Stage : Vietnamese Water Puppets Give Enchantment

Gliding weightlessly over rippling water, 10 women dressed in wide capes and gleaming gowns dance through geometric formations in an antique ritual of protection, flapping their arms like wings to the accompaniment of deep-toned choral singing. When seen at night in a Hanoi lake, with smoke bubbling up from below and hovering on the surface, the effect is unforgettable. But even under the blazing afternoon sun in Westwood, the Vietnamese Water Puppets cast their spell.

The art form dates back 1,000 years to the rice paddies and ponds of the Red River delta in northern Vietnam and requires the puppeteers to manipulate their 3-foot-high wooden figures while standing waist-deep and hidden from view behind a pagoda facade. The puppets are controlled by long underwater poles and waxed strings, plus arcane devices that enable some of them to spit water, fire and smoke.

On Saturday, the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater of Hanoi presented a 19-part summary of their unique, endearing folk idiom in a portable, free-standing pool at UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, with seven versatile vocalists and musicians sitting high and dry on a platform at the left.

Many of the sequences put comic spins on daily village life, with wily fish eluding or overpowering hapless fishermen, water buffalo determined to fight one another rather than farm, and a catlike fox snatching a duckling in the water and running up a tree. However, a sense of the miraculous informed all the pieces, whether a vision of golden dragons skimming the surface or a glimpse of farmers planting rice--and it growing tall before your eyes.

Water formed not merely the environment for the performance but its most profound metaphor: water as primal creative force, giving life to the land and to tiny wooden figures that seemed real only when swimming or diving or sloshing or racing through it. Imagine belonging to the original audience for water puppetry: working all day in the water and then, at night or on a holiday, seeing your whole world re-created in miniature in the same liquid space--your daily routine, all the myths and folk tales of your culture and the cycle of nature itself.

Puppetry is never merely kids’ stuff in Asia. And although Vietnamese water puppetry may be less literary in orientation than the great puppet idioms of Japan or Indonesia, its connection to the landscape is unmatched. Moreover in its antique pageantry the traditional values of Vietnam society can be understood and appreciated even by landlocked people who would never dare try catching fish in a wicker basket or riding on a buffalo’s back.

Unfortunately but understandably, this utterly apolitical event generated controversy because of its point of origin. Some 200 protesters assembled near the Sunset Canyon ticket booth and entrance areas on Saturday bearing signs that read “Boycott Viet Communist Water Puppets Show” and “Against Brutality of Human Rights in Vietnam.” A flier from the “Vietnamese-American Community in Los Angeles” urged “support of the Vietnamese struggle for freedom” and claimed that the Hanoi regime authorized the puppet tour “to manipulate international opinion by presenting a normal face abroad.” Even painted wooden figures, it seems, can have a hidden agenda.