Last Saturday, alongside the various forms of entertainment favored by Wesleyan students (i.e. drinking, dancing, staring in rapt attention at their hands/bedroom walls, drinking), there was the somewhat more unusual option of a shadow-puppet show, featuring the Balinese puppeteer I Madi Sadi along with several musicians skilled in the Balinese Gender Wayang. Before I really begin to describe the puppet-show in any detail, I feel that the only honest way to approach this article is by clearly stating that I know nothing about Gamelan (Balinese or otherwise) and even less about shadow puppets. Because of this complete and total lack of knowledge, I could not even pretend to approach the performance with anything resembling a critical perspective.
However, despite walking in without any understanding of the context, the performance was still highly accessible. The set-up consisted of the puppeteer and several musicians hidden behind a large screen, all of which was lit from behind. By sitting low to the ground and holding up the puppets to the light, I Madi Sadi was able to create the illusion of a two (actually, semi-three) dimensional universe while remaining completely hidden from the audience. The puppets themselves (technically, their shadows) were truly beautiful. From the first appearance of the “non-representational” puppet that opened the show (a giant, intricately patterned feather-shape), the audience was faced with a cast of mobile and highly individualized figures, all of whom were both voiced and controlled by the puppeteer.
While I expected comprehension to be a problem, this proved not to be the case. According to the program, in traditional Balinese shadow-puppetry, the higher-class main characters speak in a formal dialect that is not understood by the usually lower-class audiences. To solve this language gap, the shows include lower-class “clown” characters that translate the action for the audience, while providing the humor that leavens the more serious themes of the story. In this case, the clown characters spoke English, frequently breaking the 4th wall to address the audience directly. Armed with this humorous narration, the audience, (a fairly even mixture of students, non-students, and dancing children), was able to follow the story as it unfolded on the screen.
The audience reacted well to this novel form of entertainment. And as I watched their reactions, I realized that, in reality, it wasn’t all that different from the puppet shows that I saw when I was much younger. In a way, it could be considered a lesson in the universality of certain human characteristics. Even though it emerged from an entirely different cultural context than the “Punch and Judy” type shows that most of us are more familiar with, it turns out that almost everyone loves watching puppets hit each other.
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