a couple of the basic stories. A professor in the program, I Nyoman Sedana (1993, 24) notes that for a dalang to really be successful, he must seek additional training outside formal education in high school or university.
My own experience and relationship with my teacher can be understood as a combination of formal education in the university and working with a dalang as a kind of anak murid. My study of wayang kulit began at the University of Hawai‘i and continued at Ohio University, but like the aspiring dalang in Bali, this was not enough. I needed what folklorist Barry McDonald (1997, 64) describes as a “personal relationship” where “emotion, commitment, and deep communication are all crucial entities” in order to understand the tradition of wayang kulit as social action and artistic practice.
I found my “personal relationship” through a chance meeting. My partner, Tina,6 and I had been in Bali only a week, and we arrived in Ubud just in time for a large royal cremation (the largest ever, many papers proclaimed). The sarcophagi were so big that the villagers had not been able to burn them right away, so we returned to the graveyard a couple of days later to see the fires before they completely died out. Intrigued to know more about the cremation, we began chatting with a local Balinese man named Jaga, who was sitting there watching the activity around him. Jaga told us that they had started the fires late at night on the day of the procession and that the cremation towers were still smoldering. He asked what we were doing in Bali, and I explained that I came here to study culture and the arts, kesenian dan budayaan. When Tina mentioned that I hoped to find someone with whom to study wayang kulit, Jaga said he knew a dalang who would be an excellent teacher. Jaga offered to introduce us to him; I decided it was worth investigating and we agreed to meet.
The next morning Jaga met us at our hotel and drove us to Pengosekan, an area in the southern part of Ubud that is known for its strong community of artists. Jaga pulled the car to the side of the road and we walked through the narrow gate that is the typical entrance into a Balinese home. Traditional homes in Bali consist of several small buildings situated around a garden. We passed a statue of Ganesha, the god of wisdom and learning, to be welcomed by a spry-looking man sitting within the central bale, or pavilion. The man, I Wayan Tunjung—or Pak Tunjung, as I would come to call him—welcomed us and asked us to join him sitting on the mat. We drank sweet tea and talked about my desire to study wayang kulit. Pak Tunjung seemed pleased to meet me and eager to take me on as a student; he promised that he would teach me “systematically” and said that I could also learn to carve puppets. We agreed to begin classes the following week and we would meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. When I asked about payment he said that he worked for the love of his art and culture—he did not have a set price. We would figure it out.
I was not the first and certainly will not be the last foreigner to study arts in Bali through a close personal relationship with one or more teachers. Foreigners have a long history of working with Balinese artists—allowing for what Stephen Snow terms “deep learning,” that is, “learning that takes place on all levels: in the mind, heart, and body” (1986, 204). Snow examines the work of Islene Pinder, who studied dance; John Emigh, who studied topeng; and Julie Taymor, who collaborated with several Balinese performers, as examples of three artists who spent extended time in Bali learning and performing to bring those influences into their artistic practice. The benefits, echoing Dwight Conquergood’s (1985, 9–11) notion of “dialogical performance,” allow the artist to successfully negotiate cultural and aesthetic differences to bring a performance genre from one context to another. The idea of “deep learning” could also be applied to Ron Jenkins, Colin McPhee, Carmencita Palermo, Margaret Coldiron, and others who have dedicated a portion of their life and work immersed in Balinese performance. Larry Reed studied Balinese wayang kulit, first with I Nyoman Sumandhi in California and then in Bali with Sumandhi’s father, Pak Rajeg, in Tunjuk. Reed built on that experience to create innovative productions mixing shadow puppets and live actors with his theater company, ShadowLight. Reed’s work attempts not only to transmit Balinese theater forms to an international audience but also to “make it his own” (Diamond 2001, 260). Several scholars who study, perform, and write about other types of puppetry in Indonesia deserve mention. Matthew Isaac Cohen performs Javanese wayang kulit and Kathy Foley performs Sundanese wayang golek; both are masters of the form who draw from their performance experience to enhance their scholarship. The study of wayang “has been possible for foreigners, even actively encouraged, since the 1960’s” (Cohen 2014, 190). Many Balinese also have come to the United States and other countries abroad to work, teach, and learn. Pak Tunjung’s own teacher, I Wayan Wija, has toured the world and embarked on several collaborations with international artists.7 My own experience must be understood as part of a larger international exchange and flux of ideas regarding Balinese performance and wayang around the world.8
For the rest of the summer and then the following year, those Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays became the foundation of my slow initiation into wayang kulit. I have returned to Bali many times to continue learning and to add to my repertoire of stories and knowledge. Often during our lessons or at performances, Pak Tunjung would implore me to remember to honor the tradition of wayang kulit—to perform it “the Balinese” way. He would come up with ideas for my performances; for example, he proposed that instead of the traditional oil lamp, I should get a hat and put different colored lights on it, because I could then light my screen with blue, red, white, or yellow light depending on the mood of the scene. I also went with Pak Tunjung to watch him perform at a variety of ceremonies and events, where many of the Balinese I met would comment that they liked his performances because he was a very “traditional” performer. Sometimes I would watch Pak Tunjung perform wayang tantri, a new form of wayang made famous by one of Pak Tunjung’s teachers, the aforementioned Pak Wija from Sukuwati, which features dynamic animal puppets that were designed specifically for this performance.9 Pak Tunjung often told me stories from the Mahabharata10 and reminded me that it was important for a dalang to know these tales and be able to tell them well. He also described new performances he was creating using other stories or myths from the history of Bali. These discussions and examples demonstrated how “tradition” functions as an affect, or a “process of continual creation of meaning” (Guattari 1996, 159), rather than a stable category. The tradition of wayang changes over time and varies within the present.
As I continued learning wayang kulit, I kept wondering about what it meant to study a “traditional” performance genre. How is tradition constituted through the actions of different individuals? What did it mean for me, an American and a woman, to study this tradition? How might I fit within and outside Balinese social structures? Over time I became a dalang and Pak Tunjung became a kind of older brother to me; through examining this process I better understand how wayang kulit is connected to society and my own place within the tradition.
Tradition, Practice, and Society
I understand wayang as a practice of training and performance that connects to larger Balinese social spheres. The word practice suggests several different meanings, and I purposefully use the term in this multidimensional way. One meaning refers to the practice that it takes to learn a skill, such as learning to play tennis or speak a foreign language. In theater, the definition of “rehearsal” is to practice in order to learn a play. Sociologists have extended the meaning of practice to include the activities we do in everyday life, or our “ways of operating,” which “constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by technics of sociocultural production” (Certeau 1984, xiv). Practice, therefore, implies repetition connected to and affected by social hegemonies that are enacted through the body. Diana Taylor names this connection between learned bodily knowledge and society the “repertoire,” which unlike written or documented knowledge, “enacts embodied memory: performance gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” The key is in the doing, because “the repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission” (2003, 20). McDonald focuses the study
