I saw a puppet show by Papermoon Puppet Theatre from Indonesia performing “Puno, Sewing Memories” at the Prior Performing Arts Center at Holy Cross College in Worcester. Big thank you to the host for offering discounted tickets to local puppeteers!
The show was beautiful but left me in a peculiar, confused state of mind. Luckily, the performers invited the audience on stage to meet the puppets and chat. I joined. Up close, the puppets, masks, and objects revealed their construction details and how diverse materials were combined into a collage-like aesthetic, visual poetry born from textures, patterns, colors, and the mix of representative and abstract elements. Visually, the performance was masterful in its deliberate simplicity, full of grace that emerged from the assembled elements—simplicity and complexity in one.
I enjoyed speaking with the artists and examining puppets and sets. I learned how they were built and operated and took a few pictures. At one point, a crew member asked me to share my feelings with him. Sure. For the camera, for the ensemble. Well, why not? He gave me a mic, but as he started filming, only peculiar balderdash came out. As I was voicing my stream of consciousness, I realized that my mind was tangled in confusion. I mumbled something incoherent about my curiosity about how the show was received, and how this kind of art could be received by an American audience. As I kept mumbling, I realized that I was just not ready to say anything sensible. I closed with clichés about beauty, masterful animation, and things like that, and I thanked him for the interview. It was a disaster.
Driving home in the dark, I tried to make some order in my head. I realized I had more questions than reflections. For my feelings to be felt, they needed articulated thoughts, but my thoughts kept wandering in circles and meandering with no ground to put feet on and shape themselves.
The problem was that I watched the show from several perspectives at once. I didn’t know who I was as a spectator, and that lack of clarity about my own identity informed (or rather disinformed) the way I perceived the show. I tried to see the show as a “regular” American audience member, imagine myself in such a position, but of course, I had also all the time my own lenses of a puppeteer on my eyes and was also watching the show as a Polish immigrant artist.
The show had a meditative quality. Scenes unfolded slowly, exploring theme after theme, episode after episode. There was almost no text — only, from time to time, some simple utterances of names, mumbling, grunts, sighing, purring, or laughing, which were useful in the more realistic scenes, helping articulate interactions between the characters. Most scenes were accompanied by beautiful, masterful music that complemented and deepened the emotional tones of the story.
It opened with a moon-like shape drifting across the dark stage, a puppeteer and the form, an object filled with light and small dots of eyes moving as if looking for someone. Clear representation of the celestial body, but also a poetic sign that carried openness for everybody’s private interpretation. Movement—half dance, half action, partly improvised—acknowledged the audience. Then three luminous balls with dot-eyes and flowing fabric appeared. To my Western eyes, they suggested Halloween ghost displays, plastic toys, or jellyfish. Distracted, my mind resisted being charmed. Still, the prologue set a dreamlike, poetic visual tone for the following scenes.
Next came Puno, a masked actor, a tailor, and a father. He was busy in his shop, checking fabric and clothes he was working on. Two customers visited, and with masked actors and humorous physical acting, the scene became a simple yet funny and emotionally rich slice of daily life.
After they left, the tailor fiddled with fabric, and from it emerged a vision of a woman. A half mask, half puppet head, and a piece of soft, fluid, sand-colored fabric evoked dream or memory. Meditative dance followed—the tailor with his memory, a spirit, or dream.
I like to think about this as a dream. What is memory if not a figment of our imagination? Such philosophical reflection aligns well with the language of puppetry. There was little dramaturgy in it, but when you think about a dream as an activity of your own mind, you may wonder how dramatic it is. How much of the content of your own mind, even its unconscious part, may be able to surprise you? Thus, the figure holding and dancing with memory was telling a story and inviting our own meditations on the transience and impermanence of existence.
To my Western mind, it felt too long and literal, though speeding it up would most probably have spoiled its meditative aspect. Fortunately, the next sequence brought a shift. Another piece of cloth in the actor’s hands and through his motion, transformed, and I saw a baby. Well, I saw both a baby and a piece of crumpled fabric, masterful and magical essence of puppetry.
The story unfolded as fragments of dreams and memories. Puno played with his daughter Tala. She grew older and bigger. Puno, the masked actor, was replaced by a puppet. Tala played with a toy paper boat and a paper origami bird. Puppeteers were altering sizes and playing with transitions between representational and actual. Small bird as a toy, big origami bird as an actual bird. Four small white screens that at the beginning served as a setup for the tailor’s shop changed their functions—moving, dancing, serving as screens for a shadow theatre scene, or metaphors for passing time, shaping town blocks and a street filled with traffic. A small paper toy boat and a screen as a boat. Paper moon again. Shadows, Tala’s play and search for meaning of the world around her, and my own reading, or interpreting meanings of images and scenes. Transitions between reality and memory, present and past, realistic or semi-realistic scenes, and scenes of pure dream-like reality and metaphorical language.
Some metaphors may have been culturally specific, easier for audiences that shared the artists’ background. Yet whenever a scene was executed with precision, interpretation was effortless. The show was filled with such magic, and the puppeteers excelled at giving life to objects.
One day, Puno fell ill. He coughed harder and harder and was taken to the hospital. His puppet body lay on a surgical table, his chest X-ray projected on a screen. Puppeteers became surgeons, then puppeteers again, as his heart stopped.
The surgeons faded. Puppeteers gave the puppet an afterlife. Metaphorical, poetical scenes meditated on passage and grief. The puppets of the girl and her dad danced loss and separation. The sewing machine, bobbins, strings, yarns, and screens all became a part of these danced meditations and visions. The girl was surrounded by these inner life realities, and more and more alone, as the puppet of her dad soared further and further away.
