Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe
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Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe is an American puppet troupe that performs the traditional Japanese puppet drama commonly known as ningyō jōruri or Bunraku. Based at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, the Troupe is directed by J. Martin Holman, professor of Japanese language, literature, and theater, and the first non-Japanese to train and perform in the traditional puppet theater in Japan. Puppeteers in Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe have been trained in Japan by members of three traditional Bunraku puppet troupes: the Tonda Puppet Troupe, founded in the 1830s in Shiga Prefecture, Japan; and the 300-year-old Imada Puppet Troupe and the Kuroda Puppet Troupe of Iida, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
The Troupe's repertoire consists largely of traditional pieces from Edo Period Japan and includes the Sanbaso (pictured right), a lively, celebratory dance piece that opens a program of puppet theater; Yaoya Oshichi, the story of a young woman who must sacrifice herself on a snowy night to save her lover; Hidakagawa Iriaizakura, a scene both comic and exciting in which a young woman's raging jealously transforms her into a demon serpent; and Keisei Awa no Naruto (pictured left), the most widely-performed puppet scene in Japan, in which a woman meets the daughter she had been forced to abandon as an infant ten years earlier.
Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe has performed at a range of venues across the United States and in Japan, among them the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Iida Puppetry Festival in the city of Iida, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The Troupe also offers workshops on traditional Japanese puppetry and demonstrations of puppetry techniques.
