July 14 - Puppets and shadows

July 14 Day 150

                We got up and had a nice breakfast of banana pancakes and fresh fruit.  I went for a walk to get some stuff done but was largely unsuccessful since it was Sunday.  The full moon dance performance at the museum wasn't going to happen until after we left and both travel places for our ongoing ticket from Ubud were closed.  I did find a place to do our laundry run by a guy with excellent English who turned out to have moved here from Florida. 

                We went to a vegan place for lunch with great service but only okay food, then dropped off our laundry and went down the street to the Yoga Barn.  This was a place with signs up all over town and mentions in all of the guidebooks about being THE place for yoga in Ubud.  They had a huge space including a hotel and a large garden.  Their daily schedule was packed with different levels of yoga and a bulletin board explained the multi-day courses available.  It had lots of fitness buffs, neo-hippies and surgically altered folks milling around with lots of treatments and new age products for sale.  We grabbed a schedule and went back to our room.

                We bought some fruit and beer on the way back and hung out at our room for the afternoon.  Towards evening we walked up to the shadow puppet performance we had picked out, which was on the grounds of a very fancy hotel with a pool and various huts and stores.  There was space for about 30 people but only a few were there in advance.  Steven had told us that it was a thing to see the show both from the front and the back and we saw two people waiting on a bench beside the performers. 

                We tried to read the story description given to us and discussed it with other audience members who couldn't understand it either.  It mentioned keeping dead family members in your head and getting your way with the demons of hell by saying you needed water from a fountain.  Behind the screen were the main puppeteer, two helpers to sort and hand him the puppets and two musicians all gathered back there around the open flame that created the shadows.

                The puppeteer did all of the voices and movements himself and often kept the puppets away from the screen, leaving most of them blurry.  We moved from fromt to back and it seemed a shame that the ornately coloured puppets were only shown in black and white if you watched from the screen.  Many puppets had movable mouths and all could wave their limbs and it was a procession of monsters of all sizes, animals, plants and warriors.

                It wet on for an hour, which was a bit long.  The audience appreciated the few English words used and most of the kids and a few of the adults took turns looking behind the scenes.  By the end more than half the audience had already left but a few stayed afterwards to take pictures of the puppeteers and puppets.  The shop on the way out had beautifully made puppets of all types for sale, but we had to head out for dinner.

                We had chosen a place we noticed the night before and invited Ugur to join us, as he had caught up with us in Ubud.  The food was really good and Ugur told us of some of the places he was looking at as he planned to spend a month there and wanted an apartment.  It was good to see him and we made plans to see a monkey trance dance performance together the next night.

                We walked home and were amazed again how active but calm Ubud was, very different from our perception of Bali.  We headed home and got to sleep.

The maestro concocting a puppet show.

Real fire, with helpers on the side.

The result, which is why we watched most of the show from behind the screen.