Creating Worlds: Well-Being through Japanese Otome Bunraku

Abstract

There is a type of puppet animation that appeared to suggest itself as a therapeutic medium at the London School of Puppetry. However, the repair of emotional chasm with new health, which might be physical, mental, or spiritual, was not what was intended. The school was offering an introduction to an artistic phenomenon from Japan called otome bunraku or "maiden's doll theater," but common to all participants, the result of performing this type of puppetry was an unexpected and profound sense of well-being. This feeling challenges anything the puppet alone offers to a puppeteer, and as an alternative, points to other possibilities of focusing on the puppeteer instead as a playfully disruptive, interruptive, creative, expressive and skillful presence. It argues that the nature of the puppeteer's presence revealed in otome bunraku is a unified mind and body manifested in the manipulation of these puppets. A person reaches a physical and social realization of what well-being means through an experience of "being other" and therefore by creating other worlds in the process of puppetry.