Before the show
What Tholpavakkoothu is
Tholpavakkoothu takes its name from thol, leather, pava, puppet, and koothu, play. It is the shadow puppet theatre of the Palakkad, Thrissur and Malappuram districts of Kerala, and it is played as an offering to the goddess Bhadrakali. The story goes that she was away fighting the demon Darika when Rama killed Ravana, so the war is played again for her, with her idol set on a pedestal facing the screen.
It is performed in a temple theatre, the koothumadam, a long stage with a white cloth stretched across it. Behind the cloth, 21 lamps of halved coconut shell or clay sit evenly along a wooden beam, the vilakku madam. The puppets, cut from goat skin (once deer skin), painted with vegetable dyes and some four feet tall, are held flat against the cloth on two sticks, one for the body and a thinner one for a limb, so each throws a sharp shadow and its punched holes turn into points of light.
The text is the Kamba Ramayana, sung and argued in a mix of Tamil, Malayalam and Sanskrit by the pulavar, the lead puppeteer and a scholar, who learns more than 3,000 verses over six to ten years of training. A full telling uses 180 to 200 puppets and up to 40 artists, runs 21 nights from dusk to dawn, and plays between January and May to the chenda, maddalam, ezhupara, ilathalam, conch and cherukuzhal.
Sources: Tholpavakoothu, Wikipedia; The Koonathara shadow puppeteers, Museum of Kerala History.
Scene 1 of 4 The invocation
ShadowStage 2025 to 2026
Computational Tholpavakkoothu, the shadow puppetry of Kerala's temples. Each puppet is a graph of joints, and a motion grammar strings poses into gestures: enter, address, strike, withdraw. A semantic light controller answers the scene, so the oil lamps behind the cloth burn steady for a quiet scene and flicker for a battle. The figures on this screen are real leather puppets, Ganesh, Rama, Ravana, Sita and Vishnu, cut out of their photographs so the lamplight comes through the punched holes as it does in the koothumadam.
Puppets: Tholpavakoothu figures in the Museu do Oriente, Lisbon, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
- Joint based motion grammar
- Semantic light control
- Silhouette extraction
- React · TypeScript
