Much has been said about how Javanese puppet theatre, Wayang Kulit, richly reflects the Javanese world, and how changes and tensions in performance practice mirror those in culture and society. 0For decades, television has been as intensely part of the Javanese world as Wayang. This book explores the ways two complex media and modes of being, seeing and fantasising, with their different cultures, coexist and meet, and haunt or invade each other. It is what what a Javanese commentator calls a 'difficult marriage' - intimate on the one hand, deeply alienating on the other, institutionalised yet at the same time mercurial and shifting.0This encounter is explored on many levels including performance aesthetics, the technicalities of television production, issues of time, space, light, place, and movement, audience experience of live and televised performances, and the collaboration and struggle between performers and television producers. Central to the book are personal perspectives and experiences, as well as Javanese discussions surrounding the interaction between Wayang and television and their cultures.0They are brought into a conversation with reflections on media and technology by writers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and James Siegel. Wayang's relationship with television is considered in the context of the theatre's intercourse with older and newer media, including electricity, radio, audio- and video-recording, the internet and social media.

Jim Hunt grew up in a small town near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He was always tall for his age. He played basketball and baseball in high school, and was a good student. He entered the University of Delaware and studied Chemical Engineering. During his junior year in college, the CIA recruited him to monitor the radical groups on campus that were a growing concern in the U.S. government during the 1960s. After graduation from college, Jim entered the U.S. Army as a 2nd Lieutenant and attended officer's training in the Chemical Corps. He was assigned to Ft. Lewis, Washington and was immediately transferred to the Corps of Engineers, which was staffing several units for deployment to Vietnam. While at Ft. Lewis, Jim was recruited by a Chinese intelligence agency, with the full knowledge and support of the CIA. Thus began his life as a double agent. In Vietnam, Jim Hunt uncovered an operation by the North Vietnamese to assassinate Bob Hope, and participated in the take down of the assassin. After the Army, Jim joined The Dow Chemical Company, but maintained his relationships with the Chinese intelligence agency and the CIA. He helped uncover a network of Chinese spies, working out of the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. that were receiving information from dozens of U.S. contacts in industry and academia. His career at Dow Chemical eventually took him to Hong Kong where he and his family lived for almost a decade. He became involved in an operation where the Chinese were buying top-secret computer software from a senior official at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). While in Hong Kong, he recruited his Chinese handler with the Ministry of State Security (MSS) to work for the CIA. After a successful career with Dow Chemical, he retired and joined a smaller company in San Diego named Renewable Power Company. They were involved in the alternative energy business and were actively developing power plant projects in several Asian countries. While working on a project in the Philippines, two of Renewable Power's employees were kidnapped on the island of Mindanao by the MILF, a Muslim terrorist group. Jim Hunt had to use all his skill and resources to gain the freedom of his fellow employees. His final operation before retiring was to recruit a senior official of China's MSS to work for the CIA. After retirement from the CIA, the Chinese MSS, and Renewable Power Company, Jim Hunt and his wife moved to Hilton Head Island, SC for a restful retirement. Jim missed the action and decided to join the Peace Corps. He was assigned to Russia, and after a ten-week training program in Moscow, moved to Krasnoyarsk, Russia for a two-year assignment teaching business courses at a university in the middle of Siberia. When the CIA learned of his assignment, they brought him back for one more mission, to penetrate the Russian secret city, K-26, located several miles outside Krasnoyarsk, where the Russians operated nuclear reactors to produce weapons grade plutonium.

A brilliant examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of 'culture' in today's intercultural world.

Malaya, 1952 - The War of the Running Dogs. They shot the Chinese courier and took the documents he was carrying. Then they cut off his hands and rolled him into a shallow grave. Another act of barbary in a savage jungle war, another dead Communist and another successful mission for the police and the SAS. Thirty-five years later - Members of the ambush party start dying. Unpleasantly. One of them has had his hands cut off. The past is catching up with the men who stood in that jungle clearing - the past in the form of a man with artificial hands and an insane urge to reclaim what was taken from him - at any cost.

A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures. With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

Drawing on the author’s two decades of seeing, writing on, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this book offers a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry. Reading the Puppet Stage uses examples from a broad range of puppetry genres, from Broadway shows and the Muppets to the rich field of international contemporary performing object experimentation to the wealth of Asian puppet traditions, as it illustrates the ways performing objects can create and structure meaning and the dramaturgical interplay between puppets, performers, and language onstage. An introductory approach for students, critics, and artists, this book underlines where significant artistic concerns lie in puppetry and outlines the supportive networks and resources that shape the community of those who make, watch, and love this ever-developing art.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

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.

We are playing relatives offers a comprehensive survey of literary writing in the Malay language. It starts with the playful evocations of language and reality in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, a work that circulated on the Malay Peninsula in the eighteenth century, and follows the Malay literary impulse up to the beginning of the twenty-first century, a time when the dominant notions of Malay literature seem to fade away in the cyberspace created on the island of Java, and the Hikayat Hang Tuah's play and dance on the sounds of Malay words seem to be infused with a new vitality. We are playing relatives covers a highly heterogeneous group of texts published over a long period of time in many places in Southeast Asia. The book is organized around a discussion of related texts that are crucial in the rise of the notion of 'Malay literature'.

This volume challenges existing notions of what is “Indian,” “Southeast Asian,” and/or “South Asian” art to help educators present a more contextualized understanding of art in a globalized world. In doing so, it (re)examines how South or Southeast Asian art is being made, exhibited, circulated and experienced in new ways in the United States or in regions under its cultural hegemony. The essays presented in this book examine both historical and contemporary transformations or lived experiences of monuments and regional styles (sites) from South or Southeast Asian art in art making, subsequent usage, and exhibition-making under the rubric of “Indian,” “South Asian,” “or “Southeast Asian” Art.