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Yayasan Bagong Kussudiardja and Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta 2007 presents:

 

People�s Puppet Project in Yogyakarta
KRETEG (The Bridge)
3 June 2007 at 3PM
At North Alun-Alun Square
Kraton Yogyakarta

 

A unique giant puppet theatrical experience that is colorful and insanely comical will be offered to the people of Yogyakarta at the North Alun-Alun Square on Sunday, 3 June 2007 as part of the festival event 'Road to FKY 2007'. After an intensive two-week collaborative workshop led by Snuff Puppets of Melbourne, Australia, the performance is made from scratch by artists from the theater, visual arts, and members of the infamous Kua Etnika music group as well as a Yogyakarta's general community who has no or very little arts background what so ever. This large-scale spectacular piece of outdoor theatre will use both contemporary and traditional forms of puppetry, utilizing live music that includes gamelan percussion fused with contemporary western composition. The show will be highly energetic, populist and great fun communicating to a wide audience of all ages.

 

Kreteg (The Bridge) is a story about President Petruk and the First Lady Cangik who arrive with other members of the Punakawan at a village on the outskirts of Jogyakarta. They have come to officially open a new bridge, but are surprised and offended when the locals inform them that no-one in the village will cross it. When the reason becomes known, the villagers find themselves at the centre of a squabble between the Punakawan (traditional clown characters) and a very stubborn group of Dhemit (traditional ghostly characters). The ingenious way in which the villagers solve the problem is both dramatic and hilarious.

 

Snuff Puppets is a unique puppet company who creates characters and theatrical experiences that are accessible, colourful and often political in Australia. They have successfully designed a community development model known as People's Puppet Projects (PPP) that creates glorious puppet spectacles which expresses the joys, concerns and spirit of unique communities. The process allows them to work with many and diverse groups designing, building and performing collaborative puppet performances. PPP have been undertaken all over Australia and the model has been exported to Japan, Singapore and Holland on other occasions.

 

The two week intensive PPP workshop PPP is facilitated in partnership with Yayasan Bagong Kussudiardja (YBK) that takes place at Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja in Yogyakarta from 21 May to 1 June 2007. YBK is a non-profit community art center who aims to stimulate the innovative and creative elements of performing arts through discourse and advocacy. YBK programs include performance presentations, facilitate creative process of new work, exchange and collaboration, and community programs that serves the artists and general community.

 

The objective of this project is not only to create a unique performance piece by artists/participants of two different nations that will expose new techniques and ideas; but to gain insight, for the Indonesian contingent in particular, how the working model for PPP is adept to involving wide-range of communities.