 Good afternoon everyone, we're going to get started. We have quite a few things we want to cover today. So just hi, I'm Eileen. I am the chair of the library diversity committee whose sponsor is presentation today. Just a little bit of housekeeping information. Restrooms are over in fine arts so you go across the elevator lobby, lobby, turn left, and there, that's where the restrooms are. If in the case of emergency, and we know we won't have one, but in case there is, the emergency exit would try this door to your right, the second door down. So it's really easy to get to and we'll just walk on downstairs. And I think that's it. So this is Scotty, the dean of the library. Hi everybody, welcome to all the library. And it's a pleasure for me to introduce to all of you, Professor William Condi. Now, Professor Condi is Hamilton, Baker, and Pasta for Professor of Humanities here at Ohio University School of Interdisciplinary Arts. His work is in theater. And his most recent book is Coal of a Culture, Offer Houses and Appalachia. But he's also author of numerous articles and several on Southeast Asian puppetry. And he's here today to talk and performance and that's going to be titled Confessions of a Left-handed Delong Adventures in Balinese Puppetry. So please welcome. Thank you all for coming out. It's such a wonderful, wonderful turnout. I'm glad you could all come on such a joyous day. And so I'm going to be talking for a little while about Balinese Puppetry and I'm going to try to keep that short and then move on to do a puppet show. So the first confession I have is I'm not left-handed. I apologize to all the south paws in the audience for reporting me what I am not. But what I wanted to get at with that title is issues that I have with puppetry in relationship to my own feelings of distance and difficulty in encountering Balinese culture, my own senses of inadequacy, questioning my own existence as a Dalong. The word Dalong, as I'll explain more, means puppet master. Questioning whether I'm really a puppet master or not. The specific reference to left-handedness has to do with issues, as many of you may know, that in Southeast Asia, as in many cultures, it is use of the left-hand, it can be impolite, it can be disrespectful. And so to give and receive should always happen with the right-hand. Pointing especially with the left-hand would be a very improper, impolite, disrespectful thing to do. So my use of left-handed here has to do again with my own mistakes. And the many mistakes that I will make today in trying to describe Balinese culture, Balinese art, and Balinese puppetry. Specifically, I often tell my students the story of my first trip to Bali. I was visiting the friend of my good friend Sadhana, Inyoman Sadhana who is in Indiana right now at Butler University directing a production of Midsummer Night's Dream there. And I was visiting their house where they have a lovely temple in the corner of their house. I was visiting there on a very important holiday, Kunigan, and we were decorating the house as much as we might decorate the house for Christmas. So we were decorating the temple and the house with all kinds of beautiful bamboo ornaments. And I was sitting outside on the steps with Sene, Sene of Sea, Sadhana's wife, and we're making these with children of their, and I'm looking at their beautiful temple and I say, there's one aspect of which I found interesting. So I said, Sene, what's that up at the top of your, of the shrine right there? Can you explain to me what's at the top of the shrine? And she said, I don't know what you're talking about. And I said, right there, that thing right there that I am pointing at with my left hand is pale polite. There, Sene, don't you see? And finally, very politely, Sene is a beautiful and lovely kind woman. She said, Bill, please do not point at our shrine and please do not use your left hand. And so I learned something on that day about the delicacy with which I need to approach these subjects and the many mistakes that I make. So that's the kind of behind the story of this. So let's talk about the puppetry. First, what is it and why is it important? Balinese Wayankulit is a form of shadow puppetry that uses flat leather puppets. You'll see here using a light projected onto a screen. So you're basically watching the shadows of it there. And we'll talk about that in more detail. So why is this interesting? It's interesting on a lot of reasons. First of all, it defies all of our Western notions of theater. Everything we know about theater in the West is wrong in regard to Balinese theater. When I went there for the first time, I discovered that things I had been teaching to Ohio University students for 15 years about definition of theater and what is theater was wrong. We're not necessarily wrong, but inadequate, incomplete. So for example, and I'll explain these things in more detail later, there is no audience in the way that we understand and audience in the West. A lot of the performance happens in a language that the human audience cannot understand. The performance lasts four or five hours in ballet up to nine or ten hours in Java. There is only one performer who is the playwright, who is the director, and manipulates literally hundreds of puppets. The audience comes and goes, eats and drinks, sleeps, talks, etc. The first time when I was in Java in solo, I was watching a performance with a friend of mine, Javanese, we were watching the performance and we were talking as people do during these performances. And he said to me, I've heard about your theater in the West. He said, now let me just get this straight. So what you do is you sit in the dark and you just sit in the chair and you don't talk and you don't eat and you don't drink and you