{"id":229680,"date":"2025-05-06T07:15:45","date_gmt":"2025-05-06T11:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=229680"},"modified":"2025-05-05T12:19:49","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T16:19:49","slug":"guggenheim-fellow-from-uconn-preserving-wayang-puppetry-for-posterity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2025\/05\/guggenheim-fellow-from-uconn-preserving-wayang-puppetry-for-posterity\/","title":{"rendered":"Guggenheim Fellow from UConn Preserving Wayang Puppetry for Posterity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew Isaac Cohen<\/a> has laid hands on each of the 23,000 puppets that comprise the largest Indonesian puppet collection in the world.<\/p>\n

Over the last eight years, as the UConn Puppet Arts<\/a> professor has researched the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets<\/a> at the Yale University Art Gallery, Cohen has taken great care with each of the artifacts, some hundreds of years old.<\/p>\n

The collection came to Connecticut from Europe, after the Swiss-born Angst spent a lifetime making annual trips to the archipelago to amass what is now also the largest puppetry collection of any kind in North America.<\/p>\n

Massive wooden chests, some hand carved and requiring the strength of several people to lift, were home to Angst\u2019s puppets, maintained as full sets in just the way puppeteers, anthropologists, and historians like Cohen want to see them.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpening up one of these chests, you never could be quite sure what you\u2019d see inside,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been working in this area for a long time, and I\u2019d find surprising forms of puppets that I\u2019d never seen before, along with little Easter eggs like newspapers used for lining the box or bits of resin used as incense.<\/p>\n

\"A
Matthew Isaac Cohen, professor of dramatic arts, speaks with students about their performances at the Puppet Arts Complex on May 1, 2025. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThere were puppets sitting at the bottom of boxes that didn\u2019t really belong there, but Walter had introduced them because he felt they would be in good company. Every box had these kinds of surprises,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n

One-by-one, Cohen lifted each treasure, putting fingerprints on pieces of history that had been used to tell stories for generations, most from the time they were created until Angst\u2019s acquisition.<\/p>\n

But one set already had felt Cohen\u2019s touch \u2013 his fingerprints layered in among those from other wayang puppeteers who\u2019d handled them over the decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a set that I used in the late \u201980s and early \u201990s when I was studying with a puppeteer named Oemartopo who had borrowed them from a neighbor who also was a puppeteer,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cWe would go to his neighbor\u2019s house every Friday night and have a practice session using that set of puppets and musical instruments that went with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohen, a member of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation\u2019s 100th class of fellows, the only one from UConn in 2025-26, plans to document in two major publications what he\u2019s found in Angst\u2019s collection, even as he relives his own experiences along the way.<\/p>\n

Guggenheim Stays with You<\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cThis is a generous award that puts me into some remarkable company,\u201d Cohen says of his fellowship. \u201cIf you look back at the people in my field who have received a Guggenheim, it\u2019s a \u2018who\u2019s who\u2019 of American theater. Being a Guggenheim is not just about getting funding for a year, it\u2019s an honor that stays with you for your career.\u201d<\/p>\n

The award, he says, is the culmination of his work on the Angst collection, which he helped bring to Yale in 2017 and has researched through a series of other fellowships and awards. After Angst\u2019s death in 2014, the collection went to his brother Angest, who ultimately donated them to Yale, which then had a newly established Indo-Pacific art department in addition to other well-known Indonesia-related programs.<\/p>\n

\"A
UConn Puppet Arts professor Matthew Isaac Cohen works with wayang puppets, including the well-known Asian character Semar, and Semar dressed as a Teletubby. (Contributed photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cohen says his first major project is to finish a monograph on the history of wayang puppetry over the last 200 years, the first with that kind of scope. It also will be unique in that he plans to make the puppets characters who witness historical events and changes over the centuries.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a literary device that he says he contrived after a haptic experience with the puppets brought them to life, capable of movement much like a living person and therefore able to bear witness to the world around them.<\/p>\n

His second fellowship project is to publish a catalog of the Angst collection meant to introduce a general audience to its individual artifacts and get them thinking about puppets as storied objects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are puppets that come with a sense of character, and character exists in narratives, which are realized in performance,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cThis publication is going to look at particular puppets as modern interpretations of characters from well-known stories set alongside the traditional forms.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, the well-known Asian character Semar, a clown servant used often in wayang puppetry, will appear in a Teletubby costume \u2013 still Semar, Cohen says, just dressed differently. It\u2019s a pairing most people wouldn\u2019t imagine on their own.<\/p>\n

\u2018Entranced by this art form\u2019<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Cohen says his interest in Indonesia goes back to the 1980s, when as an undergraduate at Harvard University he joined other Americans in taking an interest in seemingly novel things coming out of Asia.<\/p>\n

