Wayang Kulit

The puppeteer runs the whole performance alone for some eight hours without a written script. He voices every character differently, delivers the narration in Javanese at levels varying with who speaks, cues the gamelan by knocking on the puppet chest, and moves the figures. The order of a play follows a fixed frame — the pathet, which changes three times across the night, each with its own mode and temper — and within that frame the puppeteer composes as he goes.

Wayang cannot therefore be learned from a text. What is transmitted is a frame, a repertoire and the capacity to compose in the moment, and the transmission runs through long apprenticeship. The number of puppeteers commanding the full sequence is far smaller than the number who perform, because most performances are now shortened to three or four hours.

An audience may sit on the shadow side or on the puppeteer's side. The division is often explained as one between women and men, or between those who see the shadow and those who see how it is made, and elaborate symbolic readings have been built on it.

Most of those readings were recorded by European and Javanese writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some of them re-entered the training of puppeteers afterwards. This is not a reason to reject them, but a reason to state their provenance: the reading of wayang as an image of human life played by God is widely current and old, and is not an account that can be traced behind the point at which it was written down.

Most plays derive from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, but their cast differs from the Indian: the Pandawa brothers are attended by the punakawan — Semar, Gareng, Petruk, Bagong — who appear in no Indian source and who carry both the comedy and the sharpest commentary. Semar, a servant in form and a god in rank, is the clearest sign that wayang is not a transmission but a recomposition.

Beside these stand the carangan plays composed by puppeteers outside the canon, the Panji plays which are Javanese in origin, and, in the twentieth century, plays made for government campaigns on family planning and elections. The last are commonly left out of accounts of wayang, and are recorded here because they show the form still being used for whatever needed saying in its time.