The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance by Bell John. Orenstein Claudia. Posner Dassia N

Author:Bell, John.,Orenstein, Claudia.,Posner, Dassia N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317911715
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Section IV

Negotiating Tradition

17

Traditional and Post-Traditional Wayang Kulit in Java Today

Matthew Isaac Cohen

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 tōgalugōmbeaṭṭa (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).

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