Masks and Puppetry Featured at 2010 Cityfolk Festival

The annual Cityfolk Festival offers such a cornucopia of musicians and musical styles and sights and sounds that it can be easy to overlook the festival’s Material Culture exhibit. That’s a mistake because year in and year out, the Material Culture area contains some of the coolest stuff you’ll ever see. Personal favorites from last year were Rebecca Cross’ amazing shibori wall quilts and Mai Lo Vue’s Hmong/Amish quilts, while memorable highlights from past exhibits range from Mary Gaynier’s incredibly intricate paper cutouts to Wayne Henderson’s internationally renowned guitars.

The Material Culture theme for the 2010 Cityfolk Festival (July 2-4) is one that promises to be fun: Masks and Puppetry. The Material Culture exhibit and activities will be curated, as they were last year, by Sara Cogswell. She has lots to work with, as both masks and puppetry offer hundreds of interesting avenues to explore.

Masks have been around forever. The oldest surviving mask—a stone mask found in the Middle East—is roughly 9,000 years old. Whether used for concealment, protection, ritual, performance or just for fun, masks are used in virtually every society in the world, for reasons both sacred and profane. From children’s Halloween masks to the elaborate creations worn by Mardi Gras revelers, from the Lone Ranger to Batman, from religious ceremony to dramatic spectacle, masks are ubiquitous, mysterious, infinitely variable yet still completely human on some elemental level.

Puppetry is an even older art form than masks, dating back some 30,000 years according to some accounts. Puppetry is a storytelling art and medium, and puppets have been used wherever people have told stories. Like masks, puppets of one form or another are found in almost all human societies. Puppetry might well have developed in India, where the main character in Sanskrit plays from 6,000 years ago was named Sutradhara, “the holder of strings.”
Two puppeteers accompanied Hernando Cortez on his first trip to Mexico in 1519 (I find that fascinating for some reason), but the concept of puppetry was already well established in the Americas almost 1,000 years before that, as part of funerary practices. Though puppets are still occasionally used for practical or ceremonial purposes, they are mostly used in modern times for entertainment.

Puppetry today has many varieties, including marionettes, in which figures are manipulated from above using strings; ventriloquism, in which a puppeteer manipulates (or “throws”) his or her voice so that it appears to come from a “dummy”; hand puppets, like the Muppets; bunraku, a Japanese tradition in which up to three people control giant puppets with sticks; British “Punch and Judy” puppetry; shadow, rod and finger puppets; a unique style of water puppetry developed in Vietnam where the puppeteers stand in waist-deep water and the puppets appear to walk and move on the water; and even a Tony-winning Broadway puppet musical, Avenue Q, an R-rated homage to the Muppets that contains the songs “It Sucks to Be Me” and “What Do You Do with a BA in English.”

Sara Cogswell is exploring these themes now and whittling down the list of potential artists. More details will be posted beginning in April. [Photos are from past Cityfolk Festivals. The first is Puerto Rican mask maker Kenneth Melendez. The second is members of Sol Azteca with Son de Madera.]