Papermoon Puppet Theater Yogyakarta, INDONESIA
Lauren Dubowski will be an artist in residence at the Papermoon Puppet Theater in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Wayang kulit (Indonesian shadow puppetry) was designated by UNESCO as a “Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” Papermoon Puppet Theater showcases a new type of puppetry that often reveals intimate moments of Indonesia’s recent past or portrays problems children and adults face in their everyday life. Using whimsical puppets, its multimedia performances often explore deep and controversial themes such as the imprisonment and mass killings of 1965. The company was founded by Maria “Ria” Tri Sulistyani, a children’s book illustrator and writer and former theater actress, and her husband Iwan Effendi, one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary Indonesian artists of his generation.
Lauren Dubowski is a theater artist, producer, and teacher committed to fostering international cultural exchange and understanding through the arts. She is pursuing a D.F.A. in the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama, where she currently holds a teaching fellowship and earned her M.F.A. in 2014. She was coartistic director of the Yale Cabaret for its 2013-2014 season and an artistic associate for its 2012-2013 season, and she has collaborated on shows there as a creative producer, devisor, director, dramaturg, and/or performer since 2011. As a dramaturg, she has worked at Yale Repertory Theatre, Yale School of Drama, and with the Lucid Body Company/Impact Theatre in New York. Lauren is a founding member of the international theater collective Guilty by Association and participated in Yale School of Drama’s summer program in theater for social change with the Baba Watoto Centre in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2012. She worked with Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia for three years to help found and launch the Headlong Performance Institute, an interdisciplinary training program in performance creation, and she consults for Local Leaders/Global Lens, an international applied-theater and entrepreneurship program based in Los Angeles. Her writings on art and culture have appeared on Culturebot.org and in the Krakow Post and Words Without Borders, and she was web managing editor of Theater magazine from 2012 to 2013. She has also worked as a grant and development writer for theater companies and institutions in New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia. Lauren received her B.A./M.A. in French from Bryn Mawr College and studied theater at Swarthmore College. She has been a Kosciuszko Foundation fellow at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellow at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland. Lauren grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.