Rastika, RIP

I have just been informed by a friend from the town of Gegesik that the great pelukis kaca (painter on glass) Rastika from Desa Gegesik Kidul (Cirebon, West Java, Indonesia; pictured above in a photo taken in front of his sanggar in 1993) passed away this weekend.

Rastika is considered to be one of the key figures in the revival of the craft of lukisan kaca (reverse painting on glass) in Indonesia in the 1970s and 1980s. His colourful and lively work was grounded in a deep knowledge of the wayang kulit tradition, the product of a long apprenticeship with the Gegesik puppeteer Ki Maruna.

One of the breakthroughs he is associated with is the transformation of lukisan kaca from an art form for mystical symbolism and the depiction of individual wayang figures (wayang ijen) to the representation of scenes from wayang kulit, above all the Bharatayudha (or Prang Jaya as it is known in the Gegesik wayang tradition). For this he drew upon the bramakawi illustrated manuscript tradition, of which Ki Maruna was probably the last living master. Rastika also applied his technical mastery of the medium to the depiction of everyday life, including a series of paintings commissioned by Kompas.

Rastika was a regular participant in national festivals and exhibitions and his work was highly sought after by collectors. With the rise of lukisan kaca prices in the late 1980s he was able to support other artists around him in Gegesik,particularly in the field of wayang, gamelan and topeng.

He will be missed by many.

Wayang at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia

I am in Lisbon, Portugal now for the EUROSEAS conference, delivering a paper on the beginnings of kethoprak and randai in late colonial Indonesia, and took time yesterday to visit the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, which has a collection of 700+ wayang puppets from Java and Bali.

The museum, which was established in 1965, includes both folk artefacts (mostly farming implements) from rural Portugal collected during the 20th century and objects from former colonies (Indonesia and Brazeil) plus Africa. A permanent display opened in 2012, and includes a large number of puppets from Bali, along with some beautifully displayed puppets and masks from Africa. It is planned that displays in the permanent exhibit will be rotated and that the Balinese puppets will be replaced by a display of Javanese puppets.

The museum is closed on Mondays but I got a personal tour of the museum by Ana Margarida Penedo, who  in 2012 finished an MA on the museum's collection of Javanese wayang in the department of anthropology of one of Lisbon's universities, and works also as a museum guide.

The bulk of the wayang collection was acquired by Victor Bandeira, a Portuguese art dealer who collected objects for the museum in Indonesia between 1970 and 1972, basing himself mostly in Bali. He purchased a number of sets of puppets during this time, and then worked with a Jakarta-based puppeteer to identify the characters. Unfortunately he did not include the names of the original owners nor did he work with local experts in Java and Bali to identify the puppets. So there are many errors in identification. (For example a kemangmang puppet from Cirebon is identified as Banaspati.)

One group of puppets (possibly a full set) is a wayang kulit purwa set in the Surakarta style. Most of the puppets are in excellent shape, and some have prada paint and Javanese inscriptions on them which indicate they date back to the 18th century. There are a large number of Balinese figures from two villages in southern Bali, some of which are now on permanent display.

I had a closer inspection of the figures from Cirebon. There are three sets of puppets from Cirebon in the museum. One is a large set of wayang kulit purwa figures purchased in Cirebon. This is missing a number of key figures (there is no kayon for example) but is in generally good shape. Some of the figures appear to be quite old, others much more recent. One of the most interesting puppets for me was a Kumbakarna puppet in which he is enveloped from head to feet by monkeys. This puppet can only be used in one scene of one lakon (Kumbakarna Gugur), something quite unusual in my experience. A number of the puppets bear the stamps of makers and owners, and might allow this set to be identified.

There is also a smaller set of purwa figures from Cirebon, about 25 in all, collected in Jakarta and of lesser quality.

Finally there is a set of about 70 wayang golek cepak puppets. The carving of many of these puppets is quite fine, but they have been very roughly painted and poorly costumed. There are a few figures which appear to be diseased -- with garments rent asunder showing spots underneath. I had a play with some of the figures and they are expressive and elegant in their movements, even if some have mismatched arms and are broken internally as well.

