An ancient Javanese proverb says: "If you want to find the light, go where the darkness is".
Ria and I will be collaborating on a new work facilitating up to ten emerging performing artists to make a short performance with the proverb as our starting point. After we have posed the question to the artists ‘What is your burning artistic question right now?’ Ria and I are then interested in how we can facilitate the exploration of these questions, combine these burning questions and create a process to make a show. All in less than two weeks!
Making this work will be like making a gourmet curry dinner for twenty people with only three cooking pots and two burners. It’ll take days to make and more to mature and the final outcome will be dependant on the combination of available spices.
Our ingredients at this stage (subject to directorial change!) are our selected (and limited) materials:
Simple puppet making materials – cane, tape, plastic, paper, White fabric, found lights and broom brushes.
Our spices are our artists. Our pots and burners are our twelve days, our pendopo, our limited funds and limited access to three phase power.
Our work in progress performance will be at Karta Pustaka. This old Dutch Cultural Centre is a stunner of a pendopo. To me it elicited a strong overwhelming feeling of ‘we have to make something big and amazing to reflect this space’. Ria explained to me however, that the space is not expected to be used in that way, it is a community space for anything and everything – no pressure. Interesting how I have a received sense of how architecture shapes culture. Grand space means grand show. So I take on Ria’s understanding of how space works here and become all inspired by the possibilities of working in an indoor out door space with 16 pillars, performing in the round……exciting stuff. Let the cooking commence!
For more information about what we cook up please check out the Papermoon puppets blogspot or watch this space!
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