... as Endo does his best to preserve the art

BANDUNG (JP): One good source of information about wayang cepak is Endo Suanda, a Bandung resident who helped assemble documentation for the Chedi exhibit. For the past two decades, Endo has been dancing back and forth over the line which tends to separate artist and scholar.

"I grew up in the village of Majalengka, about 60 miles from Cirebon," he says. "None of my relatives were artists. But my great-granduncle had a gamelan and a complete set of Cirebon- style shadow puppets that he used to rent out, so I gradually became intrigued with these traditions."

"My first experiences as a performer were as drummer in a puppet show musical group when I was a teenager. Eventually, I studied dance at the Konservatori Tari arts academy here -- the school that's now called Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of Arts). I became especially fascinated with the mask dances from Cirebon and went back to Cirebon to immerse myself more completely in those performances. After I graduated from college, I went to Yogyakarta for an undergraduate program. But then I came to see that the only way to really understand these traditional arts is to experience them at the village level. So I dropped out of the academic program.

"I joined a Cirebon troupe that danced and played music regularly in villages. I followed them everywhere for a while, then formed my own Cirebon-style group that performed in Jakarta, Yogyakarta and elsewhere. Eventually, I hooked up with an experimental theater group in Bali, then went back to school. I applied to Wesleyan University in Connecticut for an ethnomusicology program and won a scholarship. After getting my Masters degree there, I taught at Cornell for a year, then toured Europe with the La Mama theater experimental group from New York and finally came back to Indonesia to take a position teaching ethnomusicology at the Universitas Sumatera Utara in Medan. After three years there, I decided to work toward a doctorate in the field at the University of Washington. I'm finishing up my dissertation now."

Endo says that wayang holds particular fascination for him because it also includes so many other cultural elements -- music and puppetry that may touch on such subjects as religious beliefs, local agricultural practices and politics on both the local and international levels.

"On the one hand, scholars consider wayang in its purest form to be one of the highly refined court arts. But to me, it's definitely a village-based tradition. For example, many of the functions that wayang cepak serves in the Cirebon area have nothing at all to do with court life. In the old days, many dalangs (puppeteers) were hired to perform at ceremonies like marriages and circumcisions. Now, though, the reason for arranging a performance is more likely to serve some broader traditional religious function connected with day-to-day life in a village. For instance, a committee of local people might arrange a show as part of an exorcism."

"Believe it or not, there are 33 different circumstances which call for an exorcism of some sort, to clear the air of evil spirits and influences. If a person is born an only child, that situation eventually needs to be taken care of. If you're born as one in a pair of boys or one in a pair of girls -- or even if you're half of a pair of boy and girl -- or if a child is born in a breech birth or born entangled in the umbilical cord, a sort of exorcism is required, just to be on the safe side. Staging a wayang show is a good way to handle this, to intercede with the spirits who might be hanging around."

"If there's a newborn child in the village, it might well be carried to the stage during a performance for a kind of blessing. The dalang might even be asked to suggest a name for the child. The stage, you see, is viewed as a place holding great power during a performance. But after the puppet troupe leaves at the end of an all-night show, the area is regarded as especially empty, with all spirits having temporarily fled from the scene.

"There are also shows held in conjunction with the beginning of planting or the approach of the rice harvest or serious illness in the village. Shows are often held in local graveyards, too. There are even certain shows performed at road intersections, which are seen as important places spiritually in Cirebon, just as they are in Bali. The problem is that as belief in these things diminishes, there are fewer and fewer jobs for the dalangs who arrange the shows. And for weddings, circumcisions and holidays, people these days often prefer to see other kinds of shows -- dangdut music, for example. In fact, they might even just rent a large-screen video set-up instead because it costs less and the logistics are simpler."

Endo says that there a still a couple of wayang troupes that stay very busy, maybe giving as many as 200 performances a year. There are perhaps five or six dalangs that still play 100 shows annually and maybe another ten who do 40 shows a year. But out of this total, there might be only twenty or thirty full-scale wayang cepak performances every year. Some dalangs -- Mansyur and Basyari from Gesik, Sudin from Selangit and Anom Rusdi and his brother Tomo from Indramayu -- use Cirebon-style shadow puppets.

One of the most popular of the older dalangs carrying on the wayang cepak tradition is Ali Wijaya from Losari. He's now 74 years old and has lost all his teeth -- but he's still very strong and does maybe two shows a month. Kamarudin, also from Losari, gets lots of work too. In Cirebon, the dalangs most in demand are probably Marta, Ahmadi and Warsad. If you really want to understand more about this tradition, you should try to visit Warsad in his own village. His two young sons are now carving puppets, too.

Sad to say, Warsad is about the only carver who's still creating really good wayang cepak puppets on a continuing basis. Other carvers aren't as productive. They have to wait for special orders to come in. In the meantime, they earn their livings by farming or driving becak (pedicab).

-- Paul W. Blair