Although the first thing that may pop into your head when your think of puppetry is the Muppets, puppetry is a well respected craft in many cultures. And even if we smirk at Miss Piggy, I'm sure many of us can attribute some of our literacy and social knowledge to Sesame Street.
Thanks to Julie Taymor's integration of puppetry into the costumes of The Lion King on Broadway, the art of puppetry has found its way into "higher arts". The skill is also very useful to have in the current animation industry.
Japanese Bunrako is an ancient high art and Indonesian shadow puppets are intricate and linked to religious ritual of the culture.
The Puppetry Homepage offers nice brief definitions of puppetry terms and a plethora of links to various puppet forms. The site itself is rudimentary and the images are limited, but it still does a great job in leading you to some great stuff.
This Website is the imdb of Kabuki theatre. It has a list of every Kabuki actor, images of those actors, the latest Kabuki revivals, etc.
It would be a great site to use in conjunction with art history to create a virtual Kabuki play and Marquis.
The stylistic movements, erratic vocalizations, and symbolic choreography in Kabuki is so very different than Western performance that it would be a challenging but fun undertaking for a high school drama student. This website would serve as an excellent tool for a group project who could use the names and artist renderings to do more research in presenting a brief Kabuki performance. I have a DVD that I would show prior to the assignment as well as a brief description in my textbook. This would definitely take them out of their comfort zone; an important lesson for an actor.
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