The director first experienced topeng, an Indonesian form of dance drama in which dancers wear masks and perform ancient stories, when she was still a theatre student in the United States. On graduating in 1974, she used a fellowship to study Bunraku puppetry in Japan a traditional art form that uses large puppets. She then moved on to Indonesia, where she stayed for four years, first studying with Javanese poet and playwright WS Rendra, before founding her first theatre troupe in Bali, Theatre Loh, putting on productions that experimented with image theatre which puts more emphasis on the visual than the language. From her experiences in Indonesia had a profound effect on her. She once said, "I have never seen theatre as potent, powerful, and overwhelmingly theatrical as I have in Indonesia. It's part of the everyday fabric of society.” She has often reflected on how her experiences in Bali indelibly shaped her perspective on theatre.
Taymor recalls how one night, sitting under a Banyan tree, alone in the darkness in a small Balinese village, she witnessed an ancient ceremony performed by thirty elders in full warrior costume. “They did this amazing dance, maybe for 30 minutes in the dark. I saw these men performing and I understood what it was to perform, to give back, not for review, money, audiences and applause. When they had finished, a young man came out with a propane lamp, put it up on a tree, the square filled up with an audience and then they performed for the next nine hours a Balinese opera for a human audience. At that moment, I understood what it is to create art. Even though I’m all for the audience I want people to come and love it I also have to make sure what’s on stage has a sort of purity for itself,” she recalled.
Taymor worked with Michael Curry, a leading puppet expert to create the masks and puppets for the musical’s Broadway debut in 1997. They then taught the cast how to use Asian puppetry techniques to animate them, borrowing heavily from the Indonesian arts of topeng (masked) dance-drama and wayang kulit (shadow puppet) theatre.
While actors for the main characters – Simba, his father Mufassa and his uncle Scar – wear masks above their shoulder or head, transforming them into hybrid creatures that combine an animal’s essence with a human dimension, many of the other animals are brought to life through outsized puppets manipulated by performers. Here, the special properties of wayang kulit – Indonesian puppet theatre employing light and shadow – are conveyed by actors silhouetted against a dramatically lit backdrop, walking on stilts (the tall, stately giraffes) or springing forward in a rocking motion (the lightning-fast cheetah, whose movements are controlled by an actor standing inside a carved puppet with malleable limbs).
Taymor also borrowed from the Japanese Bunraku techniques, where a master puppeteer controls a large puppet doll, which can be as tall as five feet, with the help of two other puppeteers – one operates the right hand with a rod, while the other manipulates the legs. In the Japanese tradition, the puppeteers are hidden by black cloth, but in The Lion King, they are visible to the audience, albeit in chameleon-like make up and costume, allowing spectators to concentrate on the story. Read the whole story in Prestige Singapore this March.