ABSTRACT

Claims of authenticity and antiquity are attached to puppet theatres worldwide, particularly by advocates seeking patronage from heritage bodies, income from the tourist trade, or a sense of legitimacy and purpose in response to dwindling audiences. However, all we know about puppet theatre indicates that traditions are never, in fact, static but require constant revamping for contemporary audiences and changing performance contexts. Even forms that appear on the surface to be stagnant or inert, such as fusty American holiday marionette shows, the state-subsidized Bunraku company of Japan, or the ritual-bound shadow puppet theatres of India such as to-galugo-mbeat.t.a (Singh 1999), are, in fact, constantly being renewed and altered in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways. Innovation is not tradition’s opposite; change is required to keep tradition vital and meaningful as sociologist Edward Shils (1981) long ago emphasized. The last century, however, has seen the development of new articulations of

puppet traditions – not innovations within traditions but rather strategic departures from them. Puppet artists from Alfred Jarry onward have drawn deeply on tradition’s social forms, dramaturgical structures, techniques, and technologies without heeding its rules and taboos. Drawing on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1994), I refer to such puppet theatre as post-traditional. Productions usually operate outside traditionally mandated time and space, tend to be highly reflexive, and are often politically aware, even subversive. Post-traditional practitioners are sometimes critiqued by conservative traditionalists for “destroying” tradition, but many are, in fact, deeply invested in its transmission while hostile to repressive ideologies of “traditionalism” (Pelikan 1984). Some post-traditional puppetry has been catalyzed by collaborations with agents

coming from outside of traditions – as in Tall Horse, a collaboration between South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and Mali’s Sogolon Puppet Troupe (Hutchison 2010). Other post-traditional puppetry has been the result of nonhereditary practitioners entering an established field of practice and remaking it according to nontraditional values, as in Cambodia’s Sovanna Phum Theatre, which combines

shadow puppetry with circus. There are also examples of transformed tradition resulting from what Shils calls “endogenous factors,” the exploration by tradition bearers of new possibilities within the form, the radical rejection of selected precepts, and the bringing of other cultural forms and values into the mix (Shils 1981: 213-239). Endogenous factors have been the primary causes of change within the traditional

puppet theatres, or wayang, of Indonesia and the development of post-traditional wayang as well. Shadow puppet theatre (wayang kulit) on the Indonesian island of Java, my primary focus in this chapter, is in some ways hugely conservative, serving to reproduce ancient Javanese myths and embed Java’s versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in ritual contexts. Wayang “plays” (lakon) traditionally are orally improvised in performance and thus always contingent upon context, but one nonetheless observes a high degree of “substantive traditionality,” defined by Shils as “the appreciation of the accomplishments and wisdom of the past and of the institutions especially impregnated with tradition, as well as the desirability of regarding patterns inherited from the past as valid guides” (Shils 1981: 21). Shadow puppets carved from rawhide collected more than 200 years ago by T. S. Raffles and now housed in the British Museum could easily be incorporated within Javanese performances today. Puppets are valued as magically potent heirlooms (pusaka); performance collections are generally built up over generations rather than being the work of a single maker. Advances in communication and transportation and the publication of wayang

texts starting in the middle of the nineteenth century contributed to a blurring of regional wayang styles and reduction of local cultural specificities. Dutch scholars privileged literary renderings of wayang by the elites of Surakarta, a royal court (kraton) city of central Java, and supported wayang training courses and associated textbooks (Sears 1996). Texts originating from the royal courts of Surakarta were accepted as authoritative by wayang artists around the island. The dominance of Surakarta’s courtly wayang kulit was further promulgated in the twentieth century by recordings and radio (and later television and digital media). The neo-governmental wayang organizations Pepadi and Senawangi, founded in Jakarta during the New Order dictatorship (1966-1998) and patronized by cronies of President Soeharto, promoted Surakarta wayang as the sine qua non of Javanese tradition in their festivals, publications, and other public representations. Wayang was “a carriage-trade item” (Geertz 1990: 52) around East Java by the 1980s, and local puppeteers needed to adopt aspects of Surakarta style to compete (Day 1996). Puppeteers around central and eastern Java purchased colorful and lightweight Surakarta-style puppets tailored to the flashy puppet movement style popularized in the 1980s by Surakarta-style puppeteer Ki Manteb Soedharsono and sold off their old puppets (many of which had long served as bibit, or models, for crafting puppets) to antique dealers. Certain regional styles and minority puppet forms, such as wayang krucil and wayang gedhog, became endangered art forms. The construction of a monumental, kraton-centric “Java” during the New Order

dictatorship, critiqued by American anthropologist John Pemberton (1994), has been challenged by dynamic movements in Javanese culture since the 1998 fall of Soeharto. In the carnivalesque demonstrations leading up to Soeharto’s ousting, as well as in

follow-up celebratory protests against Islamist sharia-style regulations of propriety, artists and activists drew upon local forms of cultural performance to combat hegemonic authority. Artists today strive to establish communities of interest (komunitas) with local audiences and patrons, reviving and reinterpreting archaic and residual cultural forms of wayang and other arts. Endangered wayang forms, such as the scroll theatre wayang beber, suddenly seem to possess more than antiquarian interest. They are potentially vital cultural resources for “resistance against immanent power” (Nancy 1986). Recent trips I took to Java in 2009 and 2011 confirmed that while wayang remains a repository of traditional values, it is a dynamic art, responding to flows of popular culture, political and religious change, and current issues.1 Far from being “merely” an historical relic, wayang is being reinvented on numerous fronts and engaging new audiences through the use of topical humor, social and political commentary, new modes of technology, and philosophical reflection. Here, I will discuss two broad types or streams of Javanese wayang performance.

The first I refer to as “traditional.” These are Javanese-language performances of standard play-episodes accompanied by gamelan, typically lasting all night, embedded in ritual contexts, and open to the general public free of charge. The second sort of wayang is post-traditional, sometimes referred to in Indonesia as wayang kontemporer, literally “contemporary wayang” (Cohen 2007; Mulyono 1982: 281-289), which is performed outside of ritual contexts in theatre buildings, festivals, or art galleries. Post-traditional wayang articulates new relations between performers and their communities of interest and new modes of engagement within and across contemporary art worlds. It is worth emphasizing that these two streams of wayang are not bounded cate-

gories. Post-traditional wayang artists are often very skilled in traditional practice as well and quite capable of performing traditional wayang upon request. Jan Mrázek (2005) in his monograph Phenomenology of a Puppet Theatre likens wayang to a house that is constructed through performance to be inhabited by performers and spectators for a time. Slamet Gundono, perhaps Java’s best known post-traditional puppeteer until his untimely death in 2014, told me there was no fundamental difference between the all-night, gamelan-accompanied traditional wayang kulit performances he occasionally gave and his kontemporer, intermedial collaborations. Both contemporary and traditional wayang offered Ki Slamet houses in which he could live or, as he put it, in which he could enjoy (English in the original) himself. Art curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s comments on what he calls “postproduction” art are apropos. “The prefix ‘post’ does not signal any negation or surpassing; it refers to a zone of activity. The processes in question here do not consist of … lamenting the fact that everything has ‘already been done,’ but inventing protocols of use for all existing modes of representation and all formal structures. It is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. To learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them” (Bourriaud 2001: 17-18). Shils expands further on this metaphor in his discussion of endogenous factors in changing traditions: “The acquisition from the past furnishes their home but it is very seldom a home in which they are entirely at ease. They try to bend it to their own desires; they sometimes discard or replace some of the inherited furniture” (Shils 1981: 213).