don't smoke. And the people on stage just talk and he shook his head sad like, what would be the interest in that? Why would one possibly be interested in seeing something like that? What is the point of that? So part of it is it flies in the face of everything we think we know about theater. But secondly, it's of course important in its own right. This is one of the most ancient and important forms of storytelling in the world. This is a storytelling tradition that goes back at least a thousand years and probably longer. It's also pervasive all across Bali and Java. One of the reasons I was attracted to Indonesian puppet theater is because I traveled and blessed the Southeast Asian program here that's been very generous in providing me support for travel there and learn about this theater in order to come back and teach students here at Ohio University. But many forms of puppetry in Southeast Asia are performed essentially for old people and tourists. And they are not really thriving and vibrant forms of the culture today. In Java and Bali, that's not true. It's a place that everybody goes to see, that people love. One Western writer talks about how in Java and Bali that Wayang is as much of a pervasive metaphor as baseball is in America. So for baseball in America we use baseball as a metaphor for anything and everything in life. Similarly in Java and Bali for Wayang. It also is a way in which the past and the present come together. Tradition and contemporary issues join up in this kind of performance. It also is very much related to religion and many aspects of religion. It's related to, so issues of animism are very important here. A lot of part of the performance both in Java and Bali. Java of course being predominantly Muslim, Bali being predominantly Hindu but in both cases a very important part of it is having offerings for the gods. And these performances take place not just as entertainment but really as part of a devotional event. And especially they're done at transitional times and transitions are often seen as something that are dangerous. So any kind of transition, they're susceptible to danger. The spirits can get in, evil spirits can get in, can be active at times of transition and do mischief. So therefore it's important to do these rituals, do these transitions, these ceremonies in order to ease through those periods of transition. There also is a strongly mystical aspect to this. Insofar as the performances have this kind of ritualistic devotional function. And the Dalang, the puppet master serves as a kind of a medium between a broker between the natural and the supernatural. There are also Hindu aspects to it. As I mentioned Bali is predominantly Hindu and the texts come from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana Sanskrit texts from India that involve Hindu gods. And the Dalang, again looking at it from this Hindu aspect serves almost as a kind of priestly role. In addition to that, in Java there is a strong relationship to Islam. I'm going to skip over that for today because I want to focus mainly on the polonies on the forum. These are some of the, I'm sorry, we can't, I'm blocking. So these are some of the puppets. You'll see them more closely in a moment. The puppets are ritually significant. There are offerings made to the puppets several times a year. A full collection would consist of about 100 to 150. They're made of flattened cured leather. The characters are cut in profile. They're with fine chisels and then highly painted. They're manipulated by one main stick controlling the body and then usually two sticks for the hands. The central puppet, the kionan you can see here is the puppet that kind of frames the action. It symbolizes in a sense the tree of life but can also serve as a puppet representing the forest, wind, rain, fire, etc. The stage itself, you can actually see one right here. This is one that was built by Dan Denhart in the School of Theatre, according to specifications from my friend in Bali. The puppet is usually, the stage is set up in an area usually adjacent to a temple but not in the innermost part of the temple. There's a screen here. There's then a banana log right here and the puppets are stuck into the banana log. Banana logs are wonderful because they have a thick skin so you can pop the stick into them but then it's a very porous interior so that it'll hold it well and also the banana logs are self-healing so that you pull them out and it will heal over. It's hard to find banana logs here in Athens, Ohio with great funding from Southeast Asian studies. We've been able to, we've got our own plantation. We regularly cut them down. The lamp in Bali, in Java, it's usually nowadays an electric light. In Bali they use an oil lamp which is beautiful because it creates this flickering light. The wind is blowing, it creates this flickering so that the puppets really come to life as they move in and out of focus. It also is very exciting to have this, so that the wick is not quite as big as my fist but it's maybe like that big around. So it's this big wick with this big flame coming out of it that's right above your head. And also periodically they have to add more oil to it during it. So while you're performing, oil is being poured into it. Also it usually has a leak so oil is dripping down onto you. And then sometimes during fight scenes if I'm a mistake, especially if one is a left-handed long, one might hit the lamp and so sparks go flying everywhere. Mean was so sparkly. While you're covered in oil, sparks are coming out. One performance I gave, I had to put out a fire in the middle of it. Thank you, Eileen, for letting us know where the fire exits are. So here you can see setting up for a performance with the Dalong and getting