Julie Taymor

After graduation, Taymor traveled to Indonesia to study visually oriented theatre and traditional puppetry. Initially, she was at the Taman Ismail Marzuki, Indonesia’s nation arts academy in Jakarta, where she interacted with master artists with theatre, dance, music, and puppetry backgrounds. From there, she traveled to study under W.S. Renga, a respected, yet controversial playwright, director, and novelist, at his Bengkel Theatre in Yogyakarta. It was Renga that encouraged her to direct and, from it, came Way of Snow, a trilogy that grappled with cultural transition and madness and combined masked actors and various forms of puppetry. Way of Snow was popular in both Yogyakarta and Jakarta, but when it premiered in Bali, police stopped the show and interrogated Taymor about being a dissident and a Communist due to the content of the show[1]. Post-interrogation, however, Taymor was invited to live and create theatre in Bali.

Taymor spent the next 2 years in Bali and it is the spirituality of the island that would shape all of her subsequent works. After an accident on the side of a volcano led to an infected leg, Taymor was forced to return to the United States. A few months later, she returned to Indonesia with the funding to form a theatre company. Teatr Loh spent a year holding intensive workshops and from these experiences came Taymor’s next piece, Tirai. Tirai provoked controversy because it was created by a foreigner but used traditional Indonesian techniques. In 1980, Taymor returned the New York and reworked and directed both Way of Snow and Tirai.  

[1] Blumenthal, Eileen; Monda, Antonio; and Taymor, Julie. Julie Taymor Playing with Fire. 3rd ed. New York: Abrams, 2007. Print.