Puppet art originated in wushi village, sanxiang town, but its roots are in Leizhou, western Guangdong. According to legend, around 1850 (30th day of Qing Dynasty), there was a Leizhou man named Kui Yuan who lived in Sanxiang to make a living. This man is good at carving puppets and performing puppet shows. Zheng He, a villager in wushi village, and his son Zheng were very interested in this, and paid Wei Xiao to carve puppet faces and teach puppet performances. Because the local people couldn't understand the Leizhou tune sung by Kui Yuan, they invited Cantonese opera artists from Guangzhou and Foshan to teach them singing skills and acting skills, thus creating the first puppet Cantonese Opera Troupe in Zhongshan history, which was handed down from generation to generation by the Zheng family. By 19 1 18, when Zheng Ning entered the business, it was already the fourth generation.
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The genre performed by Zhongshan Puppet Cantonese Opera Troupe belongs to stick-headed puppets (also known as hand-dancing puppets), which are generally about one meter high, such as the life-size of children. The masks of various roles are complete, detailed and lifelike. At 1932, after years of hard work, Zheng Ning created a new performance program-"Lion Picking Green". The puppet was manipulated by people and danced with the lion, which looked lifelike from the audience. During the period of 1938, when the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco held a business fair, it returned to China to invite literary and art groups to perform in the United States. Zheng Ning's "The Lion Picking Boy" was one of the most popular programs. After liberation, when the program went to Guangzhou for rehearsal, it also won the Excellence Award.
There is another unique skill in the traditional performance of Zhongshan Puppet Cantonese Opera Troupe, that is, the so-called "three hanging", that is, the puppets in the performance are thrown high, so that they can accurately land on the dangling swing pole. It is said that this unique skill was created by Zheng Shouquan, an artist from Sanxiang wushi village, 50 or 60 years ago.
The 1960s witnessed the prosperity of Zhongshan puppet art. In order to show modern figures such as Liu Wenxue, a model young pioneer who died heroically in the struggle against the enemy, the traditional woodcarving mask is no longer applicable. Artists of the troupe made bold innovations, first using plaster as molds, then using old templates and paste to make "simple models", turning puppets into paper puppets, and making the faces of a number of characters such as Liu Wenxue in the play, and successfully performing "Liu Wenxue" in Guangzhou, Zhongshan and other places, which was deeply loved by the audience.
During the ten-year turmoil, Zhongshan Puppet Cantonese Opera Troupe was accused of "not adapting to the trend", and its people were distracted and its props were destroyed. Unfortunately, Zhongshan puppet art has never been heard again.