Wayang kelir screen skin#

However, the best wayang is typically made from young female buffalo parchment, cured for up to ten years. The wayang is usually made out of water buffalo hide and goat hide and mounted on bamboo sticks. The important characters are usually represented by several puppets each. The wayang comes in sizes from 25 cm to 75 cm. The perforated wayang creates exquisite shadow. Gunungan in Javanese wayang kulit performance, marked the opening and the separations between scenes. The Malaysian version of wayang kulit was derived from the Thai version, with partial Javanese influences. Religious leaders attempted to skirt the Muslim prohibition by converting the wayang golek into wayang purwa made from leather and displayed only the shadow instead of the puppets themselves. King Raden Patah of Demak, Java, wanted to see the wayang in its traditional form, but failed to obtain permission from Muslim religious leaders. When Islam began spreading in Indonesia, the display of God or gods in human form was prohibited, and thus this style of shadow play was suppressed. Wayang kulit was later assimilated into local culture with changes to the appearance of the characters to resemble cultural norms. Sanskrit became the literary and court language of Java and later of Bali. Hinduism arrived in Indonesia from India before the Islamic and Christian era.

Wayang kelir screen skin#

Kulit means ' skin ' or ' leather ', the material from which the figures are carved. In modern daily Javanese and Indonesian vocabulary, wayang can refer to the puppet itself or the whole puppet theatre performance. The term wayang is the Javanese word for ' shadow ' or 'imagination'. On November 7, 2003, UNESCO designated wayang puppet theatre, which is the flat leather shadow puppet ( wayang kulit) and the three-dimensional wooden puppet ( wayang golek or wayang klithik ) theatre from Indonesia as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Wayang kulit is among the best known, offering a unique combination of ritual, lesson and entertainment.

Wayang kulit is one of the many different forms of wayang theatre found in Indonesia the others include wayang beber, wayang klitik, wayang golek, wayang topeng, and wayang wong. The dalang (shadow artist) manipulates carved leather figures between the lamp and the screen to bring the shadows to life. In a wayang kulit performance, the puppet figures are rear-projected on a taut linen screen with a coconut-oil (or electric) light.

Wayang kulit is a traditional form of puppet-shadow play originally found in the cultures of Java, Bali, and Lombok in Indonesia.