Episode 140: A Large and Historic Puppet Collection

Professor of puppet arts Matthew Isaac Cohen has laid hands on each of the 23,000 puppets that comprise the largest Indonesian puppet collection in the world. Over the last eight years, he has researched the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets at the Yale University Art Gallery, Cohen has taken great care with each of the artifacts, some hundreds of years old. He joins us on the podcast to talk about what it is like to work with such a large and historic collection. Cohen is a member of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 100th class of fellows and plans to document in two major publications what he’s found in Angst’s collection. Cohen also talks about being part of UConn world-renowned puppet arts program as it celebrates its 60^th anniversary.

Link to Episode 140 on Podbeam

Mike: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. I. Hello, Izzy.

Izzy: Good morning. How are we today?

Mike: Are you organized?

Izzy: I would say like a good 50 50.

Mike: So, our guest today has to be organized. Oh yeah. Because like when you organize your computer files or things at work, or even things at home, I mean, if you need to organize 50 to 60 items, that’s a lot.

Izzy: Right? I can’t imagine 23,000. 23,000. Puppets. That’s a lot of organizing organized.

Mike: So, we’re, we’re looking forward to this, to hear how one organizes and keeps track of 23,000 things. Because again, for me, if it gets over a dozen, I’m in trouble.

Izzy: Oh yeah. Totally agree.

Mike: So, our guest today is Matthew Isaac Cohen. He’s a professor of UConn’s world-famous Puppet Arts program in the School of Fine Arts. He was recently named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. And the award was for his research on the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angus collection of Indonesian puppets. A massive collection of 23,000 pieces that came to Connecticut from Europe, and now is the largest puppetry collection in North America. Matt grew up in New Haven as a child of two educators. Both his parents taught at Yale University. He’s done research around Europe and Indonesia. We’re lucky he’s been at UConn since 2019. And like I said, part of our world-famous Puppet Arts program—one of the things that UConn is really known for. So, Matthew, thank you for joining us today.

Matthew: Good morning, Mike.

Mike: Great to have you here. So, congratulations on being named a Guggenheim fellow. Tell us how you found out about it, what the process was like to become one and, and what it means to you.

Matthew: Sure. I should say that the Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most prestigious fellowships in arts and humanities, something which has been on my radar for some time. And it was one of a number of applications which I put forward this past academic year in order to support the completion of two books dealing with this collection, which you mentioned already. The Dr. Walter Angst, Sir Henry Angus collection of Indonesian puppets, which has been central to my research now over the last eight years or so. And it is indeed a massive collection—absolutely staggering in its scope and its depth.

Izzy: Before we dive in about your work with the collection from Europe, can you tell us a little bit about your teaching at UConn and what it’s like to be a part of a department with such a worldwide reputation?

Matthew: Absolutely. And this is one of the major reasons why I’m here at the University of Connecticut, because of this very specialized program in Puppet Arts, which is now celebrating its 60th year with a big alumni exhibition coming up at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry here at the Storrs campus of UConn. And it’s a program which I’ve known for some time. I grew up in Connecticut. And I also went to graduate school here in Connecticut at Yale University. And so, I was aware of the reputation of the program and its prowess for training puppeteers of different stripes—people who are going into the industry as puppeteers, others who become fabricators, educators, community leaders—and with an open policy to shape future leaders in the field of puppetry, not only people from the United States, but also internationally as well.

And I had been teaching prior to coming to the University of Connecticut at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. And I had taught also and done a postdoc in other European institutions. But the possibilities of returning to Connecticut and contributing to this world-famous program were on my mind. Particularly because of the pleasure and joy I got in teaching in the United Kingdom—practical courses dealing with puppetry. I taught in very academic departments in the United Kingdom, but I found a particular kind of enjoyment being able to work with students in the practical how-to aspects of puppetry—working with them creating their own plays or working with scripts across different forms of puppetry.

And I was working in quite a number of forms, not only in Indonesian puppetry, which is a central focus of my research, but also became very interested in Punch and Judy, which is an English tradition of hand puppetry. I was working with toy theater or paper theater and had a commission, which came to me for the Cultural Olympiad when London was hosting the games and working with international puppetry organizations and networks. So, the prospect of coming back to Connecticut—where I grew up, where I have family and roots—and also contributing to the University of Connecticut became even more urgent when I was able to facilitate the move of this collection of 23,000 Indonesian puppets from Europe, where it was located, to Connecticut. And it became kind of inevitable, I think, in a sense, that I would wish to return to Connecticut and be close to that collection to continue my research on it as well as contributing to the future of puppetry here at the University of Connecticut, working with students here.

Mike: So, I think a lot of us, most of us, first were exposed to puppetry and puppets as kids when you watch Sesame Street or The Muppet Show or something like that. And I know we’ve had UConn grads involved in both those efforts. But how did you first develop an interest when you were young in puppetry, and what piqued your interest in the subject? And also, it seems like there’s—I think people think when they think puppets, they think Big Bird or Oscar or Cookie Monster. Way before your time, Izzy.