the light ready for it. And this is a company throughout by musicians. A Gamelan ensemble percussion instruments. Usually it's about four musicians, as you can see here. It's smaller Gamelan in Bali than it is in Java. The music is complex, hypnotic, beautiful. The Dalong, as I mentioned before, is the puppet master. The playwright, director, the actor and must be ready to perform up to 100 or 150 performances at a moment's notice. There is a shamanistic aspect of the Dalong. The Dalong is a kind of a spiritual leader, as I mentioned before. A link between the human world and the spiritual world. The Dalong, in a sense, becomes a kind of inspired priest when he is performing. Most often Dalongs are male, though there are some female Dalongs. In fact, a student from interdisciplinary arts, Jennifer Goodlander, wrote her dissertation on female Dalongs in Bali. A fascinating topic. Gender issues are fascinating. So the Dalong has this ability to mediate between the three realms of the earth, the sky and the underworld. And the Dalong has to have these kinds of abilities, to have the contact with these metaphysical powers. But the Dalong also serves an important community function as a community advisor and educator and a learned person. People often turn to the Dalong for advice. So the term can also be used metaphorically to mean someone who is the mastermind, the power behind the scenes, the god-like mastermind of the performance. Some Dalongs have a kind of superstar quality. Cheng Long in Bali. Whenever I was there, and I mentioned to people that I was studying puppetry, they would mention Cheng Long and ask me if I knew him. And I can tell you, I gave a lecture at the Hindu Dharma Institute in Denpasar. And one of the most terrifying moments was, as I was about to come up and give my speech, someone pointed out to me that Cheng Long was sitting there. So here I am lecturing to Cheng Long about puppetry. The Dalong sits cross-legged behind the screen when I get to perform it shortly. You will notice I do not sit cross-legged. I cannot sit cross-legged. I did when I was in Bali, but it's painful. And so I use a little stool here. My teacher doesn't know this. He then sits cross-legged hitting with a mallet with one mallet in the hand, and a mallet in the toes, banging against a puppet box for percussion, surrounded by puppets with assistants. And you'll see I'm ably assisted by some wonderful assistants today performing this. So here you can see, it's very hard to get good photos during performances. It's happening at night time, with lights. So this is my teacher, Pak Tung Jung, at a performance he was giving. We can question whether this person is a Dalong or a Dalong. You can see my teacher, Tung Jung, in the background there. He's not particularly pleased. The night before I gave that performance, I was mentioning that we had a dress rehearsal the night before for performance, and Pak Tung Jung said to me, now, Mr. Bill, many of my teachers will be at the performance tomorrow. I hope you cannot embarrass me. First one. The texts come from, as I mentioned before, from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Sanskrit text from India. But a lot of the performance happens in Kawee. Kawee is an ancient Javanese, and nobody understands it. But that's okay, because the gods understand it. The ancestors understand it. The spirits understand it. So if you don't understand it, that doesn't matter. But then the clowns come on, and the clowns translate. So in Bali, they would translate into Balinese. So they'll come on and say, this is what they just said. This is what they're talking about. So when I perform here, I translate into English. Thank you, mama. The clowns serve a fascinating function in a kind of liminal space, mediating between the performance of the audience, mediating between gods and humans. And they have a free space to comment on society, on politics, on the audience. Serving almost as a kind of a fool character. Cutting across class structure with a lot of horseplay, with a lot of jokes, with a lot of sexual jokes, and so forth. For example, Twa, who you'll see performed soon, is one of the clowns, one of the servants. He's a fat buffoon who is the servant of the Panduas. But he is also the elder brother of Shiva, the greatest of the gods. So therefore, he is simultaneously more powerful than the gods themselves. That's what's fascinating about the clowns. The performance in Bali typically begins at about 9 p.m. last until about 1 o'clock in the morning. The performance structure is quite flexible. There is a structure to it, but the Dalang is able to improvise and create within that structure. So the battle scenes can be shortened or lengthened, joking scenes can be shortened or lengthened, and so forth. The performance begins with an overture in effect from the gamalong, then a dance of the kionin, the leaf-shaped puppet that you'll see then in a few minutes. In many cases, little happens during the performance. There's a wonderful story of Ward Keeler, an anthropologist who was watching the performance, and for about two hours, it didn't seem like anything was happening. And so he turned to his translator and said, what's going on? And his translator said, nothing. But if you think about this, this is the length of time of a western performance, two hours, in which everything is supposed to happen. And in Java, you can have two hours in which nothing happens. And that's okay. Because if you're bored, you leave. You go to sleep. One time outside of Bandung, I was watching a performance in which the mayor of the town arrived. I was for a wedding. And they were all very... They were impressed that the mayor came and told me how much the mayor loved Wion. They were so proud