I hope to return to the museum at some point for more careful study, and Ana Margarida is planning now a (self-funded) trip to Java and Bali to follow up on her MA research. She has been trying to study Indonesian before she leaves.

Serat Damar Wulan

Serat Damar Wulan (MSS Jav 89) one of the most celebrated Javanese manuscripts, has now been fully digitised by the British Library, and is freely available for view at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=MSS_Jav_89&index=0. It is one of a number of Southeast Asian manuscripts that have been digitised with funding from the Estate of Henry Ginsburg, former curator of Thai at the British Library. Others   are the Serat Selaras (MSS Jav 28), a few Burmese and Vietnamese mansuscripts, and a Malay Qur'an, probably from Kelantan or Patani.

The Damar Wulan manuscript is fully illustrated, with 153 colour illustrations, showing courtly life, pageantry, warfare and the everyday life of Javanese. Some of the images are en profile in the manner of wayang kulit, but there is also much realistic detail.

The manuscript was collected in Cirebon in 1815 by Lt.-Col. Raban, former Resident of Cirebon, but an English language inscription at the manuscript's end reports that it was already 200 years old when collected. This might be a bit exaggerated, but it is well-thumbed and shows many signs of repeated reading.


Serat Damar Wulan is well known to scholars already. Its illustrations were the subject of an article in BKI published in 1953 (available online at http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv/article/view/2735/3496) and a number of its images, including the wonderful illustration of a topeng performance above, were published in 1991 in Annabel Teh Gallop and Bernard Arps, Golden Letters, and subsequently widely reproduced. (One of these images, showing a text being read, was included in Nancy Florida's monograph Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future).

The tale the manuscript tells, the story of Damar Wulan, has been described in the only English language edition of the story to date, a telling for children by Lim Yoe Djin, as 'the most popular legend of Indonesia'. It is a story that has been told and retold in many theatrical forms - wayang krucil, langendriya, kentrung etc. But so far very little work has been done on it by scholars. 

The scanning of the manuscript has been done at a very high level of resolution (90 MB per page!) which allows incredible capacity to zoom in. I am talking now with Annabel Teh Gallop about what to do with the manuscript now that it has been digitised? Should a scholarly edition be produced, with a transliteration of the Javanese original and possibly translation into English and/or Indonesia? Might something more innovative be produced out of it, in the style of a motion comic? 

It is tempting to build a big research project around this manuscript, one of the crown jewels of Javanese visual culture in my estimation. 

New Year's Eve with Sutajaya in Pekandangan

Last night to celebrate the new year I gave my first all-night performance of wayang golek cepak, performing the lakon Sutajaya at the Bale Desa of Pekandangan, Indramayu accompanied by the full gamelan of my teacher Dalang Calim from Pegagan Kidul (Kec. Kepetakan, Kab. Cirebon). I had performed the first part of this same lakon in August 2012, which concerns Pekandangan's most famous hero, and it seems that there were folk in Pekandangan who were not satisfied and wished to see the lakon performed to its completion.

I think I gave a very strong performance all in all - Calim pulled me over after the show and said with a smile that it was ngetop (the top, the best) - but many things did not go to plan. The principal organisers of the show, as in August, were Ade, husband of the topeng dancer Aerly and co-director of Pekandangan's Sanggar Topeng Mimi Rasinah, and the village headman (kuwu), who remains as intent as he was last August of making Pekandangan into a desa parawisata.  Ade, who had did such a fine job organising the performance in the school yard in August with very minimal means, was distracted in December by organising a tour to Bulgaria to perform at a Christmas fair. When that gig fell through due to Garuda dropping out as the sponsor for the plane tickets, he became despondent and it seems did not really apply himself fully to organising my own performance. This meant, among other things, a smaller audience than the August performance with fewer VIPs in attendance, provision of a smaller stage than was needed, late arrival of the evening meal and cigarettes for the musicians, no fireworks at midnight, poor coordination with Radio Kidang Kencana (which had offered to broadcast the show live, and in the end pulled out) and perhaps most importantly for the folk in Pekandangan a smaller amount in donations than expected, which meant that Pak Kuwu had to front much of the money for the show out of his own personal funds. There had been plans to bareng my show with a wayang golek cepak performance by a dalang from the eastern half of Kabupaten Cirebon, to give spectators the opportunity of seeing two versions of the same lakon. But this proved impossible due to lack of funds. I do not blame Ade for the lack of coordination - he  really is an excellent and enthusiastic arts manager with huge reserves of energy, and I would have done a worse job if I were in his shoes.

