Shadow Puppet Priest

While speaking about the recent villas that have

gone up in the area, I mentioned that I heard that the family that do the shadow puppets have built a workshop a 5 minute walk from my house. Amerta said that it is his friend, and If I am interested we can go visit him tomorrow and I can learn all about the shadow puppets. Excitedly I agreed and he called him up to plan a 9 a.m. visit. I thought we were going to the new workshop but instead we drove through the forest up to his house.

When we met, I had to laugh, because, as usual, everyone here has so many "different hats" that they wear. Here was the priest that I had been sitting next to during the masked dance performance the last two days at the temple. And now I was at his home and seeing him as just a person, sitting on his little bale (free standing porch) and he is also the shadow puppet maker and performer. He didn't speak a word of English and never made any eye contact with me, and I assumed it was because I was a woman, but no matter, amerta translated all of my questions and shared all of the conversation with me during the visit.

I was surprised to slowly realize the depth of this profession. The Dalam (storyteller/puppeteer) needs to be an artist; cutting out the character from cowhide with all of the intricacies like in lacy paper cutting, painter; knowing how to paint each puppet, singer and vocal artist  that can imitate numerous voices and sounds of multiple characters, historian; knowing by heart all of the mahabarata tales to recite, since he is the only puppeteer for the whole play, and able to understand the effect of the shadow of the puppet in order to perform behind a white sheet that is lit from behind by a live fire, while two gamelon players accompany the two hour performance.

The puppets are also sold as symbols of characters you wish to strive towards, and are hung on the wall over ones bed. So even though all you seeing during a performance is the shadow, the puppets are all hand painted in the same ancient artistic style of  typical Balinese painting. If someone has changed their name, or is happy to finally have a son after many daughters, he can hire the shadow player to do a performance and then everyone is invited at 8 in the evening for the show…again quite the causal affair with people walking around and talking during the outdoor performance in someones back yard.

As we sat there chatting, he opened up the sacred chest where the puppets are kept and showed them to me. In an attempt to try and get a feel for what it is all about I found a spot of sun on the wall where we were and tried playing with them a bit. My attempt was to reach the most perfect shadow of the intricate patterns of the puppet, which was of the palace, so I held it straight on its wooden pole and played with the closeness to the wall of it to get a very exact shadow. After a few moments the priest took the same puppet and started gently shaking it so the shadow appeared very alive and excited. I laughed as I realized that my need for aesthetics had nothing to do with the inner vitality that was the essence of even a palace puppet! What was being portrayed was life, not some piece of art. The story telling was passing on life lessons from the Gods and not trying to give a pretty performance.

Villagers who were told that they need water blessed by the shadow puppet, would come to his house in order to fulfill the required ritual needed to heal someone or something. He has been a puppeteer for over 30 years and has passed on this skill to two of his sons. The older one has commercialized it and does performances for resorts and foreigners. The younger high schooler is so skilled that he has won prizes in his accomplishment of outstanding Balinese shadow puppeteer. His father, the priest, is the only official holy shadow puppeteer in the area. Amerta pointed out that I should notice the older sons voice, and how it" is from the inside". And sure enough when the older son spoke, I had to laugh at how that kind of inner resonance is necessary for the almost ventriloquistic quality needed for the many characters portrayed.

Only once the priest began wrapping up the puppets in their holy cloth and replacing them into the old chest that doubles as the stage during performances, did he start speaking in English while he held each puppet up and began to converse with me behind the guise of each character.