Structures
The structure of a typical wayang kulit performance can often be broken into three parts, or three acts.15 The opening scenes include an invocation to the gods, inviting them to watch and participate in the performance. Next, the main characters enter to introduce the story, which the clowns, or penasar, Twalen and Merdah will translate and comment upon. There might be an additional traveling scene (angkat-angkatan) or love scene (rebong) before the next major act division, which will introduce the antagonist characters. The penasar Delem and his thin brother, Sangut, dominate this scene with their often raucous jokes and antics. The third act provides an arena for the two sides to meet and do battle; it is the climax of the performance. The performance ends with the penasar expressing their gratitude for the patience of the audience and offering the moral or lesson of the story. The dalang then closes the performance with a final ritual dedication, and sometimes he conducts the ceremony to make holy water.16
Arjuna Tapa (Arjuna’s meditation) is a popular story for young dalang to use to learn the practice of wayang kulit, and it is the first story that I learned to perform. In this story Arjuna sets out for the top of the mountain Indra Kila Giri because he is troubled by the war between his brothers, the Pandawas, and their cousins, the Korawas.17 Arjuna worries many people will die because of this war between his family members. At the top of the mountain Arjuna seeks wisdom through offerings to the gods and meditation, so that he might imagine a solution to this problem. Arjuna’s journey up the mountain is not easy; he faces many dangers because he is traveling where few others have gone before. Additionally, his desire for wisdom has made the ogre king, Niwatakwaca, angry. Arjuna does not find peace, and must battle for his life on the mountain, yet eventually the god Indra helps Arjuna by giving him a powerful weapon to destroy his enemies. At the end of the story, Arjuna is whisked away to the heavens, where he will find wisdom and more adventures.
I will use the three-part structure of wayang kulit as a description of my learning experience and as an analytic tool. The first section will focus on the basic aesthetics that are expressed and maintained in a wayang kulit performance. The second section will explore the character of the clowns and how comedy functions as a vehicle for “freedom” and social commentary, even within the set aesthetics and structure. Finally, I will describe the reception of my work, which sometimes caused conflict, in order to connect the practice of learning wayang kulit to practices within Balinese society and ritual. A wayang kulit performance contains action, narration, and commentary; likewise each section contains all these elements.
Part One—Aesthetics
A wayang kulit performance always begins with the kayonan, a large leaf-shaped puppet with intricate carving, in the middle of the screen (fig. 2.3). This puppet, often called “the tree of life” in English, is a symbol of “creative and imaginative forces” (Zurbuchen 1987, 32); it marks the beginning and ending of the performance, it indicates shifts between the three main parts, and it can be used as a transformative prop such as wind, fire, or a chariot. Mary Sabina Zurbuchen explains that the imagery and use of the kayonan in performance “links the dalang to other Balinese ritual specialists who also have access to the ‘unmanifest’ world” (134). The kayonan presents the narration of the play, blurring the distinction between the dalang’s voice and mythic voices of the ancestors represented within the ornate puppet.
At my first lesson, even without a screen, Pak Tunjung taught me how to hold the kayonan between my thumb and fingers so that I could control the movement with my entire hand. Next I learned the first of two kayonan “dances” that begin the performance. I began by holding the kayonan close to my face, and in those moments my breath slowed. As I listened to the music being played by the gender wayang (Gending Pamungkah), my awareness of my surroundings dissipated—I created a connection with the puppet and was thus prepared to perform. Using the cepala, a small wooden hammer held in the hand or toes, which I clutched in my left hand, I knocked slowly on the puppet box and then knocked faster and faster. Pak Tunjung taught me that the knocking begins in time with the music and then as it gathers energy it surpasses the music’s tempo, until it suddenly stops with one forceful final tak. I remembered this lesson as I took a breath and began the knocking sequence, which indicated to the musicians to make the shift in music that would break the kayonan from its position of peaceful contemplation in front of my face and begin an agitated dance against the center of the screen. The gender wayang played two sequences of three beats as I touched the kayonan to the screen, the top of the puppet peeked up from the banana log, and then music and puppet united as I dragged the puppet over to the lower right side of the screen for two small, counterclockwise circles. At the top point of each circle, I paused to take a quick breath with the music before the next circle. Next, the puppet slid over to the left and repeated the same circling motion, but clockwise. After I performed this movement again, once on the right and once on the left, I lifted the kayonan away from the screen. To the audience, the movement looks as though a great gust of wind came up under the kayonan and knocked it from its place. I then swept the kayonan against the screen in large figure eights. I learned to do these figure eights even before I began practicing with the screen, because Pak Tunjung wanted to teach my body and make my muscles strong in order to gracefully execute the correct movements.
Figure 2.3. The kayonan puppet begins the performance at the center of the screen. Photo by Tina (Cox) Goodlander.
This opening dance of the kayonan demonstrates aesthetic rules that connect the performance to Balinese society and religion. Anthropologists Bruce Kapferer and Angela Hobart suggest that the consideration of aesthetics provides a means to unite art with life:
The aesthetic and its compositional forms are what human beings are already centered within as human beings. This is to say that human beings are beings whose lived realities are already their symbolic constructions or creations within, and through which, they are oriented to their realities and come to act within them. To concentrate on the aesthetic is to focus on the dynamic forces and other processes engaged in human cultural and historical existence as quintessentially symbolic processes of continual composition and recomposition. If the aesthetic is to be equated with art, then art is life, an attention to its aesthetic processes being a concern with its compositional forms and forces in which life is shaped and comes to discover its direction and meaning. (2005, 5)
The kayonan dance thus acts as an aesthetic symbol and the practice of its use in performance demonstrates how wayang kulit makes meaning within Balinese culture.18
Missing from Kapferer and Hobart’s use of aesthetics as an interpretive tool is the judgment that a theory of aesthetics implies; there are “good”—or within the culture, desirable—aesthetics or “bad,” or undesirable, aesthetics. Bourdieu articulates how aesthetic judgment is connected to social hierarchy through his theory of taste. Bourdieu refers specifically to distinctions and comprehension of Western art, and thus not all his work is relevant; the idea, however, that understanding the art form and finding it pleasing and therefore worthwhile according to a set of established and learned rules reveals much about how wayang kulit is judged as pleasing or not pleasing and thus given a kind of tangible value within the society. If the viewer does not possess the “cultural competence” in order to understand the performance, he or she “feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason” (1984, 2). While in Bali, many of the foreigners I encountered expressed similar frustration with Balinese performance