There are no strings on me

So it's been quite a while since we saw the puppets at the "Shadow" theater, but I find myself comparing what we're seeing lately more and more. First of all, stage presence is extremely different. When we saw the grand opera which used its massive cast to the fullest potential, there were still several small, but noticable, mistakes. When actors were entering or exiting the stage, of course they didn't all move at the same pace. When 30 bodies need to exit the stage uniformly, there's a massive bottleneck effect causing a momentary break in the action. And this is to say nothing of a few of the actors accidentally slipping and sometimes falling on the awkwardly slanted stage. With the puppet opera, all of the puppet bodies are static. Each one permenently wired in place, moving at exactly the same pace no matter what. In this one small way, the puppet theater is actually more visually impressive than the grand opera!

The other and most obvious change (you know, other than the whole puppet thing) is the time commitment required by this medium. Even though it could be argued that a maximum 10 minute length had primarily children in mind, but everyone has enjoyed these plays, the plethora of golden mask awards is a testiment to this. I'd hesitate to say this is a better system than several hours for character building and plot structure, it's not, but I think I enjoyed it more. Purely arbitrary and subjective of course, but the time requirement concieved by the attention span of children needs to be compact and straight foreward. (You may now make jokes) I think this demands an unique take on these ancient stories, one that can only be conveyed through this medium. 

One last thing I really enjoyed was that there no secrets with the puppets. They didn't just allow, the performers encouraged us to go behind the scenes and see how everything works. 

This may mostly be due to the miniscule audience size, but it seems like that wouldn't exaclty fly with some of the bigger names in theater anyway.