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Past Event: Performance-lecture by Matthew Cohen with Video by Ben Hagari: “Sea Offerings”

Tapestry

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Free; no registration required
https://ism.yale.edu/events/2024-11-09-performance-lecture-by-matthew-cohen-with-video-by-ben-hagari-wayang-sea
Great Hall, Sterling Divinity Quadrangle
409 Prospect Street New Haven, CT 06511
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The debut of a lecture-performance co-created by puppeteer-professor Matthew Cohen, and the award-winning artist Ben Hagari titled "Sea Offerings." This performance looks back at Cohen’s training as an apprentice puppeteer in the Cirebon area of Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, when he accidentally became a shaman of sorts. The performance interpolates a puppet drama (Budug Basu) about the cursed union of the rice goddess and the embodiment of fish, sponsored annually by fishing communities. Throughout the work there is autobiographical commentary, ecological reflections, comedy, and video shot in the Cirebon area in 2024. The video features the adornment of a buffalo head with female makeup, the making and processing of miniature ships, and the casting of the buffalo head into the sea.

This event, held in the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle's Great Hall, serves as the conclusion of the full day ISM symposium symposium Wayang, Ecology, and the Sacred: Engagements with Indonesian Puppet Theatre. Although the full symposium event requires registration, this concluding lecture-performance is free and open to the public with no need to register.

Co-sponsored by the ISM’s Religion, Ecology, and Expressive Culture Initiative and the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

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Artist Bios

Matthew Cohen

Matthew Isaac Cohen is a leading scholar-practitioner of Indonesian performing arts, with more than thirty-five years of experience in the academic study, performance, and curation of Indonesian puppet traditions (wayang). He is currently a professor at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches puppet arts and theatre studies, and is at work on two books about wayang, based on the research he has been conducting over the last seven years into the Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Henry Angest Collection of Indonesian Puppets at Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), the largest collection of wayang puppets in the world. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale (1997), has twice held fellowships from YUAG’s Department of Indo-Pacific Art, and was a fellow of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music fellow in 2017-2018.

Ben Hagari

Ben Hagari works in film, video, and animation to create tragic comedies that unfold in absurdist environments. His work often employs optical illusions and “persistence of vision” (visuality after the image ceases) to understand the origins of moving images and technologies’ effects on perception. Extending from the screen-based to installation format, his projects are the result of wide-ranging research in the fields of literature, theater, art history, and scientific curiosities. His works have been shown in biennials, museums, galleries, film festivals, and other venues in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, including at The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, Sculpture Center, The High Line and The Boiler in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, KIT in Düsseldorf, Flora Ars+Natura in Bogotá, Fundación CALOSA in Guanajuato, Mexico, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art and The Israel Museum, among others. Hagari is the recipient of the 2024 Guggenheim Foundation award and is a lecturer at Yale School of Art.