The Bird flew high to mark the start of the Printemps Français cultural festival across Indonesia.

French contemporary puppet company Les Rémouleurs art director Anne Bitran took shelter under a tree at an open space in Plaza Senayan shopping mall in South Jakarta as rain began to fall on Saturday evening.

After the rain stopped, her partner, Olivier Vallet, arrived and asked her to get ready. Around 30 minutes later, she mounted the stage with a bird-like giant kite, measuring 8 meters in width, with 19 helium-filled balloons, for a show that she named L’Oiseau (The Bird).

Les Rémouleurs flew the kite to celebrate cultural festival Printemps Francais held by the French Institute. Before Jakarta, they performed in Yogyakarta, a city chosen to open the festival last Thursday.

“Printemps Francais always supports Indonesian and French artists for collaboration. This year, Les Rémouleurs is collaborating with Indonesian artists to perform The Bird,” said IFI director Marc Piton.    

With bamboo sticks and cable fibers, Bitran and her three partners simultaneously make the kite ascend, descend and move backward and forward from one side to another.

Meanwhile, Vallet projected various shadows of images onto the body of the kite, which swung gently from side to side, using two overhead projectors.

He made the shadows by shinning a number of thin sheets of transparent flexible material painted by seven respected Indonesian painters, including Gepeng Dewantoro of Bandung, West Java, Agus Kucing of Surabaya, East Java and Heri Dono of Yogyakarta.

Show time: Yogyakarta-based experimental music duo Senyawa performs to enliven the art show.

The alteration of the shadows was matched by the rhythm of the hypnotizing music played by Senyawa, a Yogyakarta-based experimental music duo comprising vocalist Rully Shabara and guitarist Wukir Suryadi.    

While Wukir feverishly strummed his strange string instrument, Rully used his vocal cords to imitate the sound of various animals, ranging from birds chirping to shouting monkeys, depending on the shadows displayed by the projectors.

The white bird then turned red and the show ended. Bitran could not hide her happiness as the applauses rang out loud and long.   

“We chose the bird because it is the universal symbol of freedom and peace,” she said of her one-hour show.

She said the show’s main message was to fight for equality in education because she witnessed that a lack of education still existed not only in France, but also in other countries Les Rémouleurs had visited.

Therefore, she continued, the shadows of the paintings displayed by the projectors were about learning, sharing, protesting, creating and imagining.

She took one week to make the giant kite. However, she needed extra time to imagine its shape and techniques to realize it. She made it four years ago and has displayed it more than 20 times around the world.

Like Indonesians, she said, French people love to fly kites. However, flying her giant kite is not easy because the helium used to fill the balloons is expensive. “It also requires good weather,” she says.

She felt honored, she said, to work with the Indonesian artists. However, she knew nothing about them before IFI invited her to take part in the Printemps Francais.

“We did not know him [Heri Dono] before. But, when we saw his paintings, we fell in love with them immediately. We then went to his studio in Yogyakarta,” she said. “He is a very nice man and he is very generous. He immediately agreed to collaborate with us.”

Meanwhile, Agus came to Bitran after hearing about the festival. He told her he wanted to collaborate, showing his beautiful paintings, and she agreed immediately.

“They [the seven painters] gave me more than 100 drawings,” said Bitran, who took a month to prepare the show.

She arrived in Indonesia late March and she had three weeks to work with the painters and only one week to work with Senyawa.

“We are so lucky to work with Senyawa. They are great musicians and every musical instruments that they play produces beautiful tones,” she said of the group, which made its international debut at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in Australia in 2011.

Bitran said it was remarkable that in Indonesia, there was little gap between artists and non-artists, something she says is rarely found in her home country. “In French, their relationship is not simple. Not an equal relationship.”    

In Yogyakarta, she was so enthralled by the relationship between local people and Heri Dono, who has been awarded numerous art distinctions, such as the Prince Claus Award in 1998 in the Netherlands for his contribution to art and the UNESCO prize at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000.

Unconditional love: French contemporary puppet company Les Rémouleurs collaborates with seven Indonesian painters to perform ‘The Bird’ at Plaza Senayan, South Jakarta.

After Jakarta, Les Rémouleurs will perform in other cities, including Surabaya on May 4, Bandung on May 7 and Bali on May 10.

In Jakarta, IFI has also invited other French artists, such as photojournalist Christophe Loviny, choreographer Anne Nguyen, pianist Jean-Louis Haguenauer and writer Elizabeth D. Inandiak.

The cultural center has prepared 50 events for 10 cities across Indonesia from April 28 to June 11.    

In Bali, for example, Sundanese singer Neneng Dinar and musicians Yoyon Darsono and Dede Suparman will collaborate with French ensemble group Doulce Mémoire for a performance entitled “The Music from a Lost Land” at Bentara Budaya Bali in Gianyar on May 7.

Piton said that this year, his institution had selected Yogyakarta to open the Printemps Français and that in upcoming years, it would be opened in other cities across the archipelago. “Yogyakarta was chosen because Les Rémouleurs collaborated with many artists from the city. It is the center of culture in Indonesia.”

— Photos by A. Kurniawan Ulung