Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. If you’ve followed this blog for a significant time you know that I have doubts about the compatibility of Darwinism and the belief in God as the Creator.
I remember as a high-school biology student, in addition to various other evolutionary facts, our teacher showed us the famous Heackel drawings of the developmental stages of embryos. He made us all memorize the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And he insisted that it was a scientific “fact” that proved that Darwin’s theory was undeniably true. It was all very convincing and I believed him. As a faithful member of the LDS church I reasoned that “evolution” was simply the device which God employed to bring to pass the creation. This was in 1989 and little did I know that the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” hypothesis had, even then, been long discredited.
As many of you know, one of my many projects is the Maxed Out Puppet Comedy Troupe. We perform fairly frequently throughout Utah Country, and will be performing for the annual Puppetry Festival at the Salt lake County Library on Saturday, March 7 at 2:30 p.m.
We are also members of the Puppetry Arts Guild of Utah which hosts an annual puppetry workshop in April where you can learn all about puppets, puppet making, puppet performance, and see performances by puppeteers from all over Utah.
The Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe, based at the University of Missouri, will be performing at the Pardoe Theatre at Brigham Young University in Provo, on January 16th and 17th.
Bunraku is an amazing form of traditional Japanese Puppetry, more properly called ningyō jōruri.
Martin Holman, is the coordinator of the Japanese studies program at University of Missouri and the director of the troupe. He studied Japanese at BYU, and is the first non-Japanese to ever be trained in and perform ningyō jōruri in Japan.
Holman contacted us through our Utah Puppetry website. ” We are, to my knowledge, the only troupe outside Japan that performs traditional Japanese puppetry,” he said. He wanted to clarify that he was slightly misquoted in the BYU press release.
