The art of puppetry stretches far past Sesame Street and the Muppets.
“I found that puppetry could be the bridge to communicate between people,” said Maria Tri Sulistyani, the co-founder of internationally known Indonesian puppet troupe Papermoon Puppet Theatre.
Papermoon’s residency at Lafayette College began on Sept. 18 and culminated in its performance at the Williams Center for the Arts on Saturday night. The troupe visited classes, held a “puppet slam,” during which puppeteers practice their work for an audience, and provided puppet-making workshops at Lafayette and at the Easton bookstore Book & Puppet Company.
“We think of that often as a child’s art, but it is not,” Ty Furman said of puppetry. Furman is the director of the art center’s performance series and helped arrange Papermoon’s residency.
“It is a mature, it is nuanced, beautiful art form, and they are just prime examples of how to make that happen,” Furman said about Papermoon.
The troupe’s Saturday performance narrated the story of single father Puno and daughter Tala, who must cope with Puno’s death.
“There were many people around me that were crying,” said audience member and theater professor Mary Jo Lodge. “It was really moving.”
Performers employed masks, wheeled carts and shadow puppets to bring the story to life. The puppets hardly said a word besides gibberish or one another’s names.
“The main language of the puppets is movement, but then the emotion is the music,” said Papermoon co-founder Iwan Effendi, who works on visuals, stage design and scoring.
The lack of words makes the show accessible to a variety of audiences.
“The puppets become a more universal language,” Lodge said.
Papermoon visited Lodge’s class, “Theater for Young Audiences,” which will be performing “Stewart Little” later this semester. Papermoon taught students how to manipulate the class’ puppet of mouse Stewart Little.
“It was like he came alive,” Lodge said of the puppet.
Papermoon fashions puppets out of wood, aluminum pipe, rattan and stockings. Although the team is primarily contemporary artists, they incorporate centuries-old traditions of the Indonesian shadow puppetry form “wayang kulit.”
“When people hear about Indonesia, they’re just seeing certain news, which is usually always bad news,” Sulistyani said. “It’s very rare that our voices are, as an Indonesian artist, are actually spread abroad. I found that I would love to tell some stories from my people.”
“With puppetry, I found people became more receptive,” she continued. “I can say they became more open and they’re keen to get closer.”
Sulistyani founded Papermoon in 2008. The troupe has since toured in India, Australia, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan and Myanmar.
Papermoon’s time at Lafayette is part of an American tour organized by Center Stage, a cultural exchange program partnered with the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Papermoon first toured with Center Stage at Lafayette during its first season in 2012. Now that the program is sunsetting due to a lack of funding, it has invited previous artists to do a final tour.
Effendi said the troupe is looking forward to trips to Europe and Taiwan, as well as its international biennial puppet festival, Pesta Boneka, in its home city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
“This is what I felt, when the first time I made Papermoon — I would love to be part of the citizens of the world,” Sulistyani said.