Izzy: I remember Big Bird.

Mike: But yeah, talk a little bit about how you got interested in, puppetry originally.

Matthew: Okay. I was of that generation, I guess, which was very beginnings of, of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Sure. Another childhood favorite. That’s absolutely. And so that was, that was there with me from the beginning. I remember The Muppet Show when that came on TV and watching at my neighbor’s house on the Sunday evenings over, over, you know, conversation and dinner. But I really wasn’t—puppetry wasn’t the center of my universe. I didn’t have any puppeteers in the family. I didn’t grow up playing with a lot of puppets, although my father, I think in some crazy moment in his life, decided he would make a puppet theater for us at home, which never really took off.

Mike: Your parents taught at Yale. What did they teach?

Matthew: Both my father and mother were at the Yale Child Study Center. My father was a professor of child psychiatry, psychology, and pediatrics, and the director of the Child Study Center. And my mom was a clinical psychologist. So yeah, puppets were kind of there in the background, but not very big. It was really only in university where I became interested—not in puppetry really, but in avant-garde theater and particularly in theater influenced by Asia, which was a big thing in the 1980s when I was in university. Everyone was interested in Asia. The thought was that the 21st century would be the Asian Century. And so, we were seeing at the American Repertory Theater productions, which we talk about now as intercultural theater—mixing Asian and European influences. And I got to see this work and I got to meet some of the artists involved in creating it. And I decided that after graduating from university, I would go off to Asia for what I imagined would be a year initially, to see where all these theatrical influences were coming from. And that year became a career. With the support of a Fulbright grant, I was able to go to Indonesia, and there really for the first time I saw puppetry—and I became a puppeteer myself.

Izzy: So, going back to the 23,000 puppets.

Matthew: Yes.

Izzy: What are you doing with them? How are they stored? I have so many questions when it comes to such a large number of puppets.

Matthew: It is indeed a massive collection, and it is the most visited collection at the Yale University Art Gallery since its arrival, really. The collection comes from one individual—a biologist named Walter Angst—whose hobby over four decades took him on annual collecting trips to the western part of the Indonesian Archipelago. He was trained as a biologist, as I mentioned, and understood Wayang as a form which had its species and genesis—some which were healthy and thriving, others which were endangered. And as a biologist, he was interested in endangered species, so he collected not individual puppets from puppet dealers, but when he could, he collected full sets of these puppets in their original boxes, which is how they’re stored and transported.

And so, what came to Yale wasn’t just 23 isolated individual puppets, but more or less 150 sets of puppets in the original boxes—performance collections which would be used by a solitary puppeteer to tell different kinds of repertoire. In addition, there are thousands of individual puppets, which found their way through eBay, through auction houses, through dealers in Indonesia. So, it’s an extraordinary collection, which was created as a study collection in order to study the diversity of forms of puppetry in the archipelago—and over time as well. So, he has some very old sets, but also sets of puppets which are very new. Some are very traditional; others are contemporary and modern in their orientation. So, it’s not just 23,000 random objects, but it’s an organized collection.

These are stored in oversized storage. Not long before Yale acquired this collection, they took over the old Bayer pharmaceutical plant in West Haven, which had massive amounts of storage capacity. And so, the different museums at Yale University quickly made a claim to these storage facilities, and essentially all the oversized storage in the compact shelving area was given over to these boxes of puppets. So, it has a very, very large footprint at the art gallery, and it’s very well looked after with this great new storage facility—quickly filled by all these boxes.

Mike: And so, your job was to go through them and categorize them and know what’s basically there?

Matthew: Yeah. So, when they arrived at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2017, after going through a period of freezing and fumigation—as one does when bringing things in—the first very quick survey was done in 2017. Actually, one of our UConn students was involved in that effort. And then I came in as a fellow for three months and did a very quick, again, survey. I was told I just have to go into every box and give an initial impression of what’s in each of these boxes. Some of the boxes are massive and involve several people to lift.

Mike: Are they like wood crates or what?

Matthew: Yeah, yeah. Wood crates with some very thick wood.

Mike: And where they flown over or did they come over on a boat?

Matthew: Yeah, they came over in a boat. You know, you couldn’t fly them over.

Mike: You’d have to charter a plane or something like that.

Matthew: Yeah.

Izzy: Literally.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Izzy: So why is this such an important collection of puppets? Like what’s the historical significance behind them?

Matthew: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, puppets like these ones have been in European collections for hundreds of years. And since the 19th century, most of these kinds of puppets have found their way into ethnological museums—museums of natural history—where they’re seen as representatives of a culture or a people, kind of a surrogate. The puppets are a surrogate for human beings. But this collection was created with a different kind of goal. It was created with a desire to understand the evolution of a form and its distribution across different islands in the Western Archipelago.

For me, what’s really significant about it is that it enables, first of all, tracing the history of the development of puppetry in that part of Indonesia where it is the most important and respected art form. And we mentioned Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and Muppets earlier, which are oriented towards children and families. Puppetry in Indonesia has a very high place and is highly regarded in the culture as a root source of all other arts. And also, is very accessible and can be performed for mixed audiences—adults as well as children.

