Shadow puppets take stage

By Mitchell Feldman
Special to The Denver Post

April 16 - Indonesia's monetary crisis has kept this Asian archipelago in the news lately, but on Friday night in Denver the focus will shift to that nation's performing arts heritage as Gamelan Tunas Mekar presents the Colorado premiere of an authentic wayang kulit performance featuring traditional Indonesian shadow puppets.

Based on stories from the Ramayana and Mahabarata epics, ancient Hindu tales of love, intrigue and adventure, wayang kulit dramas are a mixture of ritual and entertainment that have been popular in Indonesia for centuries.

The plays are directed by a dalang, a master puppeteer who manipulates intricately carved leather puppets between a lamp and a linen screen to create shadows that bring the characters to life. Gamelan Tunas Mekar is a 20-member community orchestra formed in 1988 to promote Balinese culture in the Rocky Mountain region.

Tunas Mekar's performance will showcase the Balinese style of the art form in an episode of the Ramayana called "The Death of Kumbhakarna.'' The evening will begin with an instrumental prelude by the gamelan orchestra followed by a brief performance of "Jauk,'' a Balinese mask dance.

I Nyoman Sumandhi, a leading Balinese dalang and director since 1987 of the summer program that Boulder's Naropa Institute conducts in Bali, began rehearsing with Gamelan Tunas Mekar after arriving from Indonesia recently. The headmaster of SMKI, the high school for the performing arts in Bali's capital Denpasar, Sumandhi is a third-generation dalang who has taught shadow puppetry at UCLA, the University of California-Santa Cruz, California Institute of the Arts and Wesleyan University. He also is a godfather of the American wayang kulit movement, which began in the 1970s.

"The Death of Kumbhakarna' is one of the most important chapters in the Ramayana,'' Sumandhi said. "Sita, the wife of King Rama, has been abducted by Rawana, a giant with many heads and limbs, and is being held captive in the city of Alengka on the island of Lanka.

After a long struggle between the forces of good and evil, Rawana is defeated, Sita is saved and she and Rama live happily ever after. But before this happens many subplots occur, including the story of Kumbhakarna, the younger brother of Rawana. He reluctantly becomes Rawana's minister of war and is killed in a battle with an army of animals and demons led by Hanuman, the monkey king.''

Sumandhi will use 30 of the 125 different shadow puppets at a Balinese dalang's disposal to tell Kumbhakarna's story. He has personalized his puppets, whose silhouettes follow outlines that have been handed down for over 800 years, by selecting an assortment of ornamental characteristics and colors to subtly distinguish them from those of other puppeteers. Balinese wayang kulit plays are traditionally presented as part of temple celebrations or other religious events and customarily begin with the lighting of incense at an altar and the saying of prayers to purify the space, sanctify the instruments and bless the musicians and audience. The dalang officiates over the action and, as the gamelan orchestra performs introductory music, Sumandhi will strike his gedog, the wooden box in which he stores his puppets, three times to signal it is time to begin.

"In Balinese culture, dalangs are masters of a world inhabited by our puppets and we are the gods that animate them,'' Sumandhi explained. "Since they rest between each play, I bang on the box to wake them up and then I arrange them on either side of me with the heroes on my right and the villains on my left. You can also tell the different characters apart by their shapes. The slender, elegantly carved puppets represent the good guys while the deformed, grotesquely shaped ones are the bad guys.''

As the tale unfolds, Sumandhi will narrate the story and deliver his characters' dialogue in a number of different voices and languages. "Major figures like Rawana and Kumbhakarna speak an old Javanese dialect called kawi, but for clowns, monkey soldiers and other minor roles we use the local dialect spoken where we are performing, which in Denver will be English.''

The gamelan music accompanying the puppet show will be conducted by the Balinese master drummer and composer I Made Lasmawan, Tunas Mekar's artistic director and a former student of Sumandhi.