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"Shadow puppets Indonesia Java."
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Shadows of empire : colonial discourse and Javanese tales
Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia.
Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re–envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought—and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture.
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Masks and Selves in Contemporary Java: The Dances of Didik Nini Thowok
This essay reflects on the plays of masks and selves in the dances and the life of Didik Nini Thowok, and the resonances between dance and life. An Indonesian of Chinese descent and a female impersonator whose comic dances combine different regional styles, Didik upsets notions of ethnic and gender stereotypes and identities, the notion of identity itself.
Journal Article
Meaning, Style and Change in Gamalan and Wayang Kulit Banjar Since Their Transplantation from Hindu-Buddhist Java to South Kalimantan
This article examines the origins and development of a syncretic Hindu-Buddhist-Animist musical theatre form known as wayang kulit Banjar (Banjarese leather puppet shadow theatre), a complex combination of word, music, drama, stagecraft, movement and mystical ritual. Transplanted with its accompanying gamalan music from Java in the fourteenth century, it survives to this day among the Banjarese people of South and East Kalimantan, a mainly Malay society which adopted Islam from the sixteenth century. While Muslim influence in wayang kulit Banjar is only superficial, the story lines, puppet characters and texts preserve archaic Buddhist-Hindu-Javanese elements. Drawing on the literary sources as well asfieldwork interviews and recordings of performances, the author analyses the cosmological association and meaning of elements of wayang kulit and gamalan musical style. Transcriptions are included of four excerpts from the author s 1993 recording of a Mahäbhärata-plot based shadow play entitled Terfitnah dalam Kejujuran (\"Rumours Destroying Honesty\"), led by senden-dalang Abdullah and accompanied on a gamalan Banjar.
Journal Article
The \Crisis of the Sinden\: Gender, Politics, and Memory in the Performing Arts of West Java, 1959-1964
Weintraub takes a closer look on how sinden, the only female members of the wayang golek troupe, gained such a privileged position in a performance genre dominated by men. He describes some major changes in musical repertoire, style, aesthetics, and technology, leading up to the period 1969-64, often called the \"era of the sinden.\" He contends that the sinden crisis was a struggle over cultural authority, and that these struggles had, and continue to have, important ideological stakes.
Journal Article
Civilization on Loan: The Making of an Upstart Polity: Mataram and its Successors, 1600–1830
This paper focuses on the south-central Javanese state of Mataram and its late seventeenth- and mid-eighteenth-century successors—Kartasura (1680–1746), and Surakarta (founded 1746) and Yogyakarta (founded 1749). It concentrates principally on the administrative, military and cultural trends of the period, looking at the ways in which Mataram and its heirs imported their cultural styles from the defeated east Javanese and pasisir (north-east coast) kingdoms, while developing a Spartan polity dominated by the exigencies of war and military expansion. The disastrous reign of Sultan Agung's successor, Sunan Amangkurat I (r. 1646–77), and the emergence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as a major political force in Java led to the rapid eclipse of Mataram/Kartasura's military influence duringJava's ‘Eighty Years War’ (1675–1755) when the heritage of the great early Mataram rulers was squandered. This period of turmoil ended in the permanent division (paliyan) of south-central Java between the courts of Surakarta (Kasunanan, founded 1746, and Mangkunegaran, founded 1757) and Sultan Mangkubumi's new kingdom of Yogyakarta, which, in terms of its martial traditions, was the principal inheritor of the early Mataram polity. At the same time, the political authority of the courts continued to face challenges from regional power centres, not least the powerful administrators of Yogyakarta's eastern outlying provinces (mancanagara)based in Madiun and Maospati, and the networks of Islamic schools (pesantrèn) and tax-free religious villages (perdikan), which drew their strength both from court patronage and the piety of local communities.
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Mpu Panuluh's puzzling Panakawans: do clown-servants feature in the Old Javanese kakawin Gaṭotkacâsraya?
