A puppet is an inanimate object or representational figure animated or manipulated by a puppeteer, says wikipedia, though it is the puppet basically that eventually manipulates its master, whose bread and butter is related with the coppers his marionette earns. Puppetry is an ancient form of art, a form of art that is currently dying. Rafi Peer Theater Group holds this dying art dear enough that it has arranged for an abode for these puppets in Lahore; Peeru’s Cafe, where International Folk Puppet Festival was held lately.
An art once known to be one-of-the-most-known still tops the chart, though only below the head of ‘about to extinct’. Performers at the festival seemed perturbed about the ever-falling status of puppetry in the world of more technically sassy art forms. Theater viewers, one wonders, have grown up, they are not kids anymore, and how can a wooden marionette, being controlled by strings, on a static platform entertain them? But isn’t the world of 3D visual arts also just a projection of mere photons of light emitting from a picture tube? “There are many advantages in puppets.
They never argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives,” said Wilde. It’s high time that the custodians of artists (and not art) rise beyond commercialism and give puppetry (the art) some space in the mainstream. If not for anything then philanthropistically for the art form itself…?