Last Friday, Tom McDonagh came to the Studio to treat us to a demonstration of his wonderful shadow puppetry. As well as these wonderful visual demonstrations, Tom talked to us about his investigations into how we can combine new technologies with this ancient form of entertainment in order to rekindle the amazement that it inspired when it first came about, thousands of years ago.

Tom gave us a brief history of shadow puppetry, which he started in China in about 100BC an era in which Shadow Puppetry flourished. It grew so popular, that almost every Chinese village had a shadow theatre. To demonstrate the skill involved in accomplished Chinese shadow puppetry, Tom showed us a video, in which a beautifully painted screen, adorned with lilypads and reeds, was stage to two frogs and a crane, whose movements were so complex and smooth that you would never be able to tell they were made from a bit of paper, a few sticks and a light-source. Shadow Puppetry is so revered as a skill that there are still masters of it in China.

Tom then told us about the Wayang tradition of Shadow Puppetry, emanating from Indonesia. There is a distinct difference between these two strains; whilst the Chinese tradition is quiet, contemplative and delicate, Indonesian Shadow Puppetry is cacophonous and colourful. The puppet master, or dalang, would be playing to audiences of 5000 for as long as 6 hours, with tough puppets made from buffalo leather, which were painted in bright colours. People would sit both in front of and behind the screen, as some preferred to watch the dalang work (who would joke and sing with the audience on his side), and some preferred to see the illusion of the shadows. Up until recently, shadow puppetry has also been popular in Europe. Le Chat Noir, the 19th Century nightclub (publicised in the famed Lautrec poster) was actually a shadow theatre, which used a bright electric ark lamp in order to cast shadows onto a circular screen, using lead puppets. In European culture, shadow puppetry was quite an avante-garde medium, which, for some reason slipped into obscurity at some point in the 20th Century. An interesting theory about the birth of Shadow Puppetry, explored by Werner Herzog in his documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is that shadow puppetry emerged at the same time as the birth of art itself. Paintings of animals, daubed onto cave walls 32,000 years ago are said to have been ‘animated’ by moving shadows cast by flickering torches on the uneven cave rock.

After this fascinating insight into the history of Shadow Puppetry, which turns out to be deeply embedded in our culture, Tom told us about the beginning of his relationship with the medium. Visiting Sikkim, a mountainous Indian State in the Himalayas, Tom met a wealth of fascinating characters. Memories of these people and the stories they told gnawed at him, and he knew he had to document them in some way. Considering how he could try to portray the richness of what he saw and who he met, but cheaply and effectively, he thought of using shadow puppets. The medium is real-real time, so is so much less time consuming than animation, and also so much cheaper than using actors and large sets. Whilst experimenting with shadow puppetry, Tom began to realise the medium’s room for experimentation, and he began playing with light-sources. Digital projection has a lot to offer, with the ability to project different scenes, objects and characters for the puppets to interact with, but the light-source is still, and so there isn’t a lot of dynamism in the movement of the puppet. On the other hand, a sharp ark lamp gives a cinematic approach, allowing you to change the direction in which the shadow is cast, so that on the screen, it looks like you are panning around the shadow, and zooming in and out. Some lights, wrap around the shadow, making it faint as it moves away from the screen, and very dark if it is pressed against the screen – this means that when working close the screen, the puppeteer’s sticks are invisible.

Tom then began playing with two light-sources at once, and making them switch on and off alternately, casting shadows from two different angles. He used this technique to make figures appear to perform a simple action, for example, banging a drum, by the switch of a button. He took this further, and used multiple lights to make two figures look like they were duelling. Tom has done a lot of experimenting with 3D shadow puppetry. Inspired by a Lucien Bull’s ‘films stereoscopiques’, filmed in 1904, Tom decided to try to create 3D shadow puppetry. He uses polarized light and a special screen that preserves this polarization. Viewed with 3D glasses, the shadows cast on the screen become 3D. He demonstrated this by handing out 3D glasses, placing two pot-plants behind the screen, and casting the polarized light onto them. The result was really striking, as he moved the light-source around, it was as though two black 3D plants were spinning in front of us. Because 3D puppetry is a live image, it doesn’t give you a headache as animated 3D films can do, as it has no frame rate and so is simple for our brains to process.

Tom is currently working on ‘Disasternoon’ a 3D puppet play, set in the Great Exhibition in Paris. He also plans to create a 3D shadow puppet kit that kids can play with at home, consisting of a pop up book with 3D settings (i.e. a fairground) a polarized light source, a screen and some laser-cut shadow puppets. Tom’s exploration into shadows has had some astonishing outcomes, and by the end of the talk, we were all Shadow Puppetry enthusiasts! We are looking forward to seeing where his experiments take him in the future.