ABSTRACT
An oil lamp shines out from behind an off-white screen. Later, the puppeteer’s disembodied voice will issue words of power from this flickering light source. For now, there are just shifting, dancing colours: sometimes brown or orange, sometimes yellow or white. a delicate sound adds to this scene, fragile but intense: the small quartet of bronze gendér wayang instruments playing a tracery of interlocking patterns. Its almost-familiar five-note scale too, seems strangely disembodied – by the vibrations caused by the paired tuning system and the ambiguity of the intervals between the notes. The music itself, like one of Nancarrrow’s player-piano pieces, sounds like one impossible instrument played by four pairs of hands. This is because of the interlocking of two complex parts between the four players. Their hands move in a blur while the counterpoint is so dense and complicated that it seems to shift as fast as you can catch it: cross-rhythms playing against cross-rhythms. All the time, the players’ wrists twist and bend, moving effortlessly as they damp the notes they played previously to prevent the sound ringing on. The overture to a shadow play has begun.
