Shadow-Show

Shadow-Show, form of puppetry in which flat, jointed figures are passed between a translucent screen and lighted candles or, nowadays, electric light bulbs, so that the audience, seated in front of the screen, sees only their shadows. It originated in the Far East, particularly in Java and India, and in an increasingly crude form spread to Turkey and so to Greece, where it gave rise to plays centered on the comic character Karaghiozis (in Turkish, Karagöz) which can still be seen in a rudimentary form in some Greek villages and in the back streets of Athens. As ‘les Ombres Chinoises’, shadow-shows were popular in Paris for about 100 years. In 1774 Dominique Séraphin opened a theatre devoted to them in Versailles, moving in 1784 to the Palais Royal, where his nephew continued his work until 1859. It was Séraphin who first introduced to Paris the classic shadow-play The Broken Bridge, in which a frustrated traveller indulges in an impassioned but silent argument with a workman on the other side of the river. This was well known in the streets of London, where, as the Galanty Show, shadow-plays continued to be given up to the end of the 19th century, usually in Punch and Judy booths with a thin sheet stretched across the opening and candles behind. There was a literary revival of the shadow-show at the Chat Noir in Paris in the 1880s, and in the 1930s Lotte Reiniger employed the technique of the shadow-show for her animated films. Her puppets were made of tin, as were those used at the Chat Noir and in the English Galanty Show, but in Java and Bali, where the shadow-play survives in its traditional form, they are cut from leather. Manipulation is by bamboo rods or concealed wires running up the centre of the figure and operated from below the screen, except in Turkey and Greece, where the rod is held at right angles to it, and fastened to the flat figure in the centre of the back.