Peking Opera on a String

'Ancient Paths, Modern Voices," the festival of Chinese arts largely at Carnegie Hall, started still and without a sound at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With the exception of a video loop in one gallery documenting some current Chinese musicians playing traditional musical instruments, the two special exhibitions at the museum were as quiet as a tomb and as contemplative as a votive stone.

Silk and Bamboo," a small selection of musical instruments and related artifacts from the fifth century B.C. to the present, begins evocatively with some ancient flutes made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes. "Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799)" is more extensive and features nearly 60 works of Luo Ping, one of China's most celebrated 18th-century painters known for his depictions of ghosts, alongside other artists in his circle. The exhibit depicts an old world drawn primarily in pale veils of color flecked with black, calligraphic ink strokes. It amounts to views of man and nature that seem breathed onto the papers and scrolls that hold them.

The performance that opened the music and dance series at Carnegie Hall last Wednesday was a more lively and even noisy affair. The Quanzhou Marionette Theater, with its pattering of little feet (attached to string puppets about 30 inches tall), its clatter of percussion-driven music (led by Chen Zhijie, on the foot-controlled drum) and its sing-song texts (delivered by male and female puppeteers), provided the festival with an often giddy-making din.

Now directed by Wang Jingxian, the company was founded in 1952 and follows in the longstanding traditions of the southern Chinese province of Fujian, also known for its hand, or glove, puppets. Puppetry of various kinds dates back in China to at least the Tang dynasty (618-907). Though Mao's so-called Cultural Revolution brought a brutal halt to such "old" arts from 1966 to 1976, Chinese puppet theater looked alive, well and happy in these offerings.

The mixed bill at Carnegie's Zankel Hall consisted of six different presentations, plus one encore. Some were short, self-contained set pieces, soliloquy-like affairs for a single puppet and a single puppeteer in clear view of the audience. Other parts of the bill showcased excerpts from longer works. All the puppets are operated by a near-tangle of over two-dozen black strings; sometimes two puppeteers work a single puppet in tandem.

For Western audiences, probably the least compelling offering was the program's opener, "Auspicious Ritual Overture." Mostly symmetrical in arrangement and formal in pace, it looked like a scene from Peking Opera, greatly reduced in scale—complete with heavily robed male warriors—and offered little chance for utilizing puppetry's arts of animation. But the solos that followed made up rapidly and richly for the staid, hieratic tone of the "Ritual."

In "The Young Monk Goes to Town," a roly-poly little man wearing a blue robe and hat and carrying a red shoulder bag scooted and stumbled and flopped around as he addressed the audience, revealing his somewhat wayward ways: Think of a wily, clean-shaven, ancient ancestor—minus the glasses—of the dwarf Doc from Disney's "Snow White." A contrasting solo for a female character, "Ruolan's Journey," described an elegant woman's somewhat perilous travels from the countryside through rough terrain to reach her philandering husband in town. Ruolan's puppeteer is a woman, and her plaintive voice added delicate pathos to the scene.

Another male solo, again in a style suggesting Peking Opera, offered a bravura show not only of human behavior but of physical dexterity. The marvels these nimble artists achieved, giving their puppets idiosyncratic motions—the wily monk and the desperate wife, for example, have decidedly different ways of walking—became extracomplicated in "Drunken Zhong Kui." As a portly, bearded demon-slayer, Zhong Kui gets inebriated on goblets and jars of wine, which he deftly grasps and imbibes forthrightly. In the end, he was snoring in a stupor with his belly quivering like a bowlful of jelly.

Two longer works concluded the bill. "Three Battles With the Skeleton Enchantress," an excerpt from a still-performed longer work, featured the iconic Monkey King in a battle of wits with a would-be benevolent female warrior. The Monkey King twirled a shiny staff and flew in and out like Peter Pan. The woman's demonic powers allowed her to transform from porcelain beauty to grotesque skull-headed horror in the shake of a puppeteer's hand.

The concluding work, excluding the encore, was "Lantern Festival," a concentrated production number that's a tribute to China's great acrobatic traditions. This parade of sorts, with numerous characters, is an adaptation of an older work, with much new activity devised by the current troupe. Not only did the puppets approximate contortionist acrobatics and stack up for tower-like groupings, but there was a bounding romp for a shaggy, mischievous russet lion in which two more male puppets are nestled as would-be operators. Additionally, a quartet of seemingly old, wizened women miraculously transformed before our eyes, via a sudden tug on their marionette strings, into four statuesque, classically cool court beauties.

The encore, "Taming the Monkey," was another solo of sorts, featuring a devil-may-care simian who looked like a somewhat mangy version of Curious George, the children's book character. I say "solo" advisedly, because eventually the puppeteer was operating two puppets, the monkey as well as the bicycle he acquired to ride with no end of virtuosities. This vignette of monkey shines was the creation of the troupe's former president, Huang Yique, who died a few years ago.

Though one little girl near me was somewhat rambunctious during the performance, most of the audience seemed riveted by this ancient art, given modern voice by the Quanzhou Marionette Theater.

—Mr. Greskovic writes about dance and related performing arts for the Journal.