Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1902 — Operating The Marionettes. [ARTICLE]

Operating The Marionettes.

“The ingenuity of some of the handlers of marionettes,” said a showman, “is incredible. I know a man wno conducts a marionette theater, wherein an orchestra of eight pieces plays under marionette leadership, while In the boxes a dozen marionette spectators laugh and applaud, and on the stage a marionette drama briskly enacts itself. “The conductor of all this stands, exposed to the waist, at the back of the stage, and apparently he is motionless, though really each finger of both hands and the majority of the toes of both feet are working with unexampled rapidity. For each marionette is connected by a string with a toe or a finger of the operator, and this string sometimes has as many as ten or fifteen branches, Joined to the manikin’s face, body, arms, legs, etc., so that It may dance, smile, wave Its arms and do a number of other lifelike things. One of these figures, indeed, is connected by thirty-two strings to the operator. “It Is bewildering to think of the number of strings there must be altogether,” concluded tbe showman, according to the Philadelphia Record, “and really it Is impossible to conceive of the dexterity and the thought required in the artistic manipulation of a band of marionettes.”