Speaking in Draft is an interview series in which Intermission staff writer Nathaniel Hanula-James speaks with some of the artistic voices shaping Canadian theatre today. In a mixture of lighthearted banter and deep dives into artistic practice, this column invites artists to share nascent manifestoes, ask difficult questions, and throw down the gauntlet at the feet of a glorious, frustrating art form.
As a dedicated make-believer, I’m thrilled when an artist uses everyday materials like cardboard boxes or lentils to make theatre magic. Until this year, though, I’d rarely considered the potential of one particular substance, which literally follows me around every day: shadow.
That changed when I watched an exquisite blend of dance, projection, and shadow puppetry co-created by interdisciplinary artist Annie Katsura Rollins and Andrea Nann, the artistic director of the Toronto-based company Dreamwalker Dance, along with director Sarah Chase and dramaturg Cindy Mochizuki. An impressionistic portrait, both a reckoning and a healing, Firehorse and Shadow reflects on Nann’s formative years in Vancouver, her hyphenated Chinese-Canadian identity, and the stories of her matrilineal line. During the pre-show, I watched as Rollins painted the Vancouver skyline in black Chinese ink on a huge, backlit, translucent sheet of paper. (You can check out a digital version of the show here.)
In a brief pre-show speech, Rollins explained how she’d made several trips to China between 2008 and 2019 to apprentice in the art of Chinese shadow puppetry, and how this millenias-old form blurs the boundary between artistic and spiritual practice. Previous to this, I’d known Rollins through Concrete Cabaret, an experimental puppetry collective in Toronto that she co-founded in 2018. Having performed in a few of Concrete Cabaret’s showcases, I was familiar with Rollins’ deep passion for community arts, but I’d had no idea of the years she’d spent studying this ancient performance lineage. During Firehorse, she breathed life into detailed, emotive shadow figures representing zodiac signs, elements of Chinese medicine, and Nann’s relatives.
How can the absence of light create such a powerful onstage presence? Rollins has spent years and multiple degrees pondering that question. After speaking with her, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I’ve gained a new respect for this oft-overlooked art form.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In a short 2016 documentary produced by CBC Arts, you said that your shadow puppetry journey began with a hunch. Can you expand on that?
It’s hard to know where intuition comes from. There were quite a few factors that cumulatively led me to shadow puppetry. I’m part Chinese and part Japanese, mixed with some white heritage. I grew up in a very homogeneously white environment in Minnesota. I was looking for belonging, and I found it to some degree in community theatre when I was 12. I ended up doing a BFA in musical theatre performance at Carnegie Mellon.
Even though I was in theatre, it took me a long time to realize that puppetry beyond the Muppets existed. In college, we went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, and I saw Indonesian shadow puppetry, an art form that is thousands of years old, for the first time.
At that point, I’d been wanting to repair my own fractured immigration history with my Chinese side. In an intuitive way, that’s the lineage that has felt the closest to me, and that I felt I wanted to be closest to. Then somehow, when I was in my mid-20s, I heard in passing that China has a 2,000-year-old shadow puppetry tradition, and all these unarticulated parts of me awakened at the same time.
Shadow puppetry became a lightning rod for all the questions that I had. Maybe the art form in and of itself wasn’t the answer, but what I found through studying it and working with shadow puppet artists: that actually was the answer. Isn’t that wild?
When I teach playwrights, I’ll sometimes ask, ‘What are you trying to get to the other side of in your writing?’ In all artistic practices, I think we’re often trying to figure something out, and for whatever reason this form has to be the vehicle.
Artists keep making art because they’re continually in need of learning — or at least, art is how we best work out our questions. Firehorse and Shadow feels like an overt example. Andrea understood that my love of shadow puppetry wasn’t just an aesthetic one: It was about touching something that was so deeply embedded in a people’s history, which was my shared history, and which I had never been able to touch. Andrea, for her part, was on this quest to repair lineages of fragmentation through immigration, especially through matrilineal lines.
We were match-made by another friend, Deanna Wong, the executive director of [the Toronto] Reel Asian International Film Festival. Another hunch! We met at a bakery and shared a cinnamon roll. No one had ever asked me to innovate with shadows in the way that we did for Firehorse.