There were many memorable moments in this show for me. I enjoyed going once more to visit the principal tapakan of Sutajaya, the kandang associated with Ki Jebug Angrum which is an important shrine, to request the permission and blessings of the ancestors. I was very touched that the 85-year-old dalang Gonda, the most senior dalang wayang kulit in Indramayu, attended the whole show from beginning to end. Gonda has not performed wayang kulit since 1965 but is highly respected among artists in the region for his knowledge, collection of antique manuscripts and puppets and age and authority. I got a chance to talk to him before and after the show- he remains sharp as a nail, and was very pleased by the show I gave, complementing me that  I am fully competent (wis dadi) as a puppeteer. I also enjoyed receiving a souvenir t-shirt from Pekandangan from a rack of t-shirts sold at the bale desa which reads 'SUTAJAYA LEGEND, PEKANDANGAN-INDRAMAYU' with a picture of the village shrine in the middle. For Ade and others in the audience, the most memorable moment was when two village elders got into a big fight about my interpretation of the story. In my telling (as in also the sandiwara version by Candra Kirana, Pusaka Setan Kober) Sutajaya is accused by Sultan Matangaji of stealing the kraton's keris Naga Runting and exiled as a result. As Sutajaya is a local culture hero, the accusation of him being a maling or thief was taken as an affront by one eldery spectator and threats were exchanged with another. This disruption shows how seriously people in Pekandangan took the event.

Aesthetically, there were many moments that were pure joy for me, others where I stumbled a bit and perhaps even a few moments which dragged. Overall though, the show was over in a flash, and though I did not hold back in singing, storytelling and movement, I was not very tired after it was over.

Before the show I was introduced to a group of teenage hanger-oners to the Sanggar Topeng Mimi Rasinah who describe themselves as wamen - short for wanita mendi bae or 'wherever women'. In the opening scenes, I had the clown servant Lamsijan talk to Sutajaya about how he had enjoyed his time in  Pekandangan and a relation he had struck up with one such wamen - this of course got a big laugh from the audience. I was also told by Aerli's mother that boys are locally addressed as nang not cung, and so I had Ki Jebug Angrum call his son nang. The night market was going on during the performance, and so when Suta and Lamsijan go to buy the keris Sekober I was able to make reference to this and have Lamsijan point in the direction where the actual market was going on.

The two trick puppets I used during the first battle (a standard halangan scene in wayang golek) - a drunken buta with a bottle of alcohol in one hand that vomits water and a punk buta named Coker (short for Cowok Keren) who can emit smoke from his mouth and sings the comic song Udud Dulu by Enthus Susmono - went off well. I set this battle in Unjung Krangkeng and had at the end the principal buta named si Lorod takluk to the power of Keris Sekober. This taklukan explains to Suta about the magic power of the keris and later clears the forest (notor alas) for Sutajaya and later helps him in many other endeavours not dramatized in the lakon I performed. I felt it was a good use of this scene- which otherwise would have been very formulaic. A spectator afterwards commented however that I could have also had the buta turn out to be a jelmaan of Ki Guna Wangsa, a way to trial his resolve. (Guna Wangsa later in the lakon assists Suta in his moments of need.)

A pleasant moment for me was in the dancing of Dipati Anom at his first appearance at the Siti Inggil of Kraton Kasepuhan. It is very hard to dance puppets without a full gamelan accompaniment, and so in my rehearsals with Calim I spent very little time working on dancing. In performance, the dance came fully alive, with many variations and a great sense of play. I had a similar feeling later in the lakon upon the first entrance of Prabu Klana Juru Demung-- who dances in the style of the topeng mask Klana. Calim, who was sitting at my side throughout the performance, preparing and passing puppets to me, beamed with pride at both moments.

