Wayang kulit
I’ve been doing research on wayang kulit (literally, ‘theatre skin’ – a reference to leather, the traditional puppet material), as I’m making a series of loosely-inspired shadow puppets for Cicada Tree’s MAD About Bats lessons.
One thing about wayang kulit that strikes me is how the appearance of the puppet characters often conveys information on whether they are ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
According to the Art-Pacific.com website:
‘The puppet characters range between alus (extremely refined) and kasar (rough and crude). Refined, virtuous characters have small bodies, slitted oval eyes with pupils like rice grains, pointed noses and a modest downward gaze to delicate feet. More vigorous characters look up.
Middle size characters may be strong like good kings or princely warriors. ‘
Sometimes this codified visual system is cleverly subverted, for instance in the case of the prince Karno. Though an antagonist, he possesses many of the puppet features typical of princes.
What’s really interesting are the parallels between the Indonesian/Malaysian wayang kulit and its unrelated Straits Chinese friend, wayang opera. Both are extremely stylised forms of theatre, and both utilise a live orchestra for music. Another similarity lies in how character appearance conveys role: in wayang opera, red-faced characters are valiant and white-faced evil, green-robed characters are good, and so on – a form of semiotics than, on afterthought, applies to the allegorical folktales and stories of perhaps all cultures.
Filed under: All, Singapore | 2 Comments
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since bahasa is an ‘object-adjective’ language (as far as i know, anyway) shouldn’t the literal translation really be “skin theatre”?
but that aside, this is a fascinating blog. *_*
That’s true, thanks for pointing that out! ‘Skin theatre’ is a better translation meaning-wise, but I wanted to put the words in the same order, so it was clear that wayang = theatre and kulit = skin (dried skin/leather, in this case).