Traditional puppetry refers to the regional forms passed down through generations with established repertoires, stock characters, construction methods and performance conventions.
The defining quality is that the form is inherited rather than invented. A practitioner learns an existing tradition and works inside it, and innovation happens slowly and within bounds.
The major living traditions
include Javanese and Balinese wayang kulit, Japanese bunraku, Punch and Judy in Britain, Guignol in France, Sicilian opera dei pupi, Czech marionette theatre, Turkish Karagoz, Vietnamese water puppetry and Chinese shadow theatre. Every one is still performed today.
Stock characters
are central. Audiences arrive already knowing who these figures are, which frees a performance from establishing character and lets it work on variation instead. Punch has behaved the same way for three hundred years.
Training is by apprenticeship
Bunraku traditionally requires around ten years on the feet before touching the left arm. Techniques transmit hand to hand rather than through documentation, which is why several traditions are considered endangered.
Why a builder should care
These forms represent centuries of solved problems. How to make a figure read at distance, how to string a marionette that walks, how to carve a head that expresses without moving — traditional builders answered all of it long ago, usually more elegantly than a modern first attempt.
Not museum pieces
The temptation is to treat traditional forms as preserved history. They are working theatre with living practitioners, and the best contemporary artists study them for craft rather than curiosity.
If you build only in the Muppet-derived style that dominates English-language tutorials, you are working in one narrow branch of a very large tree.