity is that the rod runs between the shoulders in order to be able to manipulate the body, affixed by orifices made from pieces of leather to ensure the rod remains horizontal, a characteristic that otherwise only exists in Turkey. In the Chaozhou region, bordering the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, shadow theatre was replaced by small dolls with wooden busts into which a small earthen painted head is slotted. The dolls are manipulated from behind a curtain by three rods exactly as happens with the leather figures.

 

However, the style of the figure is not the only way in this theatre genre differs from province to province. The genre of opera performed is also different and this is not due to the repertoire, which is common to all China for the case of shadow theatre, the puppets or the actors, even while there are some rarer plays that do not get performed apart from in one or another particular region. There are as many opera genres as there are regions, each distinguished by its respective music and melodies, by the composition of its orchestra, by the dialect used when singing, which results in sounds as different as western opera sung either in German or in Italian. However, in each place the musical style is common to all theatrical techniques, with one nuance: shadow theatre held onto the tradition historical styles that would otherwise have disappeared, such as wanwanqiang in Xianxim, a set of rhythmic rhyming melodies incorporating an instrument similar to a metal saucepan. In the spoken sections, the local dialect becomes a natural choice and which explains why companies only give performances in their respective regions as only there are they understood.

 

It would indeed be highly regrettable for this theatrical genre to disappear as the style has already demonstrated its worth as a genre the Chinese have taken to the highest level and, out of its unique charms, enabling something to be kept in the present that extends beyond all reality: the universe of legends and the gods. It might be considered that cinema would be capacity for impressive technical special effects. However, on seeing films that have attempted to adapt the stories of gods, ghosts and demons, we cannot help but laugh as the best that such are able to attain is admiration for the technical feats of production. The cartoons that reproduce such popular stories as Snow White or the Jungle Book are only susceptible to moving the youngest audiences. Cinema has not proven able to convey the magic of these tales that only shadow theatre seems able to visually transpose in an original way. Lotte Reiniger managed to grasp this and, in order to film The Enchanted Flute, opted to do so through recourse to shadow theatre.