\u201cSushi was newly introduced here,\u201d he says, \u201cand my roommates and friends were busy studying Chinese and Japanese languages because everyone believed the next century would be the Asian century. I was watching Butoh dance theater from Japan and Peter Brook\u2019s massive \u2018Mahabharata\u2019 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was interested where those things came from, not particularly in puppets, but I gravitated to Indonesia through a confluence of things,\u201d he says, including an ethnomusicology professor who suggested playing gamelan, the traditional music of wayang.<\/p>\n

Even though he was a psychology major interested in child\u2019s play and temperament, Cohen says he started to imagine what it would be like to be an auteur-director, that is having an intimate creative fingerprint on a production from script to music to direction to performance, and how puppeteers often play that role in their work.<\/p>\n

When he went to Indonesia in 1988, he says he expected to stay off to the side, there to observe the puppet traditions of the country. But the conservatory that sponsored his Fulbright scholarship had other ideas, and enrolled him in private puppetry lessons, no questions asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce I started to do these practical studies, which are incredibly involved and very physical, I was entranced by this art form that has occupied a lot of my life since,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not the only thing I do, but it\u2019s one of my areas of expertise. This art form is so complicated that you can\u2019t just study it for a year and think you know much. It\u2019s something that needs many decades to appreciate at a deep level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Preserving Puppet History<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Walter Angst was a biologist, not a historian or puppeteer, and only a hobbyist when it came to wayang puppetry, Cohen says. Nonetheless, the 40-year hobbyist made annual trips to Indonesia, condensing vacation time for an extended stay overseas, and brokered large puppet purchases with dealers who became his trusted informants.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, he\u2019d spend time communing with his puppets. He\u2019d make notes about them, air them out, and make sure they were well maintained,\u201d he says. \u201cWalter felt that he was on a mission to save the diversity of wayang as an art. Biodiversity was one of his specializations as a biologist, and he worked on endangered species. That was his understanding of what he was doing with his puppet collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Angst collection has three main forms of puppetry in the wayang tradition, Cohen says. Shadow puppets comprise most of the lot, with 3D rod puppets known as wayang golek and flat wooden puppets known as wayang klitik making up the rest.<\/p>\n

The shadow puppets are made of animal hide – buffalo in the better-quality ones – that has been stretched, dried, and chiseled to give them detail. Two sets, Cohen says, are from the royal courts and depict exquisite detail, especially in lace work so intricate it\u2019s hard to imagine a human could have done it.<\/p>\n

\u201cStill, after years of working with these puppets, it\u2019s extraordinary for me to see,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Yale has Angst\u2019s collection preserved as a study collection with sets of puppets kept together instead of arranging them in some other way, say by size or type.<\/p>\n

The full collection is so large not all of it is on view, although the Yale University Art Gallery<\/a> does have a permanent exhibition of selections from two of the 140 sets in the full collection.<\/p>\n

\"A
UConn Puppet Arts professor Matthew Isaac Cohen is a member of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation\u2019s 100th class of fellows, the only Guggenheim fellow from UConn in 2025-26. Over the next year, he plans to work on two major publications centering on his work with the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets at the Yale University Art Gallery. (Contributed photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cohen says the Indonesian puppet tradition is one of the oldest globally and dates back about 1,000 years, although no puppets in the Angst collection, or anywhere for that matter, are that old. Historians have images of puppets etched in stone from about 800 years ago \u2013 \u201cNothing survives like that in the tropics,\u201d he quips.<\/p>\n

Shadow puppetry is a product of simultaneous invention, Cohen explains, popping up in the northern part of Africa, China, India, and Indonesia around the same time, although it\u2019s the Indonesian tradition that\u2019s enjoyed the most popularity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one of the most important art forms in Indonesia and occupies the highest level of prestige,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople name their kids after puppets and presidents and kings collect and perform with puppets. It\u2019s not a marginal art form for children. It\u2019s a highly prestigious, celebrated form of culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, performances are routinely livestreamed, and in the case of one popular performer who drew an in-person audience of 500 to 1,000 to a recent show, up to 40,000 people worldwide watched online.<\/p>\n

\u201cWherever there are Indonesian migrants, they are often some of the most devoted fans interested in supporting wayang because it allows them to feel part of the cultural community,\u201d Cohen says.<\/p>\n

And as he opened each of Angst\u2019s wooden chests, that cultural community became more rooted for posterity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not to say that at this moment it\u2019s not challenged by other media that are available,\u201d Cohen says. \u201cBut it\u2019s an art form that appeals to different ages and socioeconomic statuses. It crosses religious barriers and lines. It\u2019s a rich art form with a very long history.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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