Kathy Foley, writing from her own experience learning wayang golek, or rod puppetry, in West Java provides an explanation for the kind of “Balinese” character I could occupy. She writes that learning to perform with the puppets and masks allows performers to “multiply their bodies” through the performance, and that “through the one body we inhabit in this life we can, with the help of these puppets or masks and the ideas they encode, embody the whole cosmos” (1990, 61). The body changes because learning to use puppets begins “by moving away from oneself,” unlike many systems of actor training that begin from the actor’s own personality and life history (65). One of the women dalang I interviewed explained the different skills necessary to perform wayang kulit: “If you are going to perform wayang it is important to practice it all. You need to practice the voice, dancing the puppets, and the foot also. You must become one [menyatu] with the puppets. It is very important. It is important to be able sing and do the voices” (Trijata 2009). Whether in Java or Bali, the performer in puppet theater must learn to physicalize, vocalize, and think a variety of characters that are connected to society through the myths those characters embody and the culture that informs them. Performance provides insight into tradition, as Henry Glassie states: “the performer is positioned at a complete nexus of responsibility” and as such must account for his teachers, the audience, and himself (1995, 402). I inserted myself into the structures of Balinese society by working within the system of the performance tradition. Foley writes, “I feel that my body is still open to the meanings of the practice in itself. Indeed, practice is the only way to get beyond the simple introductions that are found in books and the fragmented, albeit tantalizing information about meanings that come from performers” (1990, 77).12
That I had changed as a result of my experience was noticed by others as well; as this story illustrates: “Om swastiastu!” I called out to my friend Eka as he walked down the path to where I was living in Bali. We met at Ohio University when he was a student there and I was taking my graduate coursework. Now, after living for a few years in Washington, DC, Eka was back in Bali, and after seven months of fieldwork, I was happy to see a familiar face. “Om swastiastu,” he responded with surprise in his voice. “Om swastiastu” is a Balinese rather than Indonesian greeting, typically not known by foreigners. “You speak Balinese?” Eka asked me. “Abidik sajaan,” I answered in Balinese, meaning “only a little.” Eka laughed as he came up the stairs to my balcony. We sat at a little table and sipped hot tea while Eka admired the view of the garden and rice fields that I had from my room. We talked about my research in Bali and I told him I had studied dance and performed at a couple of temple ceremonies. He was especially curious about my experience with wayang. He peppered me with questions: “Do you perform in Kawi? What story are you doing? Are you using an oil lamp? What kind of music? Do you have your own puppets? How often do you go to the temple? You mean you are learning to make the puppets, too?” Eka was truly surprised with all I had been doing. Finally, before he left, he exclaimed with a smile, “My goodness! You are more Balinese than me!”
On the one hand, I knew Eka’s comment was purely out of friendly admiration for all I had been learning and doing over the past year, as there are a lot of foreigners in Bali but very few of them learn Balinese language or spend time doing “Balinese” things. Eka’s words also reflected an awareness that many more Balinese, like himself, are spending less time doing traditional performance and art; the artists I spent my time with do not represent “typical” Balinese. Many people in Bali work in hotels, shops, or for the government and do not make their living as dancers, puppeteers, or musicians. Young people prefer television to topeng and like pop music better than gamelan. Eka’s exclamation, which I received occasionally in some form or another from other Balinese people, reflects a perception, however, that language, culture, and the arts, especially wayang kulit, play a role in the formation of a “Balinese” identity.
Teachers in Bali transmit knowledge and skill of performance to their students through the body. Students stand alongside or behind their teachers to copy movements—teachers will often physically adjust or move their students into the correct pose. The process is not always easy. Emigh describes the difficult nature of his own training in topeng: “daily [my teacher, I Nyoman Kakul] wrench[ed] my resistant body into something approximating the proper shapes for Balinese dance” (1979, 12). I often observed dance teachers with their Balinese students use their hands to adjust a dancer’s hip, head, hand, or leg. If I made a mistake in executing a motion with the puppet, my teacher, Pak Tunjung, would take my hand so he could guide my body and make my movements more precise. Likewise, Pak Tunjung would sometimes sit with his son, Nandhu, on his lap and guide his hand holding the puppet across the screen (fig. 2.2). This is a typical method of teaching in Bali, regardless of age and gender of the students. Jonathan McIntosh describes how a Balinese dancer first learns visually by copying, but then the movements are refined through direct transfer, “the teacher will frequently take hold of a student by wrapping his or her arms around those of the student. . . . Through this process the teacher’s style of dancing and interpretation is kinaesthetically transferred to the student” (2006, 7). One body has power over the other to transfer knowledge of tradition.
Pak Tunjung’s willingness to teach me, body to body, greatly enhanced my ability to learn and to understand the nuanced movement of the puppets. The first time he took my hand, however, he hesitated, and asked, “I will show you, OK?” Age, gender, and ethnicity might have been a factor in his initial hesitation,13 but the question could also be understood as an invitation to fully inhabit the bodily knowledge of the tradition. The student grants the teacher power over his or her body.
Figure 2.2. Pak Tunjung teaches his son, Nandhu, how to perform wayang kulit—the tradition is passed through the body. Photo by author.
Because I learned wayang kulit in my body, the body offers an ideal site for studying the relationship between the past and present as expressed and experienced through tradition. Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes, “The present still holds on to the immediate past without positioning it as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds its immediate predecessor, past time is wholly collected up and grasped in the present” (1962, 80). People constantly put themselves in relation to objects and time, just as these things are positioned relative to them—the body remains the primary point of reference. Tradition, like habitus, relates to the past, but also like habitus this does not mean tradition reproduces exactly from generation to generation. People improvise interactions within their social situations according to a set of rules and expectations,14 much like a dalang improvises each individual performance according to set rules and expectations. Bourdieu (1977, 73, 76–77) argues that practice within the habitus is neither mechanic or predetermined, nor is it completely a matter of free will, rather that actions or strategies of any individual or group are always conceived and executed within the structures that surround them, and that actions are thus limited by the available possibilities. Bourdieu’s explanation of this situation could certainly apply to how tradition functions as well:
This is why generation conflicts oppose not age-classes separated by natural properties, but habitus which have been produced by different modes of generation, that is, by conditions of existence which, in imposing different definitions of the impossible, the possible, and the probable, cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable practices or aspirations which another group finds unthinkable or scandalous, and vice versa. (78)
My own study of wayang kulit provides