Page 4 | Wayang puppets

Stylisation

Contents

Wayang puppets - a spotter's guide (1)

Making the puppets (2)

The main character types (3)

Stylisation (4)

The elements of puppet design (5)

Colours (6)

A final word (7)

Seleh Notes Volume 4 Number 4

© Tim Byard-Jones

A typical gagah puppet

 

Like ancient Egyptian paintings, wayang figures appear at first to be in an impossible position, the eye is seen from the front, the face in profile, arms and legs from the side but the torso from the front. Try it some time!

When looking at a puppet start by getting rid of the idea that this is supposed to be a picture of a real person – the very exaggerated stylisation should help.

The puppet is better thought of as being a sequence of pieces of graphic code, in which each element of the body is seen in its most characteristic form or appearance, in order to present the maximum number of bits of information about the character represented.

On the subject of stylisation, it is interesting to note that in Bali (which has preserved a lot of pre-Islamic Javanese cultural elements) the puppets are a great deal less stylised than in Java today.

Javanese tradition attributes this to Kyai Sunan Kalijaga, one of the nine Islamic saints who brought Islam to Java. Realising that he would never wean the Javanese off wayang, but finding it difficult to reconcile with the Moslem prohibition on representative art, he introduced the extreme stylisation as a way of getting round the problem, and even used wayang as a vehicle for Moslem preaching.

A typical gusen puppet

 

Go to next page