What was innovative about the shadow puppetry in that piece?
The essential quality of the shadow interests me more than puppetry in a capital-P sense. Most Western shadow puppetry is very figured-based: It focuses on the mechanisms of the puppet. I’m just so interested in what the heck a shadow is. It’s different from any other performance substance we’ve ever used. It’s the absence of something. That’s why it’s been used in ritual practice around the world. What is the enigmatic nature of the absence of light that can do something different than a prop or a hand puppet?
The innovation in Firehorse came from being able to explore that question through many different avenues. We had time to play with what shadows might be in this world and what exactly they meant.
Shadows became all the things that were hard to speak to — the things or people that weren’t around anymore — the unseen. That felt innovative, as did the large part that shadow puppetry played in the show. Usually in Western theatre, shadow puppetry is used as a gimmick, like in a flashback scene, and then we go back to the ‘real play.’
I’ve never thought about shadow as a performance substance until now.
That’s how I wish people would think of shadows. I wish there was a shadow revolution, honestly. I should have bumper stickers and posters that say, ‘Start seeing shadows.’
If the shadow revolution happened tomorrow, what would be one point on your shadow manifesto?
This is so nerdy! I disagree with how the Western world has equated shadows with darkness and ignorance and evil. Shadows are equally as important as light. We give them no notice, once we grow up past a certain age. But they are necessary for us to process the world, and see in three dimensions, and understand movement and texture.
I want everyone to have some kind of practice to notice shadows, both literally and figuratively, and to understand that they’re our friends. They’re here to teach us something and show us something really valuable.
Let’s rewind back to that hunch. In 2008, you began your journey to learn about Chinese shadow puppetry. What was your first step?
After I finished my BFA in performance, I was in Los Angeles trying to do theatre out there. It was terrible. So I went back to school for an MFA in scenography, and to study puppetry and design, and I applied for a travel grant through my program to go to China for the summer. I said that I would go find a shadow puppetry troupe and study with them, but I had no idea what the practicalities of that were!
Once I got the grant, I started pinging people I knew who’d been to China, and friends who had contacts there. Luckily, I spoke to someone who was able to connect me with a troupe. That someone is actually now my husband.
When I arrived in China, I used my rusty Chinese and a cell phone that I bought there to track down this troupe in a little town in Huaxian (华县) district, which is in Shaanxi (陕西) province in northern central China. The town was in the middle of nowhere: I took many trains, buses, and smaller buses to get there. That area is supposedly the birthplace of Chinese shadow puppetry. It has the most refined aesthetic, and strong ties to local opera and popular religion.
I spent that summer with the troupe. A few years later, in 2011, I went back to China on a Fulbright scholarship. I went to eight different provinces to see their different styles. The art form looks and sounds totally different in different regions of the country. I was there for almost a year, but at the end I’d just begun to uncover what was there! So I did an interdisciplinary PhD [in humanities — specifically fine arts, theatre, art education, and East Asian studies] at Concordia University in Montreal from 2013 to 2019, to give me more time. I took four more trips.
What was the most revelatory part of apprenticing with these traditional troupes?
Making the puppets fascinated me more than performing with them. They’re made out of leather. The reverence you have to give the puppet in making it and the difficulty of making it are themselves achievements that take a lifetime.
These shadow puppets aren’t just objects to me. I do see other kinds of puppets as objects. But in Chinese lore, shadow puppets come alive when they’re left alone at night if you keep their heads and their bodies connected. That’s why they’re designed to have their heads separated. Because of that, and because I’ve seen what’s put into making them, they feel real. As a puppet nerd, they’re the most alive things in the puppet world for me.
They’re these conduits, too. Most Chinese shadow puppets are not opaque, and so they’re mediated objects, in that they both capture and are conduits of light — and spirit, and history. They’re the most incredible objects in the world.
I have to mention that you’ve created this incredible, comprehensive database on Chinese shadow puppetry that’s free for anyone to access.
In 2008, I googled Chinese shadow puppetry and barely anything came up. Maybe two pages on a Chinese tourist website. There was nothing for a North American audience. I’m perpetually jealous of the Indonesian shadow puppet tradition. Because of their political orientation to the West at a certain time, they exported their cultural activities and arts very well. But nobody knows about the Chinese tradition, which predates it.
