The Art of Wayang
28-7-15
Have you heard of Wayang?
Wayang is Indonesian Shadow Puppetry. The most beautiful form of puppetry according to many scholars. It was created in Indonesia around the 8th century. The puppets are made out of paper, leather with wood and metal rods and traditionally bound together with wax. The puppets perform in front of bamboo paper sheets or muslin and perform by candlelight or lanterns for a warm glow. Even today, traditional electricity is not used in Wayang- as it’s considered disrespectful to the art form.
The term for puppetry, wayang, comes from the Indonesian word for shadowbayang. Wayang is considered to be the oldest freestanding puppet form. And scholars have praised the work for century. King Airlangga (1035–1049) wrote:
“There are people who weep, are sad and aroused watching the puppets, though they know they are merely carved pieces of leather manipulated and made to speak. These people are like men who, thirsting for sensuous pleasures, live in a world of illusion; they do not realize the magic hallucinations they see are not real.”
Indigenous origins of the puppetry are argued by scholars who point toward connections between the jesters and ancestral spirits who may have brought Wayang from India or China. The jester characters that appear in every play have no clear Indian precedent. Performances of puppetry are still held once a year at cemeteries where the founders of each village are buried.
Balinese puppets differ from the Javanese in that they are much simpler and more naturalistic. There has been some speculation that the delicacy and distortion of Javanese puppets stories are more based from Islamic perspectives of the human body and therefore stand taller and more male in view,and that Balinese puppets (from the predominantly Hindu society of Bali) are more original, sit lower to the ground and show more female characteristics.
Most Wayang performances tell stories of folk-lore or religious base in Indonesia. Today, such ritual stories are performed infrequently, but they remain a part of the history of the art. You can see traditional Wayang in Java or in museum settings across Indonesia.
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