I had a major special effect in the Gedong Jinem scene, where two metal keris were connected to batteries and sparked as they fought each other. This was accompanied by a special lighting effect and the spooky sounds associated with sandiwara. Unfortunately the sound and light guy I employed to engineer this effect, and also a special effect involving flowers that grow mysteriously from pots, vanished for most of the rest of the show, meaning I didn't get special effects elsewhere in the lakon.

When Sutajaya is exiled by Sultan Matangaji, accused of stealing the keris, the pathos of the moment was greatly increased by the beautiful singing of the sinden Een. Unfortunately I forgot to sampiraken Suta's arm and have him hunched over to portray his sadness. And the love play between Sutajaya and the three women he marries in the lakon - the princess from Cirebon, the daughter of the sage Ki Ajar Sidik and the  discontent wife of Juru Demung - seemed to be much enjoyed by audience members. Pekandangan is known for its flirtatious women, and I played this element up.

There were other mishaps along the way of course. A buta entered once with his head backwards, to the hilarity of the audience. Lamsijan's head fell off when he lay down during once scene and an audience member had to pick it up and hand it back to me. I made mistakes on occasion with puppet voices and grammar. And I sometimes struggled to control the gamelan - Calim did not fully trust me to conduct the gamelan by myself and was giving covert and overt signals (with a cempala!) though I had tried to tell him subtly that I did not wish him to do this. I was able to give a minor dig at him however, criticising a watering can he had made for the show as looking like a teh poci kettle. Calim responded quickly on stage that he did not make it, it was Dalang Uk who did, and I wove that into my dialogue as well. Such good-natured ribbing is part of the normal banter of wayang.

I finished the show a minute or two after 3am. The village headman had said I could have up to 4am to perform but I had assured him that I would not need all this time. Calim was very clear that I should not go beyond 3am as this would be a violation of professional etiquette. I would perhaps have run the show til 3.15 am but the musicians were very clear to me, through numerous signs, that I needed to stop. This meant an ending that was perhaps less satisfactory than usual for me. I normally end shows with requests for forgiveness if any mistakes were made, general proclamations about the nature of wayang, moral messages, blessings to the audience, sometimes a joke or two etc. All this had to be truncated. Calim's most serious criticism of me after the show was that I did not end exactly on time. But I think this was only to be expected in my first all-night attempt in the form.

A film crew from ISIF recorded the show on handicam and also took photographs and have promised a DVD to me and Pekandangan's kuwu. I plan to upload the DVD to youtube if the result is satisfactory as there are no  full-length videos of wayang golek cepak currently available. I hope to continue my practical investigations into wayang golek cepak in months and years ahead. Thanks are due to Pak Kuwu Pekandangan, Ade, Aerly, Calim and all the supportive spectators and performers last night.

Cirebonese History and Culture Seminar at IAIN Syekh Nurjati Cirebon

Today, at the invitation of  Didin Nurul Rosyidin, I offered a seminar on Cirebonese history and culture to the history department of IAIN Syekh Nurjati Cirebon, the state institute for Islamic studies, before a meeting with Didin and his colleagues to discuss possible future research collaborations. The seminar was well attended, mostly by students, but there were as well a few members of the outside research community present, including Dr Bambang, a veterinarian and amateur historian, and Mustaqim, an independent heritage expert. I sweated profusely through the long introduction (with numerous communal prayers), my talk and the intense q&a session that followed, not because I felt under any pressure but because the room was not air conditioned. (We were all generously supplied though with a bottle of Aqua as well as a snack box and at the speaker's table there were imported oranges wrapped individually in plastic.)

My talk, which I titled Seni dan Budaya Cirebon dari Zaman ke Zaman, argued that Cirebon's history involved the invention of tradition through cultural production that became particularly intense starting in the 1960s. Cultural actors had long before inflated the importance of Cirebon under Sunan Gunung Jati, and a minor node in the Indian Ocean trading routes was reconfigured as the puser bumi, or centre of the world. During the last 45 years or so, Cirebon culture has become figured as a discreet object to be taught in schools, invoked at official occasions and monumentalized. 