I thought that if I put up a website, at least when somebody googles Chinese shadow puppetry, there will be an overview. Not to mention that the people I’ve worked with in China have been so generous that putting up the site felt like the smallest thanks I could give.
I don’t have much time to upkeep it, but a lot of people still visit. I get funny emails all the time, like ‘I’m doing my International Baccalaureate high school project on shadow puppets. Do you have time for an interview?’
In the CBC documentary, you mentioned that most masters of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry are between 60 and 80 years old, and that there was a break in how the art form was handed down because of the Cultural Revolution. Do you ever think of yourself as a custodian of the practice and its history?
Custodian is a great word. No one’s ever described me that way before. Custodian, or superfan. It feels important to be a witness. I think the saddest thing is to have something so important die with no one around to have paid attention to it.
I don’t believe in fate, but wherever the practice will find a way, it will find a way, I think. The people I worked with often asked me, ‘Why are you studying this? What are you going to do with this?’ I said that I imagined it would inform everything I did as an artist, but I didn’t think that I’d be performing traditional Chinese shadow puppet shows.
Those artists were like, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right!’ because they hadn’t been allowed to innovate the form. What they were charged to do was to keep the form preserved, since it was right on the precipice of dying. Once that happens, you’re already in nostalgia. Nathaniel, as an artist, imagine how you’d feel if someone said, ‘Can you please do the same show for the rest of your life for tourists?’
From 2008 to now, how has Chinese shadow puppetry informed your broader artistic practice?
Seventeen years ago, I started this journey. The two things it fulfilled that I didn’t even know needed fulfilling were, first of all, to see the arts as a spiritual and ritualistic mechanism. Entertainment’s important, but in my heart I know that performance does something far more meaningful and integral to how we create ourselves.
Second of all, it made me realize that I’ve always been most curious about community building. All around the globe, traditional performance forms have been community based. They haven’t distinguished between professionals and amateurs. That’s why, as soon as I finished my PhD, I’ve been in community arts here in Toronto. That’s where I’ll stay, if they let me, for the rest of my life.
To your previous question, if anything I put out there peaks someone’s interest in shadows or in arts as a community connector, passing on those curiosities feels in many ways like carrying the torch.
I love that the conversation is turning to community arts. The previous Speaking in Draft interviewee, Derek Kwan, spoke about bringing theatre back to the town square. You’ve given me opportunities to perform in the past as part of Concrete Cabaret, which I think embodies that spirit to a tee. What’s your favourite part of community arts work?
If I was passionate about shadow puppetry, oh baby, watch out for community arts!
I walk around worried about our chronic isolation and the fall of democracy — no big deal! I’ve noticed that the political scientist Robert Putnam’s research on isolation has been resurfacing. On a micro-level, we aren’t offering encouragement or easy ways for people to meet in person, share, and deeply connect. I think that food and the arts are the best, most efficient, and most fun ways to do that.
In my work with any group that I’m helping to serve and support through community arts, I see people walk in so differently than when they walk out, even in two hours. It’s been proven through research that if you have an arts organization near you, even if you don’t participate, you do better, because the other people in your neighbourhood are doing better.
Concrete Cabaret is so volunteer-based and we wish we could do more. It’s a stepping stone for people’s entrance into puppetry, but I like it best because it’s a community builder. Have you been part of the Exquisite Collaborations?
I haven’t!
It’s a model we’re trying to use to reduce barriers to entry in the puppetry field, and to encourage collaboration. You come in, you write three words of a show premise, and you pass it on to someone else. They have to write a synopsis from those three words, and then they pass that on to someone else, who has to realize the show. We’ve done virtual versions, but next year in the winter we’re going to do an in-person version with groups making three-to-five minute pieces. If you like puppetry but wish you knew more people in the field, or feel stuck in a rut, this is a way for people to work together and shake things up.
If everybody, every two square kilometres, had an arts organization that served their community, I think we would be doing so well. I know it’s impossible, but I want it to come true.
WRITTEN BY
Nathaniel Hanula-James
Nathaniel Hanula-James is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has worked across Canada as a dramaturg, playwright, performer, and administrator.
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