So, for me, it was being able to trace that history and also to be able to celebrate the creativity, because all of those puppets are different, and that’s really interesting—to see form and variation, the changing aesthetics, and the way different things in society are indexed by these puppets.

So, we’ll see, for example, there’s a rather magical set of puppets which were designed by a contemporary puppeteer named Suo, who was very interested in including pop culture references in his puppetry. So, he has clowns dressed up as Teletubbies. He has puppets of Batman and Superman. And you can see his attempt to try to reach new audiences through the inclusion of these popular cultural references within a traditional storytelling form. So, he is still telling the old stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, but a sumo wrestler will make a guest appearance, or army officers with tanks and jeeps. And this ability of Wayang to index the contemporary is really fascinating. And it goes back hundreds of years—you can see the integration of local culture and global culture in these different puppets.

Mike: Is this a collection that’s available for the public to view, or is there a catalog somewhere or what’s the end game in organizing these puppets?

Matthew: Yeah. So, there’s an exhibition of some of the puppets at the art gallery on Chapel Street, which I put together with colleagues in the Indo-Pacific department of art, which oversees the collection. There’s also a small exhibition at the Yale University Collection Study Center in West Haven, which can be visited by appointment.

And when the puppets arrived in 2017, we took several hundred very high-quality images, which have been uploaded to the Yale University online catalog, and those are available free for anyone who wants to download them—very high-quality studio photographs. Yale’s policy is an open access one, and so they don’t charge for reuse—unlike many other museums—for photographs of the work.

And we will have a print catalog, which I’m working on. That’s one of my two books, which I’m working on as a Guggenheim fellow. And there also will be, along with that, a monograph which looks at the history of Indonesian puppetry over the last 200 years, with these puppets as the primary sources or witnesses to this history as it unfolded in the domain of puppetry.

Izzy: Obviously this is a massive collection. Are there any favorites that come to mind?

Matthew: Yeah, there are quite a number. As a puppeteer, you’re not really allowed to have favorites. It’s like being a father—you can’t have a favorite child. But I’ll be frank that there are some sets which really call out for my attention.

One of them is this modern set from Enthus, with the figures all unique, quite beautiful, very well crafted, and showing this rare imagination of a contemporary puppeteer at work. Enthus also—he died a number of years ago of a heart attack—but he was my own age, and so I felt a special kind of affinity to him, having been born in the same year and knowing him for quite a number of years.

And there are other sets as well where I have very personal connections—with sets which I performed with in Indonesia, which I studied. Another set which is really quite special to me is a set from a family in Cirebon on the north coast of Java, which belonged to a family of businesspeople—not of puppeteers—but the great patriarch of this family was a man named Ang, and he was a great patron of the arts. He gave each of his children a full set of puppets along with a gamelan—a musical orchestra which accompanies Wayang puppets in performance.

And I got to visit the ancestral houses of this family last summer. I saw the same kind of motifs in the houses there, which you could also see on the puppets. And I got to talk with descendants about the traditions of this family. And it was really special to see these puppets from the place where they originated a hundred years ago, and to be able to talk with the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents would have been present while those puppets were still active in use in this setting. So yeah. And there are other sets as well, but those are some of them which come to mind particularly.

Mike: Do you ever use the puppets as you’re categorizing them and organizing them?

Matthew: I’m very haptic as a scholar. I like to get my hands on puppets to understand how they move, how they operate. My fingers are in the same place as the puppeteers of yore who used these puppets—who made their livelihoods with these puppets. So that’s part of my process as a scholar.

But also, Yale has been very good about enabling performances to happen within the context of the art gallery. So, I’ve given a performance of a ritual drama with the Yale gamelan group. One of the royal puppeteers of the Royal Court of Yogyakarta came along with the king—or the sultan—and performed using his own puppets and also some of the puppets from the collection.

And a number of years ago, we had a visiting fellow named Dewanto Sukistono, who’s a lecturer in puppetry at one of the conservatories, and he also gave a performance. Recently, I’ve been collaborating with a filmmaker who also teaches at the School of Art named Ben Hagari. We just completed a puppet film using puppets from the collection. The film is on display right now—it’s a two-channel video installation at a museum in Tel Aviv. It will probably be screened in the fall at the art gallery. That film combines documentary footage, which we shot in Java in July of last year, with these beautiful archival puppets from the art gallery set in motion by me, with Ben as the director. So yes, it’s a collection which is in active use, which is really kind of extraordinary.

Mike: Well, that’s great. It looks like you’re doing outstanding work, and we’ll put some links up to some of those pictures in the description of the podcast so people can check it out. So, Matthew, thanks for joining us here today on the UConn 360 Podcast. Interesting work.

Matthew: Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Izzy.

Mike: Izzy, we will talk to you next time on the UConn 360 Podcast.

Izzy: Catch you next time.