Re: [-empyre-] poetics...

[Aleksandra Dulic <adulic@sfu.ca>]

Dear Sally,

Thanks for your stimulating questions... My reflection is partly  
aimed at trying to articulate some strains of the tremendous  
influence that Balinese shadow theatre left on my artistic practice.

While numerous parallels drawn between shadow play and cinema inform  
my research into shadow play, my key concern is the dramatic  
principle that underlies animated performance of shadow theater,  
which enables one to make an inanimate non-moving object come to life  
by body movement, while the performer, or dalang (puppeteer), stays  
outside the audience’s focus. This situation is what i refer to as  
media performance. The audience focus is centered on the animated  
events taking place on the screen, and in Balinese terms the  
characters speak for themeless, while the dalang acts as a medium.  
Again the comparison is focused on what happens in the  
improvisational context of the performance with (electronic,  
computational or non-electronic) media.

This concept of braided processes is aimed at supporting the  
improvisation and real-time animation driven by the body of the  
performer, or participant. The composition and presentation of  
electronic media, using capabilities offered by computation,   
provides an extension of the cinema by braiding encoded process with  
various media, narrative elements and participants interaction in the  
real time of the performance.  The "interaction" of performers,  
partakers and the elements of the work brings media perfomance form  
close to shadow play.
This flexible character of media performance employs the dramatic  
structure that can be articulated as a system of braids of several  
strands of activities that bring performers and partakers together  
here and now. This situation is analogue to Eco's notion of he Open  
Work. In a series of essays published as "The Open Work" Umberto Eco  
(1962) articulates the concept of "openness" of the work of art,  
where the arrangements of elements of a work are open to different  
interpretations on the part of the performer, audience and reader  
that are made a significant part of the completion of the work.  
Openness of the work of art is in leaving the work unfinished and  
flexible in order to be completed by the participants. Eco notes  
that, although a certain level of openness is intrinsic to every work  
of art in the flexibility of its interpretation by individual  
spectators, these new works are intentional, and explicit, in  
allowing a new level of interpretive potential.  These works are  
based on a semantic plurality that makes them larger than any single  
instantiation, performance or reading can contain.



In the open work the participant is placed at the focal point of the  
variety of interrelations that make up the work and therefore it  
demands a creative response from the participant. The action involves  
constructing an experience from a disparate number of elements that  
do not exist in the absence of the participant whose role is to  
articulate closure of the work.  The participant collaborates in the  
construction of a particular meaning of the work, but in no way  
exhausts the potential for other meanings in the form of other  
instantiations.

The open work supports structured improvisation—a chaos and cosmos  
negotiated between the art system and a group of participants.   
Improvisation for the participant allows an instantiation of the work  
within a co-constructed context—a form of distributed dialogue with  
oneself and others—where the role of participant is both as ordering  
agent and source of novelty. Media performance is a form of open work  
that braids together spatial, time-based and contextual factors.

Another reason for looking for analogies between the shadow play and  
this emerging form of so called interactive art or more specifically  
media performance is that if we consider computational media  
performance as a continuous development of cinematic animation, and  
by extension, that of shadow play tradition, we can study a form that  
has had thousands of years of unbroken development.  This vast  
history provides us with rich and deep well of compositional  
approaches, techniques and methods. And of course Balinese Wayang  
kulit (shadow play) is interesting because it is an example of rich,  
diverse and continuos living tradition.

Wayang kulit performances function as a means to maintain and  
reinforce wisdom and the value system of the society, and to preserve  
the narrative tradition of Balinese folk heritage.  Classical  
literature, such as Indian epics, Mahabharata, and Ramayana, as well  
as stories of the East Javanese prince Panji, are highly respected as  
it preserves the sacred language of the Gods and eternally valid  
truths about the world — the tradition.  But, an innovative dalang  
occasionally invents a whole new cast of characters, creating new  
puppets based on classical Balinese mythology not previously part of  
wayang kulit performance. Some innovations live briefly and fade away  
from the repertoire. Very few of these innovations become a part of  
standard performances. I would like to discuss some recent  
innovations in narrative initiated by I Wayan Wija,  one of the most  
highly regarded Dalangs in Bali. They include Tantri episodes derived  
from ancient Indian Panchatantra stories (wayang tantri), and Shadows  
of Light and Illusion (wayang sinar maya).

