This comprehensive book explores the Malaysian form of shadow puppet theatre, highlighting its unique nature within the context of Southeast Asian and Asian shadow puppet theatre traditions. Intended for a Western audience not familiar with Asian performance and practices, the text serves as a bridge to this highly imaginative form. An in-depth examination of the Malaysian puppet tradition is provided, as well as performance scripts, designs for puppet characters, instructions for creating a shadow screen, and easy directions for performance. Another section then considers the practical, pedagogical, and ethical issues that arise in the teaching of this art.

The ancient, time-honoured art form known as wayang kulit (literally, 'leather puppet theatre' or 'shadow puppet play') is found in many parts of South-East Asia, including the Malay Peninsula. The present book, an ethnomusicological study focusing on the musical sound and its role in the drama, explores an aspect of wayang kulit hitherto neglected by scholars. Based on interviews and recordings conducted by the author in the villages of Kelantan, as well as on her experience as a student performer in one of the finest and most skilled wayang kulit troupes in Malaysia, the book begins with a useful overview of the various types of wayang kulit in Malaysia. It then goes on to discuss the main theatrical conventions, puppet design, performance structure, musical repertoire, orchestral instruments, and characteristic features of the music of wayang kulit Siam, the most popular type of Malaysian shadow puppet theatre. Written in a pleasing, easily digestible style, this book will be of value to ethnomusicologists, sociologists, students and practitioners of the performing arts, theatre enthusiasts, and general readers interested in the arts and culture of South-East Asia.

Local renderings of the two Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in Malay and Javanese literature have existed since around the ninth and tenth centuries. In the following centuries new versions were created alongside the old ones, and these opened up interesting new directions. They questioned the views of previous versions and laid different accents, in a continuous process of modernization and adaptation, successfully satisfying the curiosity of their audiences for more than a thousand years. Much of this history is still unclear. For a long time, scholarly research made little progress, due to its preoccupation with problems of origin. The present volume, going beyond identifying sources, analyses the socio-literary contexts and ideological foundations of seemingly similar contents and concepts in different periods; it examines the literary functions of borrowing and intertextual referencing, and calls upon the visual arts to illustrate the independent character of the epic tradition in Southeast Asia.

Javanese shadow puppetry is a sophisticated dramatic form, often felt to be at the heart of Javanese culture, drawing on classic texts but with important contemporary resonance in fields like religion and politics. How to make sense of the shadow-play as a form of world-making? In Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind, Bernard Arps explores this question by considering an all-night performance of Dewa Ruci, a key play in the repertoire. Thrilling and profound, Dewa Ruci describes the mighty Bratasena’s quest for the ultimate mystical insight. The book presents Dewa Ruci as rendered by the distinguished master puppeteer Ki Anom Soeroto in Amsterdam in 1987. The book’s unusual design presents the performance texts together with descriptions of the sounds and images that would remain obscure in conventional formats of presentation. Copious annotations probe beneath the surface and provide an understanding of the performance's cultural complexity. These annotations explain the meanings of puppet action, music, and shifts in language; how the puppeteer wove together into the drama the circumstances of the performance in Amsterdam, Islamic and other religious ideas, and references to contemporary Indonesian political ideology. Also revealed is the performance’s historical multilayering and the picture it paints of the Javanese past. Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind not only presents an unrivalled insight into the artistic depth of wayang kulit, it exemplifies a new field of study, the philology of performance.

The Trial of Hang Tuah the Great, a prize-winning play, uses an ancient story of the Malay hero, Hang Tuah, to re-examine of some of the issues connected with identity prevailing in Malaysian society over the past fifty years or so since the independence of Malaya and the establishment of Malaysia. It is an imaginative retelling of the story of Hang Tuah, associated with the Melaka Sultanate of the fifteenth century who, myth and legend maintains, never died, while historians, time and again questioning Hang Tuahs very existence, have recently declared that such a figure never actually existed. The Trial of Hang Tuah the Great takes both these theories into consideration and through them, examines the traditional idea of a hero in the Malay psyche, linking him symbolically to certain individuals, such as Maharaja Lela, and a spectrum of events, mythical, legendary and historical, based on the hypothetical question of who Hang Tuah would have been if he had lived beyond 15th century Melaka right up to our own times and even beyond the present until the year 2020. The plays text is a powerful and stunning confrontation of myth in the manner of Grotowski (Poor Theatre). In terms of staging, as envisioned by its author, The Trial of Hang Tuah the Great is based upon modern western theories and techniques, such as those of Bertolt Brecht (Epic Theatre) and Antonin Artaud (Theatre of Cruelty). In both senses, The Trial of Hang Tuah the Great is a groundbreaking Malaysian play.

A comprehensive and authoritative single-volume reference work on the theatre arts of Asia-Oceania. Nine expert scholars provide entries on performance in twenty countries from Pakistan in the west, through India and Southeast Asia to China, Japan and Korea in the east. An introductory pan-Asian essay explores basic themes - they include ritual, dance, puppetry, training, performance and masks. The national entries concentrate on the historical development of theatre in each country, followed by entries on the major theatre forms, and articles on playwrights, actors and directors. The entries are accompanied by rare photographs and helpful reading lists.

Scholarly works considering traditional Malay letters from a literary point of view are scarce. In this book, classical Malay literature of the 16th through the 19th centuries is viewed in the context of more than a millennium of medieval Malay letters. In the first part, based on a reconstruction of the literary self-awareness of the Malays, a model is offered of classical Malay literature as an integral, hierarchically arranged a ‘anthropomorphic’ system, the impetus for its formation being the Islamization of the Malay world. A study of the origin and evolution of all genres of Malay literature, as well as an analysis of some exemplary works with special reference to their poetics, provide the factual basis for the suggested model. The second part of the book treats of the aesthetics of classical Malay literature, first and foremost the central notion of the sphere of beauty, ‘the beautiful’ (indah). Its divine origin, internal properties-such as the diversity of manifestations, perfection, orderliness-capable of arousing love and thus producing a harmonizing effect on the human psyche, are considered, as well as the synthesis of Hindu-Javanese and Muslim components in Malay literature aesthetics. This is the first study that aims to present a coherent view of the entire body of classical Malay literature. In a novel and stimulating approach, the organizing principles of Malay literature are seen as a system in which the various genres are allotted their proper place.