by Khin Zar Thwe

YANGON, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- Thet Thet Htwe Oo, 22, is a Yangon-based young female puppeteer who tapped into puppetry since her middle childhood.

Marionettes became an integral part of her upbringing after her family founded a marionette theater, which offers puppet shows, when she was 9.

Thet and her younger brother spent their childhood days on the audience seat at the shows performed by their father's troupe.

Not long after the foundation of their family puppetry theater "Htwe Oo Myanmar Puppetry Home," the young sibling duo got into learning the puppetry to become skilled performers.

Late veteran puppeteer U Maung Kyi was her first teacher. "My debut stage was not here at my family's theater, but the other show where we were invited to perform," Thet told Xinhua, adding that her first-day jitters made it hard to stand calmly in front of the audience.

At the age of 13, she got to join her father's troupe which includes puppet masters and have performed daily shows with her family members together since then.

A maiden puppet is her favourite one among other string puppets as she grew up practicing performing puppetry with the maiden puppet which entailed difficult steps.

"I had a hard time of controlling strings of the puppet when I started learning puppetry like maiden dance as I was only 10 at that time and my body is similar in size with the puppet's. And Of course, I even thought of dropping the marionette while performing as they were heavy," she said.

Thet had experienced some minor stage accidents, saying "I had some cases like the strings of the puppet was broken and I had to continue the performance."

Her peers are impressed by her awe-inspiring passion as the young artist still sticks to the traditional puppetry in her 20s.

"There are puppetry specialization university courses in our country, but it is difficult for the graduated people with puppetry specialization to live on it as there are not many employment opportunities in the country," she said.

"As for me, I have the opportunity to perform on stage at both home and abroad just because my family runs the puppetry theater. So there are not many puppeteers here due to the career challenges," she added.

Thet had to sacrifice her university student life when she was in her second year of music major at the National University of Arts and Culture in Yangon.

She said, "As I had to travel for puppetry performances in my second year, I joined distant education in English specialization at the Yangon University of Distant Education and now I'm graduated."

Her overseas debut stage was at the Harmony World Puppet Carnival in Thailand in 2014 and she was invited to perform abroad, along with her family's troupe twice a year ever since.

As for recent foreign activity, Thet and her family members joined the Macao International Parade in China earlier this month.

Thet has always been eager to learn puppetry-related things. "I have a dream of making puppets like well-known local cartoon characters to attract the public interest," Thet lighted up when asked about her dream.

"My brother and I recently joined a puppetry workshop hosted at Goethe-Institut, a German cultural institute in Myanmar. I had a great time of creating marionette on my own from carving the shape of the puppet to final finished design," Thet said.

"At first, my two children started as hobby and learnt just to fill the positions in our daily shows as we didn't have much human resources and were financially weak. But, they are now passionate and skilled performers, not just amateurs who are assigned to fill the vacant positions when the puppet masters are absent," her father Khin Maung Htwe, founder of Htwe Oo Myanmar Puppetry Theater, told Xinhua.

"The passions of Thet and her brother are now the reason why our family-run puppetry theatre is still alive and I'm always ready to support their dream," he said. "My dream of turning my puppetry home to puppetry center which can provide one-stop service for the audience from sharing information on puppet making, the historical stories of puppet to puppetry performances."

Thet is inspired by other foreign puppeteers' creations, saying "I am a fan of Vietnamese puppetry art as their ideas and creations are innovative. I want to create a puppetry art which can not make everyone boring."