Living in New York City, you learn a lot about bridges. That’s one side effect of inhabiting an archipelago. The DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn where my studio is located is rife with them. From my windows I see several fine examples of the bridge builder’s craft in both the near and distant scape. Closest to my vantage, the Brooklyn Bridge provides express passage to lower Manhattan from the westernmost tip of Long Island. On the horizon the graceful looping arch of the Goethals links Staten Island to New Jersey and the rest of the continent. Bridges like to cluster around centers of commerce and nexuses of power (traffic demands it).

Bridges are useful constructs. It is an exceptionally rich word in the English language. Webster’s gives ten different definitions. Used (and overused) metaphorically to represent any object or action that spans a gulf.

But whether viewed as an engineering feat or intellectual construct, bridges large and small can be identified by their immutability, their steadfastness beneath the feet of mutable traffic. Sometimes you can pass one with one even realizing you done so. Sometimes it arcs your vehicle high above the surrounding landscape to catch glimpses of the larger picture.

Puppetry is also a form of bridge building. At the heart of all its myriad forms, genres and subgenres is a play with the distance between the performer and the performing object. The temporary contraptions we build to span the gulf between these two distant points we call puppets. Because the act of bridging distance is a defining feature of the field, puppetry shares features with the less metaphorical sorts of bridges. Puppetry has been a convenient passageway for culture-streams, or individual artists to make leaps onto new continents (“ombres chinoise”, wayang golek) or into new mediums (film, television, digital).

The gulf between the object and its operator is one span - the gulf between the object and its image is another. Shadow puppetry bridges both at once.

Puppet theater often provides travelers with their first glimpse into an alien culture. Because puppetry is as much a visual as a language based performance art, the outsider less at a disadvantage for not speaking the native tongue.

Pauline Benton – the story of how her puppets and me ended up in the same Brooklyn loft, looking out over upper New York Harbor is a story that reveals a lot about the nature of bridges. She fell in love with Chinese shadow theater during some of her travels thee in the 1920’s. At the time the political upheavals in China, and the advent of western novelties, such as cinema, were leading to the death of the genre, which was rooted in the towns and villages going back centuries. She bought some of the fine antique figures that were on sale in the Peking and delved into the study of into the study of how they were performed. She studied with a master, Mr. Li and learned the repertoire and the techniques of making and manipulating the small leather figures. She had sets of figures made for her by traditional craftsman the local Luanchau style. However since the Luanchau figures are relatively small (9”-12”) she decided to have her figures made larger, as in the Western Shechwan traditions (14”-18”). She had made a corresponding larger shadow screen and acquired all the other accouterments needed for performances and returned home just before the fires of war and revolution spread across China and obliterated the Launchau style of shadow performance from its native soil. With her stock of figures and repertoire, Benton founded the Red Gate Players who performed English language programs of traditional Chinese shadow theater with them for three decades. When they disbanded, the entire collection of several hundred leather shadow figures, the musical instruments and accessories were packed away into large steamer trunks.

Near the end of their era, a young woman named Jo Humphrey had seen some of the Red Gate productions. They inspired her to start her own company devoted to the preservation of Chinese shadow puppet performance, the Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre Company, which expanded later, with the addition of scholastic and educational activities into the Gold Mountain Institute for Traditional Shadow Theatre. After Benton’s death in 1975 the trunks containing her treasures went to her colleague and associate, Mercina Karam, who passed them over to Jo Humphrey in around 1996. Opening the trunks found that the forty year passage in storage had fused the figures together. The viscous tung oil that was spread over the leather to condition it and make it more translucent had extruded and gummed together different layers of tightly packed figures into a solid block. Humphrey began an arduous process of restoring the figures: patiently prizing them apart without shredding their delicate perforations; stripping off the tung oil and the gunk of time with solvents and resealing them with fresh oil or varnish; then rejointing them attaching control rods. The most exquisite of the collection, a set of dozens of figures representing a marriage procession, were hand stitched onto stretched linen panels for public display. The rest of the refurbished figures were packed in a pair of large flat files, more loosely this time, so that the air can circulate around them and prevent curling or re-sticking. These, and many other trunk loads of wonders arrived in my Brooklyn studio last year after Gold Mountain Institute, (which has been under the direction of my wife Kuang-Yu Fong since Humphrey’s retirement in ‘97) lost it’s long time office/studio/rehearsal space in Queens. Special shelving units were built to accommodate their bulk and now, here they are - shadows from a time 75 years distant and half a world away. We have already begun using some of figures, including wonderfully nimble tiger, fox and other animals, in many of our shadow performance. This year we plan to use the more of them in a production of “The Legend of White Snake”, that will combing excerpts of Chinese Opera with the shadow figures (Benton thoughtfully commissioned a complete set of White Snake characters and scenic units).

Now isn’t that the function of bridges, to bring far away things across great gulfs?