Wayang tantri episodes are a variant of the "Thousand and One Nights"  
theme. Dalang Wayan Wija was the first to use these stories, and  
remains its main innovator. Tantri stories include many animal  
characters. He has devised an entirely original set of puppets. Every  
new form of wayang requires a whole puppet set, which involves  
creating as many as 150 new puppet characters per story. Wija’s  
intention was to use animal characters to inspire the interest of  
young people in wayang, expand its moral lessons and spread an  
environmental consciousness in Bali. Wija’s wayang tantri represents  
a breakthough in the kind of stories commonly depicted in wayang  
kulit performances. Traditional wayang is fundamentally about human  
beings and eternal struggles over land, love, disagreements between  
good and evil, but wayang tantri is about animals. These stories  
explore ecological issues and people’s relationship to animals. This  
world is not created only for human beings, points out Wija, in Hindu  
religion the respect for god is enacted by the respect for what God  
has created, and God created animals, humans, all living and natural  
beings.

Wija also made experiments with sets of dinosaur puppets, created to  
depict the scientific findings of prehistoric times, and mixes these  
with traditional stories. At the time I did my research, Wija  
performed with dinosaur puppets only outside of Bali, and was still  
getting ready to present them in Bali, because he considered them too  
radically different for the purpose of temple ceremonies. Wija also  
made sets of Ramayana characters similar to the originals, but with  
more articulated joints and very flexible movement.

His current creative project is the development of the Wayang Sinar  
Maya, or Shadows of Light and Illusion, which makes innovative use of  
reflective materials and intense light sources. His mirror puppets  
make shadows out of light. They are dancing mirrors, made of  
reflective flexible plastic, on which Wija has made complex character  
drawings.  A small bright lamp points away from the screen towards  
the dalang and the puppet reflects the light  onto the screen. The  
puppet is manipulated by bending the flexible plastic material. They  
have very tiny moving parts, since the smallest bend is amplified  
drastically on the screen. “The only reason my ancestors did not make  
mirror puppets is because they could not get a hold of these new  
materials,” says Wija.

Wija’s innovations point up the flexibility of this tradition and its  
ability to adapt to contemporary problems. Wija’s ritual performances  
explore contemporary ecological problems, realities brought to us by  
scientific studies, and new materials brought to us by  
industrialization. The dalang learns at a young age that he/she must  
continue to develop, grow and take in new experience as long as he/ 
she lives. This continuous development is to be shared for the  
spiritual and social well-being of the community. The new  
developments are always rooted in tradition. Tradition always  
provides the basis for innovation. This continuous development makes  
the cultures of Bali diverse, vibrant and alive. The reason to make  
something new is to offer people a reflection of contemporary issues  
within a framework they can understand. If the performances are not  
performed well, or are not engaging and reflective of people’s lives,  
people will not pay attention to the philosophy. As Wija points out,  
the duty of the dalang is to lead the audience through, articulate  
movement that feeds our eyes, expressive song that feeds our ears and  
meaningful philosophy that fills our hearts.

So the classical narratives form the framework for innovation and  
allow high level of locilazed adaptation, but these narratives even  
in Bali are changing and fluxing. By extension every place and local  
community has those kind of stories that everyone is familiar with  
and those common narratives form rich framework for structuring  
interaction, participation and localization.

To conclude, the notion of braided processes is one approach for  
structuring locilazed interaction that takes into account place,  
community and context in which the work is presented. But this  
interrelationship among space - time - place - and context are well  
developed in the contemporary theatre. Following Artaud’s curiosity  
for the Balinese dance theatre he was introduced to in the Paris  
exposition in the 1930s and Bertolt Brecht’s approach to art, not as  
“a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it"  
the search for a “ritualization” of society began within the  
exploration of Turner's notion of liminoid phenomena — the space for  
social transformation in contemporary society . This search provides  
performance with its elementary role of political intervention, a  
peaceful redefinition of the rules of the society, cultural dialogue,  
communal bounding and social healing exemplified in the work of  
Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Peter Schumann’s Bread and  
Puppet Theatre in the USA; Augusto Boal and Vianna Filho in Brazil;  
and Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba in Europe.  
Anthropologists such as Erving Goffman and Victor Tuner began to  
study the importance of representation, with its ritual and  
performative aspects, in every day life. Following the form of media  
performance a particularly strong echo is found in the socially  
expressive ritual of Wayang Kulit (shadow play) — in particular the  
Balinese form with its emphasis on place, time and context in  
performance, ritual and daily life.