Les Grandes Personnes à Kota Tua, Jakarta

The title was a clickbait, the post is in English.

The Event

On 13 June, puppeteers from France had an open show at Kota Tua, Jakarta. I wonder why they call themselves Les Grandes Personnes.

Ah, c'est pourquoi

The show began at 17.00 sharp and only lasted for less than an hour with only 2 repetitive songs that was still ringing in my brain when I drove home. They began at the yard of ceramic museum then spread around the area attracting tourists.

The crowd

The biggest puppets are the puppets of le grand père and Pelé (I think it's supposed to be Pelé), they have backup puppeteers who exchanged on the corner when no one was looking and other smaller puppets distracted the audience. It took about 5 minutes to re-strap the doll, quite a process.


IFI director, Mns. Marc Piton was there too. He wears suits on every occasion and apparently on this one as well. I don't know if it has that kind of rule in the bureau, but he was sweating.

The Puppets

From behind

That is what it looks like from the back. The puppets are very heavy, you can see the puppeteers were sweating. Quite a workout.

Look how they move the dolls!

Immediately I am curious of the mechanics, the motions and how they bring the props through airports, all that behind the scene stuff.

The puppets were made in France, but there are other workshops, like in Africa: Boromo, Mozambic, South Africa and in Chilli and it has toured all over the world. It's very nice for them to put a preview for free (gratis) to acquaintance people of Jakarta to French big puppets. The doll is kind of reminded me to Ondel-ondel, but bigger with fancier mechanism and actually looks and moves like a person. It'd be cool to have puppets conference and have a week full of theaters and talks from different puppeteers from parts of the world. ça serait intéressant.