Papermoon Puppet Theatre in Indonesia
Tuesday, 18 February 2014The Melbourne Ring Cycle has to be my cultural highlight of 2013, after all Maureen played a big part in getting it to the start line. But the Papermoon Puppet Theatre was a small delight. We caught a performance of these unusual puppets – and their unusual puppeteering – at a private performance during the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali. A Huffington Post article examines these imaginative performers.
The puppets may have been wonderful, but it was also an interesting love story, of a couple separated by the fall of Sukarno. The male side of the relationship was in Russia at the time and as a suspected (at least) Communist he could never come back and now lives in Cuba. The Oscar nominated documentary The Act of Killing centres on the bizarrely violent side of the genocide that took place during the downfall of Sukarno. It was a terrible period in recent Indonesian history which played out particularly nastily in peaceful Bali.
