Wayang Kulit

 

Wayang is an Indonesian word for theatre (literally "shadow"). When the term is used to refer to kinds of puppet theatre, sometimes the puppet itself is referred to as wayang. Performances of shadow puppet theatre are accompanied by gamelan in Java.

WAYANG KULIT or SHADOW PUPPETS (Central Java) Wayang kulit, or shadow puppets, are without a doubt the best known of the Indonesian wayang. Kulit means skin, and refers to the leather construction of the puppets that are carefully chiselled with very fine tools and supported with carefully shaped buffalo horn handles and control rods. The stories are usually drawn from the Hindu epics the Ramayana, the Mahabharata or from the Serat Menak, (a story about the heroism of Amir Hamza.


WAYANG KULIT is done by the puppeteer who is also the storyteller who is possibly considered the best entertainer in the world. All the night, he plays all the characters of the leather puppets forming human characters made from buffalo skin decorated with motif as the product of leather carving. He has to change the voice character, switch the intonation, produce humor and even sing. In order to make the atmosphere vivid, the storyteller is assisted by musicians who play gamelan - the traditional Javanese music instruments - and the female singers called sinden who sing Javanese songs.

The total characters in leather puppet show number in the hundreds. The puppets that are not played are stuck in banana stem that is placed close to the storyteller. While being played, the puppets will look as shadow from rear view of the white screen in front of the storyteller. The shadow is created by the light from the oil lamp placed at the upper rear of the storyteller that is cut off by the puppets being played on the screen.

Each puppet performance presents different story or act. The act variations are divided into four categories namely lakon pakem, lakon carangan, lakon gubahan, and lakon karangan. Lakon pakem is the standard story that entirely originates from leather puppet literature while lakon carangan is only the main story that also refers to the leather puppet literature. Lakon gubahan does not origin from the leather puppet stories but it uses the places in accordance with leather puppet literature; lakon karangan is entirely a free story.

The stories in the leather puppet originated from some old books such as Ramayana, Mahabharata, Pustaka Raja Purwa and Purwakanda. Now, there are some books containing lakon gubahan and karangan that have been hundreds years to be liked by the society such as Abimanyu Kerem, Doraweca, Suryatmaja Maling and so on. Among the old books, Purwakanda book is most often used by the puppeteers from Yogyakarta Kingdom.

The leather puppet show begins when the dalang takes out a puppet in the shape of a mountain called gunungan. A nightlong leather puppet show in Yogyakarta style is divided into 3 scenes with 7 jejeran or acts and 7 war acts. The first scene, called pathet lasem, has 3 jejeran and 2 acts of war accompanied by pathet lasem Javanese musical composition. Pathet Sanga as the second scene has 2 jejeran and 2 war acts, while Pathet Manyura as the second scene has 2 jejeran and 3 war acts. One of the scenes that most spectators mostly wait is gara-gara that presents typical Javanese humor.

WAYANG KULIT  tells us about very good philosophy from Mahabarata and Ramayana story in Javanese version. The show is conducted by dalang in a full night and it is completed with the gamelan instrument (Javanese traditional music). You can watch Wayang at Sasono Hinggil or Sonobudoyo museum while you are visiting Yogyakarta.

The entry ticket is very cheap, only Rp20,000 for 2 hours show.

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