Wayang Kulit (Shadow Puppet)
One of my childhood favorite traditional entertainments was Wayang Kulit or Shadow Puppet Theater, and is Bali’s most complex sacred art form but yet also full of humor telling story and religious advice for the youth at the same time. It is a traditional medium of moral and spiritual instruction, but also wonderfully entertaining.
a wayang kulit show
The trick of how it displayed is very simple: an oil lamp is hung behind a screen of white stretched cloth, and in the space between them shadows are produced by flat, leather puppets. To carry this out is very difficult. A single puppeteer, manipulates all the puppets, often several at a time, speaking for them in a myriad of voices and in several different languages, while conducting a small assemble of gamelan musicians as well.
Génder (read “g” as in go)
Gender is the music that plays to accompany the wayang performance. The compositions of the small gamelan ensembles are complicated and played at lightning speed.
The Balinese wayang kulit adopted its form to its Javanese precedents, but over the past four hundred years it has evolved its own unique puppets, music, and ritual. The Balinese puppets, for example, are smaller and more naturalistic than those of the Javanese, which are more stylistic because Islam forbids portrayal of the human form. Balinese performances, which often begin late at night, are usually held after ritual or major event in the community.
The great Indian epics, the Mahabarata and Ramayana, provide most of the character of the wayang Kulit Theater, but serve as only a thematic sketch for the plot of the actual plays created by the Balinese puppeteer (dalang).
3,219 Views | Posted in Bali Daily |
