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Shadows, Strings & Other Things at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology

I remember the Museum of Anthropology from a school field trip and it was such a magical place. It was one of the places I wanted to revisit when I moved back to Vancouver. So when I saw this interesting event, I was intrigued.

Shadows, Strings, and Other Things is an exhibition at MOA running from May 16 to October 14, 2019. It is curated by Associate Professor, Anthropology, UBC, Nicola Levell.

You can experience a virtual tour of this exhibition here.

Over 250 puppets, old and new, from 15 countries, are illuminated in MOA’s dramatic new exhibition. These exquisite puppets—sometimes charming, sometimes a little bit scary, and always entertaining—come together and reveal our enduring fascination with storytelling.

For thousands of years, knowledge holders and storytellers around the world have engaged puppets as a means to dramatize the human experience. Puppets have been delighting, entertaining and educating audiences of all ages, letting our imaginations soar. Puppets are the precious purveyors of our epics, dreams and satires.

Enter into a theatrical world of kings and queens, demons and clowns, supernatural beings and more. Extraordinary stories and fantastical characters fill the stages, cases and multimedia installations of this enchanting exhibition. Whether animated using age-old techniques or digital technologies, puppets are manipulated by hand, and here you’ll discover more about the different forms of manipulation and animation that give them life: shadow, string, rod, hand, and stop-motion. With a focus on Asia, Europe and the Americas, the exhibition draws from MOA’s stunning international collection of puppets—the largest in Western Canada­—and reveals new acquisitions from China, Brazil, Sicily, Java, the UK and France.

Shadows, Strings and Other Things is an immersive experience that illuminates how puppetry continues to evolve and innovate in the hands of artists and performers who keep the tradition alive. From graceful Vietnamese water puppets and comical British hand puppets to the captivating stop-motion puppet animation of the award-winning Indigenous artist Amanda Strong—the full spectrum of human resilience and creativity is on display.

Museum of Anthropology

Photos from the show that night and around the museum and a walk in UBC on the way to the museum.

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