The questions after probed details of my talk, and also expressed a curiosity about where I came from and what drew me and continues to draw me to Cirebon. Some present were interested in what the government should do for Cirebonese culture. How to reconcile the mysticism of Cirebonese chronicle literature with Western historiography? Where does wayang come from and is it possible to return to an ideal of wayang propagating moral messages that is not contaminated by humour? Lots of other areas are characterised by cultural mixture, so why would Cirebon alone use the trope of mixture for its ancient name (Caruban)? 

The most intense discussion came up around Sunyaragi, a ruin of a water palace on the outskirts of town. I quoted an English historical source that stated this was built as a place of recreation in the early nineteenth century. This was heavily contested by a number of participants, who were convinced that this was a more ancient site for pious meditation and the training of soldiers etc. I was prepared of course for such reactions, and spoke about how the meaning of Sunyaragi had been continually revised and its appearance changed over the decades, quoting the work of Sharon Siddique, a report from the Dinas Purbakala about how the archaeological service transformed the ruins into a Taman Arkeologi theme park, the building of the institution of the panggung terbuka and the change in its atmosphere from a place of quiet to a busy site next to the Jalan Bypass. Not everyone was satisfied though with my answers, and one participant made it clear that I should leave archaeology to the archaeologists....

The Tall Man from Sumedang in Cirebon

Today (25 December) I had my first real 'free' afternoon of my trip here. I had originally planned to go out to  East Cirebon with some friends to meet a dalang pantun and a dalang wayang golek cepak and taste some of the local delicacies (a typical combination of scholarship and culinary tourism for me and my friends here in Cirebon) but my wayang golek cepak teacher was insistent that we hold our practice during the day time rather than at night and I had to cancel the outing, leaving me with time on my hands.

So after my practice wrapped up and the afternoon downpour had dwindled to a drizzle  I wandered over to Pasar Pagi in search of some DVDs. The DVD store, it turned out, had moved to Pasar Balong, but to compensate for this I came across a carnival side show that was playing on the top floor of the Pasar Pagi market. Unfortunately I had no camera with me, so am unable to provide a photo.

But briefly the show was performed by three men (a fourth man, a juggler and acrobat, reportedly was sick and had to return to Bandung). The MC, described in promotions (http://aboutcirebon.com/component/gcalendar/event/6/v863g657erfah6813pgcspefs0) as a humorous MC with a thousand voices, gave an Islamic framing for the 'spectakuler' show, saying how the first man Adam was 35 meters in height in order to stand a chance against the gigantic wild beasts of his time. People have gradually shrunk over time, and now the typical height for Indonesian men is 160cm or so, while Westerners are 10cm taller on average. Sometimes though, a freak of nature is born.

Cue the entrance of 'Jaguar', a Tall Man from the foothills of Gunung Tampomas, billed as being 220cm in height, 'plus or minus'. The MC interviewed Mr Jaguar about his family life, diet, clothes and the like. His father and grandfather were both unusually tall, apparently, as is one of Jaguar's two children. (The MC joked that it was hard for Jaguar to have found a wife, as women must have feared their first night with him.) His black robe with red fringe needed 5 meters of black cloth and 1 meter of red cloth; steel-toed shoes have to be specially ordered; he eats two plates of rice 4 or 5 times a  day as he is now on a diet.

This was followed by some standard magic tricks by a young magician, some of them done in 'kolaborasi' with Jaguar, and some juggling by Jaguar. Jaguar's last trick was to juggle fire and put the fire out in his mouth. The magician also requested audience participation - a young boy blindfolded him and then balloons were placed under the boy's arms and between his legs which were popped with a knife wielded by the blindfolded magician. There were the normal jokes about the chance of losing the family jewels and the like. The child's mother and family laughed hilariously at this prank.

The show took about 30 minutes in all, and the audience who had all been sitting on the floor (we were assured that it has been mopped clean) filed off, many to the adjacent food court for dinner.