Wayang Kulit

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A traditional wayang kulit performance begins after dark and can run until dawn, staged around a taut cotton screen lit from behind by an oil lamp or, today, an electric bulb. On one side sits the audience that came to watch the shadows; on the other, often, sits a second audience that prefers to watch the dalang and his puppets directly, since both views of the same story are considered legitimate ways to attend. The dalang works alone at the center of the production: he selects and voices every character, sings the narrative passages, cues the gamelan orchestra seated around him, and strikes a wooden mallet against his puppet chest to mark rhythm and punctuate combat, all while manipulating flat leather puppets whose jointed arms he moves with thin horn rods.

The repertoire performed most often, wayang purwa, retells the Ramayana and Mahabharata, but rarely in a straight recitation. Javanese performance convention interleaves the Sanskrit epics with the punakawan, a set of clown-servant characters belonging to no Indian source at all, who comment on the unfolding action, crack jokes about current events, and give the audience a familiar, indigenous voice inside a story of gods and kings. A dalang's reputation rests as much on his skill at these improvised interludes as on his fidelity to the epic itself, and a single performer is expected to hold an audience's attention, and an entire cast of characters, for a night that can stretch past eight hours.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Wayang is usually introduced to outsiders through its most famous stories, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, both of Indian origin, which can make the tradition look like a Javanese retelling of imported material. The scholarly record points the other way. The earliest firm evidence for wayang, a royal charter of 903 CE naming a dalang called Galigi performing the story of Bima Kumara, predates the epics' full literary establishment on Java, and the theatre historian James Brandon has argued at length that wayang's entire technical vocabulary, the words for puppet, performer, screen and every part of the craft, is native Javanese rather than borrowed Sanskrit, a pattern that would be strange for an art form supposedly imported wholesale from India.

The likelier picture, on this reading, is a native Javanese tradition of ancestor veneration and spirit contact that existed before Hindu narrative material arrived, and which then absorbed the Ramayana and Mahabharata as compelling new content for a much older theatrical form rather than adopting the form itself from abroad. That would explain why a dalang is still regarded as much a spiritual officiant as an entertainer, and why performances remain bound to weddings, harvests and purification rites, occasions rooted in the life of a Javanese village rather than in the ritual calendar of classical Hinduism. The gods on the screen may have come from India; the screen itself, on the evidence, did not.