Javanese shadow theater
Jul. 11th, 2011 15:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyContinuing the clean-out of the posts folder. I am behind on everything ever, hopefully new content will appear again soon. Gate 7 05 is first priority in that queue, for those still looking out for my translation.
Gatutkaca's Journey. Gamelan Sari Raras feat. Midiyanto and Heri Purwanto. Performed 25 April 2010.
I know very little about wayang kulit (Javanese shadow theater), but I've always found it a fascinating theatrical experience, so I sprang for tickets to this performance at Berkeley as soon as I could. This performance was…interesting. Apparently the dhalang (puppet master) who performed, Midiyanto, has made something of a career out of experimenting with adapting the form so that people for whom it's not native can appreciate it better, which in this case principally involved drastically shortening the performance (2.5 hours, compared with a whole night in the traditional staging) and Midiyanto himself occasionally rendering the dialogue into colloquial contemporary English as well as speaking in the usual language, with the addition of one of the gamelan members providing crucial information in English every so often. We, the audience members, were invited to go up onstage and sit behind the orchestra and the dhalang at our leisure, which was really cool.
The story is an excerpt from the Mahabharata, which I gather is the norm for the shadow theater. I could attempt to summarize, but really, I had only the dimmest idea of what was going on and I didn't mind at all--for me the attraction of the shadow theater lies in the the shadow puppets, which were entrancing. I'd be lying if I said I was paying strict attention for every second, but there was definitely something fundamentally compelling about it, in the interaction between the music and the narration and the puppetry. I could go on about the awesomeness that is gamelan and how it blows my mind that the ensembles are able to do what they do so well, because it's completely antithetical to the way I was trained as a musician, and yet globally it's not actually that uncommon. In sum, really, really cool.
Gatutkaca's Journey. Gamelan Sari Raras feat. Midiyanto and Heri Purwanto. Performed 25 April 2010.
I know very little about wayang kulit (Javanese shadow theater), but I've always found it a fascinating theatrical experience, so I sprang for tickets to this performance at Berkeley as soon as I could. This performance was…interesting. Apparently the dhalang (puppet master) who performed, Midiyanto, has made something of a career out of experimenting with adapting the form so that people for whom it's not native can appreciate it better, which in this case principally involved drastically shortening the performance (2.5 hours, compared with a whole night in the traditional staging) and Midiyanto himself occasionally rendering the dialogue into colloquial contemporary English as well as speaking in the usual language, with the addition of one of the gamelan members providing crucial information in English every so often. We, the audience members, were invited to go up onstage and sit behind the orchestra and the dhalang at our leisure, which was really cool.
The story is an excerpt from the Mahabharata, which I gather is the norm for the shadow theater. I could attempt to summarize, but really, I had only the dimmest idea of what was going on and I didn't mind at all--for me the attraction of the shadow theater lies in the the shadow puppets, which were entrancing. I'd be lying if I said I was paying strict attention for every second, but there was definitely something fundamentally compelling about it, in the interaction between the music and the narration and the puppetry. I could go on about the awesomeness that is gamelan and how it blows my mind that the ensembles are able to do what they do so well, because it's completely antithetical to the way I was trained as a musician, and yet globally it's not actually that uncommon. In sum, really, really cool.