Abstract
What follows is a discussion of how the performance and practice of the art form known as wayang has been engaged in the ongoing process of culture-making in Indonesia. My experience at the Ramayana Ballet reflects wayang’s shifting identity and the changing shape of its cultural footprint in Indonesian society. I base this claim on my Indonesian-language interviews with a mixture of Yogyakarta residents and Balinese, as well as an exploration of wayang’s engagement with media, its drift away from the “liveness” that characterizes performance, and the process of secularization that has flavored, and sometimes outright replaced, wayang’s rituals with spectacles. Tempting as it may be to cast wayang’s interactions with contemporary Indonesian society as a conflict between traditional forms and modern sensibilities, I want to affirm Homi Bhabha’s claim that interactions between elements of contrasting times and cultural templates should not be painted with so broad a brush. I see wayang in Bhabha’s assertion that “the borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definition of tradition and modernity.”[1] I hope to present wayang as something outside these kinds of dichotomies. Instead of framing it as a fixture of a decayed, colonially-afflicted cultural identity, I want to emphasize wayang’s potential for flexibility, adaptation, and hybridity. From this perspective, wayang becomes something more than an Indonesian cultural artifact. It is a case study in the ability of performing arts to connect spirituality to technology, and a testament to the complex relationship between art and entertainment.
[1] Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture, (London and New York: Routledge), 3.