FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM Michael Schuster with some of the traditional South Indian puppets used in his performance, "The Monkey King." His friendly puppets are, from left, King Benares, clown Sarti and the Monkey King.

Puppets pull
his heartstrings

Isle man maintains
Asian traditions

---

Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.com

A chance encounter 30 years ago in a Burmese marketplace changed Michael Schuster's life.

'The Monkey King and the Water Demon' Created and performed by Michael Schuster Where: The Doris Duke at the Academy, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 900 S. Beretania St. When: 2 p.m. tomorrow Tickets: $5 adults and $3 children Call: 532-8726 Also: Student performances 10 a.m. Tuesday through March 7, along with a tour in the academy galleries. (Cost is $2 per student.) Schuster will also give a shadow puppet workshop for teachers from 9 to 11 a.m.

"I was traveling in the Far East, through Rangoon in Burma (now Yangon in Myanmar)," he said. "I was walking up to Shwedagon Temple one day and, on the way, passed through a marketplace and saw this beautiful, old puppet. I was immediately smitten with it -- so much so that I traded a travel alarm clock for it.

"When I asked the people around me where I could see a performance using such a puppet, they told me you couldn't see it anymore. Years later, when I went back to that same area, the people had revived that tradition."

Schuster has kept that and other South Asian traditions alive by carrying on as a puppeteer here in Hawaii. Inspired by his folk-theater research, he's created an original work called "The Monkey King and the Water Demon," which he's performing for students visiting the Honolulu Academy of Arts this week and next. There will be a special public performance tomorrow.

"I've already performed it on the mainland for children and the community in arts centers in Los Angeles, the Bay area and Las Vegas about four years ago," he said, "and I decided to revise it here because it seemed appropriate, being that we're in a potentially violent time right now."

With many of his characters inspired by the "gombeyata" puppetry of South India, Schuster will tell how the Monkey King outwits a wicked demon who refuses to allow his herd to drink from his lake.

"The stories are rooted in Buddhism, where they speak of universal kindness and compassion, resolving major issues with intelligence and a spiritual approach to living, (instead of) violence.

"So much of entertainment for families these days seems based on an idealized notion of heroism through fighting. And what I'm presenting is not dull at all -- it's fun because there's still conflict.

Even though Schuster is the lone performer onstage, he said he still feels he contains within him "all these people who taught me in India, so I guess that means I'm not really alone up there."

BEFORE his epiphany, Schuster was a UCLA undergraduate who had studied history in Jerusalem a year earlier. After returning from the Far East, however, he wanted to study puppetry at the Westwood campus.

"I wanted to find work as a puppeteer, not doing TV commercial work in L.A., but through the tradition of Asian theater. It's there that it has such a totality, an epic theater so large that it has the potential to cross boundaries."

After graduating from UCLA, Schuster went to Indonesia and Java in 1975 to study shadow puppetry. "I studied for six months with a prince, and it was truly mind-expanding!

"It was kind of unusual for an outsider like me to express an interest in this field of study ... but after being introduced to the prince, he was quite open to teaching me. The only thing holding me back was my own struggle learning this art. For example, he started trying to teach me to sing two octaves, and I told him, 'I haven't even sung one!' It was all about expanding yourself as far as you could go."

Schuster returned to Jerusalem after completing his studies and started performing there, developing a program using old and modern biblical stories as a kind of cross-cultural theater.

"The Monkey King and the Water Demon" continues in the same cross-cultural vein, as Schuster also uses a European marionette and sometimes dances about, wearing painted "kathakali" masks of India.

"I was influenced by the picture-story presentation in the street performances I saw. This is not based on the usual Buddhist 'jataka' tales, but instead some of the oldest tales from South Asia, where Buddha's incarnations would be in animal forms, one of the more famous being the Monkey King."

The one-hour show has been best for the academy's school tours, he said, complementing the students' studies of the museum's South and Southeast Asian collections.

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