My own puppets: Shadows
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Photo/puppets: Copyright 1996 Robert Petersen and Emre Yilmaz.
This is a pair of shadow puppets from a show directed by a friend
of mine, Rob Petersen. We and a third person (I unfortunately have forgotten
her name!) worked on the show together. Rob Petersen had studied
Wayang Golek rod puppetry in Java,
and the Javanese influence was strong in all of his work.
We were both also serious fans of Wayang Kulit,
the traditional shadow puppetry of Bali. I'd also seen some
experimental work with shadows, and we tried to draw on that too.
The man had met a long series of trials in trying
to get home one night, one of which was getting
trapped in a log with a snake. The story was based pretty directly on the
writings of Amos Tutuola.
This web page and puppet designs copyright © 1996 Emre Yilmaz