drinking tea during the performance; sometimes children would even run up and touch the screen or play with the puppets; women would stop in their tracks and take a moment to watch before rushing to the kitchen or family temple. It is never quiet during a wayang kulit performance.
Figure 1.2. Backstage during a wayang kulit performance. Photo by author.
Some parts of the performance attract the attention of a larger crowd of people. Sangut and Delem, two of the main clown puppet characters, or penasar, performed a scene full of jokes and slapstick that was one of the highlights of the performance. During the scene Delem described a recent experience he had going to the hospital and all the troubles he had there. The dalang used the comedy of the penasar to critique the troubled Indonesian medical system for being both expensive and inefficient. The audience’s chatter erupted into laughter and cheers in response to the joking of the clowns. At one point everyone burst into applause at a clever remark made by Delem. The final scene of a performance is typically a fight scene with loud music and a great deal of action and can last up to an hour. Sometimes the puppets battle hand to hand and throw each other across the screen, and other times the puppets use arrows or other large weapons. As wayang kulit struggles to please a contemporary audience familiar with faster-paced movies and television, the comic and fighting scenes often dominate the performance over conventional themes of religion and moral philosophy.
After almost three hours of performance, the kayonan, or tree of life puppet, was returned to the center of the screen and the musicians played one last melody as Pak Tunjung and his assistants returned the puppets to the box. There was no applause, the audience just wandered away as soon as the penasar characters returned to make some final comments about the lessons that could be learned from the story told that night. Offerings were brought so that the dalang could bless the screen, the puppets, and the musical instruments by sprinkling holy water. Ritual significance permeates the performance and gives the dalang much of his power. At the end of the short ceremony, Pak Tunjung pulled out the center pin rooting the screen to the banana log to signify the end of the performance, and then he went off to the side to sit and talk with the sponsors of the performance. The musicians and the assistants folded the screen, gathered the sound equipment, and loaded everything into the van.
The work of the dalang is not over when the theatrical portion concludes. The sponsors thanked Pak Tunjung for the performance and gave him a small basket that contained several brightly colored flowers, rice, and money. Pak Tunjung counted the money, put it in his pocket, and tucked a yellow flower from the basket behind his ear. He often gave a small portion of the money back to the sponsor. This type of reciprocal exchange can be understood to reposition power from the sponsor to the dalang. Following a few more minutes of conversation, Pak Tunjung begged, “Permisi, mau pulang. Tamu saya capai” (Excuse us, we need to go home. The guest I brought is tired). Just as I benefited from traveling with Pak Tunjung, he often called attention to my presence to mark his performance as important on a global scale. We then stood, found our shoes, and returned to the van. Upon returning to Pak Tunjung’s house, the assistants unloaded everything from the vehicle. I tried to help but they laughed at my efforts to carry the heavy equipment; it is not a job for a woman. As the final load was carried through the gate, I got on my motorbike to leave. Pak Tunjung reminded me, as he always did, to drive slowly and safely. Before going to bed, Pak Tunjung gave the puppets additional offerings and prayed to thank the gods for the successful performance.
Through my friendship with Pak Tunjung I was offered a privileged window into the world of Balinese culture; attending performances such as this one allowed me to witness firsthand the different components that constituted the tradition of wayang kulit, an opportunity complemented by my own practice of the art form. The many elements of the event—the people in the audience, the rituals that surround it, and the content of the story—all come together in a complicated tangle of tradition and modernity, gender, and performance.
The term tradition suggests an object or practice that has come, unchanged, from some mythical past into the present. Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, is often considered one of the oldest and most important traditions in Bali because it connects a mythic past to the present through public ritual performance. Flat, two-dimensional puppets, made out of carved leather, are manipulated against a screen by a single puppeteer to tell stories from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, or other Balinese myths and histories. These entertaining performances are generally given as an integral part of a ceremony or ritual. The dalang, or puppeteer, is the central figure in this performance genre and is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and spiritual leader.
Until recently, the dalang was always male, but now women in Bali are studying and performing as dalang. This innovation comes not without controversy because many people in Balinese society question women’s ability to undertake the difficult physical and spiritual tasks of performing wayang kulit, as well as the appropriateness of a woman performing it. Women are rarely present in the audience or represented on the screen, thus making my interest in women dalang an anomaly among most considerations of wayang kulit. Women’s roles in Balinese society have traditionally been in the sphere of the home, or in the shadows, and the opportunity presented within the shadows of wayang kulit offers an occasion to analyze how traditional performance creates and maintains systems of power in Balinese society.
Tradition is regulated by time and place; local, national, and international forces all contribute to the meaning and practice of traditions. Bali is a small island, located just east of Java and slightly south of the equator. Bali is part of Indonesia, which is made up of over seventeen thousand islands with over three hundred distinct ethnic groups and as many languages. Bali is less than one-third of 1 percent of Indonesia’s land area of nearly 700,000 square miles (1.8 million km2), yet it is Indonesia’s most popular destination. It has a tropical climate with a lush volcanic landscape in the south, dotted by terraced rice fields, and in parts of the west and east it is dry desert. Bali is one of Indonesia’s most populous areas, with a population of over three million people, compared to the population of Indonesia, as of 2016, at almost 260 million. Tourism is the major source of economic revenue on the island, but historically people on Bali made their money through rice and trade (Pringle 2004, 1–5). Bali is the most visited and often the most recognizable part of Indonesia to foreigners.
Society in Bali is anything but homogeneous, as my use of the terms Balinese society or the Balinese may imply. Instead, when I use these terms, I am referring primarily to those who identify as Hindu, are ethnically Balinese, and live in the southern part of the island, where my research was conducted. I use the terms in order to both preserve clarity and put my work into conversation with other scholars writing about “the Balinese”; even so, I want to foreground this term as a conscious discursive construct rather than to erase the diversity of the people living on the island of Bali (Barth 1993, 9–15).
Scholars who write about women’s performance in Bali often posit that women performers challenge Balinese tradition by taking nontraditional roles without accounting for how “tradition”7 functions as a complex principle within Balinese arts and society. Catherine Diamond’s work resonates with that of other women scholars (Bakan 1998; Susilo 2003; Palermo 2009; Downing 2010) by pointing to gamelan wanita, or women’s gamelan, as one of several performance genres giving evidence of women’s expanding gender roles in Bali. Middle-aged women especially find a “sense of accomplishment distinct from their other duties that are usually both never ending and taken for granted. Performance provides an opportunity to dress up, be involved, and sparkle artistically. It has raised their self-esteem, giving them an individual public identity other than being someone’s wife or mother” (Diamond 2008, 235). Diamond, like the others, acknowledges limitations—in the end, art forms created and populated by mostly male performers perhaps can offer only partial opportunities for women to find their voice, and that until women create their own forms and characters they will experience only minimal representation (264). Cok Sawitri,
