Audience questions

Leah Sanginiti experiments with clay puppetry for Book of Questions presentation while fighting off Java’s tropical heat

Training under Papermoon artists and puppeteers, Leah began creating “Buku,” a rod puppet made from fallen rattan, discarded wood scraps, wire, masking tape, a plastic jar, and the foot of a lightbulb.

Experimentations with Book of Questions storytelling for Pablo Neruda’s question, “Why, when expecting snow, do trees take off their clothes?”

Experimentations with wrinkled, discarded gels to be used in the first Book of Questions presentation.

My first idea for Book of Questions was to focus on the questions from the Pablo Neruda poetry collection of the same title. I mapped out the questions based on worlds that could flow from one into the next, and created at least three components for each world: two-dimensional with lights and shadow puppetry, three dimensional on a “stage” small enough for children to play in as if the props and characters were dolls or other toys, and immersive with rod puppets entering the audience. While the performance portion of my presentation lasted only ten minutes, the audience engagement gave me enough information to determine that I am curious to develop Book of Questions using these worlds within worlds, with the nonverbal protagonist puppet “Buku” freely moving between them.

Example of artmaking ethos for the Book of Questions first workshop—the majority of materials used in the presentation of ideas came from discarded scraps lying around the Papermoon studio. My idea was to highlight the accessibility of imaginative play by repurposing existing materials that children from any community might find in a classroom. With a heavy reliance on tape, small bits and edges of paper, and natural objects found on the ground outside the studio, we created an environment in which the audience could picture themselves.