Water Puppetry

Water Puppetry (Mua roi nuoc)
The village had organized the performance to celebrate spring. The puppeteers were not professionals but, instead, farmers from a village puppetry guild. They had practiced with puppets they’d carved. Their characters were men, women and children, the old and the young... The performers used stories from Vietnamese traditional theater and tales of national heroes who have resisted invaders.

Vietnamese water puppets probably began as a ceremony to pray for water to nourish the rice crop. For that reason, the mythical dragon (a positive image in Vietnamese culture) is a particularly strong character. The Red River Delta is hot, humid and filled with rivers. Every village has a pond or lake that can serve as a water-puppet theater. The weather must be warm since the performers stand in waist-deep water for hours. A theatrical set, which is often a village temple, separates the audience from the performers who works from behind a bamboo curtain. They manipulate their puppets at the far end of the bamboo pole about two meters long and must keep the pole under the water. The heavy wooden puppets held so far from the puppeteers require that performers be very strong.



During French colonialism, urban Vietnamese did not know about water puppets because only farmers perform such puppetry and only for their own neighbors. As the result, water-puppet scenes take place in rural settings with rice paddies, fishponds, bamboo thickets, banyan trees, wells and of course the village temple.

Water puppets incorporate Vietnamese animism as well as Buddhism, Taoism and especially Confucianism. Spectators sitting amidst rice paddies as they watch the water puppets soon sense how Vietnamese farmers live together with spirits in an atmosphere of pantheism.