Wayang Kulit: Indonesia's Sacred Theater of Shadows
In the darkness before the performance begins, a white cotton screen ( kelir ) is stretched between two banana-tree trunks and a single oil lamp ( blencong ) is lit behind it. The dalang — the puppet master, narrator, conductor, and priest — takes his place between the lamp and the screen, and for the next eight hours (a full performance lasts from sunset to sunrise), he will voice every character, direct every movement, cue the gamelan orchestra with foot taps and hand signals, and guide his audience through a complete episode from the Ramayana or Mahabharata — the great Sanskrit epics that arrived in Java with Hinduism in the first centuries CE and were never entirely replaced even by the arrival of Islam in the 15th century. The puppets ( wayang ) are made of carefully treated water-buffalo hide, hand-cut with extraordinary delicacy, painted in traditional colors — white for the noble and refined, red for the passionate and aggressive, black for the wise — and mounted on central ...