The earliest account of the well-known love story of Abimanyu and Ksiti Sundari seems to be the Old Javanese \"kakawin Gaṭotkacâsraya\" (ʿGaṭotkaca's help), said to be composed by mpu Panuluh in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. In secondary literature the \"Gaṭotkacâsraya\" owes its fame to the allegedly first appearance of three so-called panakawans, viz. Juru dyah, Punta and Prasanta. The modern concept of panakawans in the wayang (puppet theatre), in which they perform the role of clown-servants, however, has played tricks on most scholars who have hitherto dealt with the \"Gaṭotkacâsraya.\" In this article it is argued that the panakawans in this text are only followers and companions of Abimanyu; Juru dyah is not a personal name but a function, whereas Punta and Prasanta may well be later Balinese additions to the text.
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How a Javanese gentleman put his library in order
B. Arps How a Javanese gentleman put his library in order In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Encompassing knowledgeIndigenous encyclopedias from ninth-century Java to twentieth-century Riau 155 (1999), no: 3, Leiden, 416-469 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl BERNARD ARPS The matters that people choose to discuss, considering the circumstances in which they find themselves, are an important but underexposed constituent of culture. The general lesson is: 'find the right place to ask your questions' (ulah salah geusan nanya). [...]if one wants to know about all manner of stories {sakwehning carita) - a series of fifteen titles is quoted - one should ask the performer (memen), to learn about the contents of holy books (sing sawatek eusi pustaka) one should ask the pandit (sang pandita), for information about chronology (dawuh natika, 'instants and periods') one should approach the expert in traditional knowledge called the bujangga. [...]for songs, games, mythical narratives, ornamental drawing patterns, tools and weaponry, cookery, battle arrays, ways of ritual worship, nautical lore, arithmetic, foreign idioms, and more, each class being furnished with a list of titles or technical terms from that class and the type of expert one should request for information (Saleh et al. 1987:82-6). [...]as they directed the reader to human resources outside the text, the authors linked it to a body of specialist competencies which could presumably be taught in the environment where the text was to be consulted.
Journal Article
Javanese Talèdhèk and Chinese Tayuban
[...]when the Serat Centhini tells about a tayuban party given by the widow Sembada,23 the solo dance of the dancing-women before the partner dancing is [already] called \"to perform gambyong\". [...]of Susuhunan V [1820-23] the term gambyongan was used to refer to the dance of all the female servants (nyai) sitting in lines and dancing together; as they walked in the manner of laku dhodhok [a squatting walk], they were smoothing the lower garment so that it would not open up;24 this was called gambyongan. [...]Babah Kudus feels a bit disappointed that he cannot at that moment also express his yearning for the dancer. [...]Babah Kudus wants to dance once more, while he hands a tombok of one / 10 banknote; he cannot resist being pinched and ogled, being immediately aflame, and then gives a banknote of 50 rupiyah as a personal gift, so that she will not like him less than Babah H, to whom in fact she has already taken a liking. According to Tio Ie Soei, an expert on the history of Javanese Chinese (peranakan) quoted by the author, wayang cokek was already known in Jakarta in the seventeenth century. According to the description in the medieval Tantu Panggelaran, the circumstances necessitating the divine creation of a dancing-woman were that the gods were perplexed by the fury of Lord Shiva (in his aspect of Guru, the Divine Teacher) who, after taking on a demonic appearance, threatened to destroy life on earth.
Journal Article
Music in Nineteenth Century Java: A Precursor to the Twentieth Century
Only recently has it become possible to attempt to reconstruct a history of Javanese music in the nineteenth century. The relevant primary and secondary sources, including Javanese poems and treatises, colonial writings and scattered references in various historical tracts are only now beginning to emerge from cold storage to be published, translated, and made more widely available. This article is a preliminary attempt to draw together from them an overview of Javanese music in the nineteenth century, adopting a musicological, cultural and historical approach which is based partly on my own fieldwork over the past twenty years. An understanding of nineteenth century musical developments is clearly important not only in its own right but also as a means of facilitating our comprehension of the contemporary artistic scene.
Journal Article