by Shenzhan/申展
White Snake, Pauline Benton’s shadow figures collection
To You Who Are Gay:
Do not think us too grave and erudite
We bear the burden of China’s past.
We have lived through the depth of her
suffering from which have flowered the greatest
heights of her culture.
To You Who Are Serious:
Do not think us too light and frivolous.
For many centuries, we have brought Joy and
Laughter to troubled monarchs, weary laborers,
and fragile, lonely ladies in the dim seclusion
of their courtyards.
To You Who Are Wise:
Do not think us too naive and simple.
We make no claims to colossal and
gigantic glories. We are the creations
of men who have carved and molded us with
their own hands and endowed us with life from
the breath of their own souls.
Thus,
We ask you ALL to laugh as we laugh,
Weep as we weep, love as we love, and live
with us our simple and homilies as
we recreate them for you in our Show World.
The Shadow Actors
Written in 1940 by Pauline Benton, an American shadow player who studied from Lee Tuo-ch’en (李脱尘), the leading shadow player before WWII, the poem, “Greeting”, is from her book, “The Red Gate Players: Introduce the Actors and Plays of the Chinese Shadow Theatre”, beautifully capturing her love of “the Shadow World”, sentimentally and romantically. Given the current state of this almost extinct theatre art, it reads melancholy as well.
Inside cover of “the Red Gate Players” by Pauline Benton, 1940
The world, recreated by light and shadow, and brought to life by the shadow players, has long gone. And the art itself is almost forgotten in this busy noisy world overwhelmed by multimedia.
Perhaps not yet. At least, on a sunny early spring Saturday in New York, there were still a group of people, gathering at China Institute for a talk on shadow figures, by Prof. Li Mingjie (李明洁), an anthropologist from the Folklore Institute of East China Normal University. To shadow players like Pauline Benton, and Jo Humphrey, who inherited the shadow figures Benton had custom-made in China, and passed the torch to Ms. Feng Guangyu, currently running Chinese Theatre Works in New York that continues to produce shadow plays and workshops, Li has one main question:
Why are you interested in the shadow plays?
Because it’s a rich culture created by humans. It’s part of the world civilizations. You look at them, and you are led into the heart and soul of the people who created them. If no one continues it, those worlds and people will disappear, which would be a loss of the world. They said.
Shadow figures and shadow plays, evidently was already invented in China as early as Western Han Dynasty, when Emperor Wu (156 - 87 B.C.) was shown a shadow figure of Lady Wang, one of his favorite concubines who he terribly missed after she had passed away. While very popular between the 8th and 12th centuries during the Tang and Song Dynasties, they are hardly viewed to be relevant any more in contemporary China. Perhaps very few people would care nowadays. Perhaps as it becomes so irrelevant, it doesn’t hold the same kind of meaning in order to survive . But certainly it took people's heart before. People, like Benton or Humphrey, may not be born into the Chinese culture but nevertheless had a deep appreciation of it. Perhaps there is no point mourning for the decline, or the eventual extinction of certain arts at all. Civilizations are always like this. A culture has its own life cycle. One fades into the past when a new world with completely different people gradually, but surely replaces the old world. By luck there can be traces left, so that the new people will have something to build upon, for the new world at a different time.
And hopefully it will be a better one.
Shadow figures from Chinese Theatre Work’s production of “Monkey versus the Mountain of Fire”, created for the Chicago Field Museum in 2015 by Stephen Kaplin, copied from original figures in the Benton Collection. Currently on view at China Institute until February 29, 2020.
2-24-2020 8:52 pm
Astoria, New York