that he had come there because he loved Wion. He was honoring this wedding by being there and so forth. Everyone else was sitting in plastic chairs. They brought out a leather upholstered sofa for him to sit in. They'd taken pictures. Of course, they brought me and I'd sit next to the mayor and have a lot of pictures taken and so on and so forth. The performance got started. Within ten minutes, he was sound asleep. And I don't mean just nodding. I mean dead jerking, drooling, out cold. And that was okay. That was okay. Because he was there. In no way was this an insult or dishonor in any way whatsoever. The audience. Most of the audience watches from the shadow side. Watches the shadows here. In Bali, the Dalong will often be in a kind of booth that will keep the audience from watching. But still, many people come around and sneak in and pull the curtains aside because they want to see the Dalong. They want to see the puppets there. And in fact, in Java, almost all the audience watches from the Dalong side. In fact, I've seen performances in which the screen is put up against a wall. And so there is no shadow side. Because people are really interested in watching the puppets, watching the Dalong, watching the mastery of this, and so forth. There's a scholar, A.J. Becker, who talks about the audience. And he describes it in what he refers to as the essential audience and the inessential audience. The inessential audience is you. You don't need to be there. You don't matter. The essential audience is the gods, the spirits, the ancestors, the unseen. And that's why it's okay to perform in Kawi because they understand it. If you don't understand it. And the beginning of the performance really is about a kind of a prayer to this essential audience. So a performance of Wang is really a social experience. The atmosphere is festive. The atmosphere is chaotic. Again, people are coming and going, eating, drinking, sleeping, gambling. And so it's really, it's about being in the midst of a group of people. Everybody in the village knows everybody else. And so it's a kind of community gathering. Think, you know, the farmer's market. Another scholar talked about this, A.J. Becker also, describing what he refers to as the attention of the audience being non-compulsive. I think it's a nice way of thinking about this, non-compulsive. In a sense, in western theater, our attention is compulsive. There's nothing else to look at for this lit stage in front of you. It's all dark. The walls of the theater are usually in America. They're, you know, boring. There's nothing to, it's almost like we're horses with blinders on. And there's nothing to look at from a, so that's a kind of compulsive attention. In Bali and in Java, the attention is not compulsive. You don't want to pay attention, don't pay attention. I'm not talking about you anyway. That also means that as you are coming and going, each person creates his or her own narrative by what you watch. So there's something in a sense very post-modern about it. It isn't that there is this strict storyline that you need to follow. You pick and choose your story by when you come and go, by when you are awake, by when you are paying attention, et cetera, et cetera. So if it's an interesting scene, you watch. If it's a boring scene, you go to sleep. And much of the interaction is what it's about. As one scholar said, watching Wyon is not about watching Wyon. Another scholar not writing about Wyon specifically, but I think is a helpful phrase, refers to it as selective inattention. Selective inattention. The idea that you pay attention when you want to, you don't pay attention when you don't want to. So the audience, if you fall asleep, you're not missing anything. The pleasure, as one scholar wrote, lies in the disc focus, disc focus. So these happen, as I mentioned, as part of a broader Hindu ceremony. The community comes together for this, for a wedding, for a bird, for a village cleansing, et cetera. This is a picture of offerings in a temple. This was a procession coming up to a temple with a suckling pig here. He was sacrificed shortly after. I love this picture because it gives a sense of the trance that falls into this. It's filled with amazing offerings. Everything that you're seeing here is part of a pig that are cut into pieces and made as this decoration is offering. There are also dancers who are performing, topang, mass dance. So the performance happens in the context of all of this. Stephen Lansing, an author I like very much, writes about this as trying to understand the context of this, refers to it as that in Bali there are three worlds. There is the middle world. That's the world we see right now, the world of humans. But it's also a world of illusion, Maya. But that middle world is influenced by the upper world of gods, ancestors. These are the forces of growth. Also then influenced by the lower world, the world of demons, the world of dissolution. And so the middle world comes into existence out of the agreement between the other worlds. These other worlds shape the world that we see. So success in our world consists of keeping those other worlds in balance. So the temple then is a kind of a link between the human world and the unseen worlds. The veil of Maya, the veil of illusion is lifted briefly during these ceremonies. So the temple becomes a place where these three worlds intersect. And the purpose of the festival then is to accommodate all three worlds. The gods, the humans, and the demons. Each one has their own desires and all of them have to be met. So if the accommodations are successful, if compromises are made between these three worlds, then the ceremony is successful. But it then has to be renewed every cycle. And then the temple is deserted.