Puppets Kali, Sang and Jun

From Papermoon Puppet Theatre's facebook page.

I'm not a fan of clowns, dolls or puppets. They're so creepy. I had this damn sus-face when I was pulled along to watch 'Stream of Memory' produced by Esplanade Theatres by the Bay and Yogyakarta-based Papermoon Puppet Theatre. 

An impressive puppet installation popped up on the front lawn outside the Waterfront Theater. It's titled 'Kali – A Stream of Memory', featuring a larger-than-life puppet, houses on stilts and miniature puppets created from clay, wood and rattan. In Bahasa Indonesian, the word kali has a number of meanings, depending on how you use it and how you link it. It can be used to mean sungai/sungei, a river, or the name of a species of fish, or any small river fish, literally ikan kali. So I suppose you could reference this Kali as the River God or something. 

The performance celebrates the relationship between humans and nature. Sang and Jun spend happy days by the playground — the river. One day, they met the giant Kali, an old and forgotten figure of the legends. It reminds us the nature is omni-present. We can't ignore it and we shouldn't seek to bend it to our will. Nature binds urban lives and communities and gives us meaning to our lives. 

The Waterfront Theatre is a mid-sized versatile black box with technical theatre capabilities about 5000sqm, with the capacity to take 700 standing pax and 610 seated. It's meant to cater for dance and theatre performances. The performance had ticketed seats in chairs and on the floor. We requested for for floor tickets, dressed comfortably and happily sat on the floor. NO REGRETS. The sense of being immersed in the storytelling was way more enveloped than if we had been further back in the seats. TBH, I would love to watch this literally by the river in the cool climate of Yogyakarta. That would be sooooo awesome. I feel that this Waterfront Theatre is too big for this performance; the theatre studio might have worked better. The puppets were best experienced up close, shuddersome as they could be. I tried to ignore that and focus on the story.