SHILO KLOKO – Behind Shadows

Shilo Kloko is an interdisciplinary performance team that uses puppetry, animation, and the Japanese dance theatre form of butoh to draw the audience into a meditational, entertaining, and surreal world.

When a puppet is moved by a human puppeteer, who is moving the puppeteer?  In their new work, Behind Shadows, the relationship between puppet and puppeteer disrupts the conventional puppet-master hierarchy. As if reflecting our ever-changing emotions, social status, and imagination, a puppet introduces its diverse role: a manipulated object, friend, slave, missing soulmate, threat, psychological mirror, and a ritualistic vessel.

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Shilo Kloko (she-lo clo-ko) members Walter Santucci, Nao Kobayashi and Yoriko Murakami started exchanging their diverse influences, ideas and styles after all participating in Adult Puppet Cabaret in San Diego. Using their expertise in animation, puppet fabrication, theatre costume and body movement, their collaborative works cultivate a deeper relationship between human body and visual form, seeking to expand our conventional definitions of beauty though an embrace of unknown possibilities. The name Shilo Kloko comes from 2 Japanese words, meaning shiro “white,” and kuroko meaning “black-stagehand.”