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Sri Waluyo: 'Wayang golek' reformer
(JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)Playing with puppets was a familiar pastime for Sri Waluyo when he was a child
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(JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi) (JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)
(JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi)
Playing with puppets was a familiar pastime for Sri Waluyo when he was a child.
His father, Gunawan, was a famous wayang kulit (leather puppet) master in Tegal, Central Java, while his mother, Suwati, was a popular sinden, a gamelan music singer.
Waluyo's introduction to puppetry was through his grandfather, Ki Sebat, a wayang golek (wooden puppet) master.
Waluyo used to accompany his grandfather when he staged his shows in various villages; Waluyo would sit beside the puppet box to watch, eventually falling asleep late at night. 'When I was a fourth-grader, I had already memorized nearly all the wayang golek stories,' Waluyo, who was born in Tegal on May 4, 1977, said.
His grandfather began to entrust the opening of every show to Waluyo when he was in the fifth grade, although his spot only lasted for 10 minutes. This early experience of staging wayang golek shows, however, helped to significantly build his self-confidence.
'Appearing in public takes considerable self-confidence; otherwise, a show can be messed up. Puppetry techniques, wayang stories and gamelan music can all be learned, but confidence can only be gained through frequent shows,' said Waluyo, who now heads up a wayang golek group called Cing Cing Mong.
At junior high school, Waluyo learned wayang kulit from his father. On several occasions, he even staged leather and shadow puppet shows in abridged versions of two to four hours, and once won a school competition. However, he finally chose to delve into the art of wayang golek.
'There have been a great number of leather puppeteers. What's more, I didn't want to compete with my father,' he said, laughing. Waluyo later entered the Indonesian Classical Art High School (SMKI) in Surakarta, commonly known as Solo, where he studied gamelan music before furthering his puppetry skills at the city's Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI).
According to Waluyo, wayang kulit shows are more popular than those with wooden puppets, even in his own hometown, Tegal, where shadow puppet shows are held almost weekly. Wayang golek shows are far rarer; they cannot always be found, even on monthly art schedules.
'When I arrived in Solo, I faced a greater challenge because wooden puppet shows were almost absent. Local people were only familiar with shadow puppets and wayang orang (classical dance dramas),' noted Waluyo, now an ISI graduate.
Wayang golek's lack of popularity prompted him to be creative, though. Over time, he designed a presentation style for wooden puppet shows completely unlike its standard form in order to draw spectators.
His innovative changes include the transformation of the gamelan's traditional pentatonic scale to Western music's diatonic scale. In this way, his gamelan instruments can play several genres of music, such as pop songs and jazz, paving the way for his shows to be warmly received.
In terms of stories, Waluyo develops the original texts according to his own imagination and interpretation. He also explored Tegal-style speech, known as ngapak-ngapak (rustic or rural tongue), to attract audiences. Little wonder, then, that he is called the ngapak-ngapak puppeteer for his language style.
Waluyo said many of his peers in Tegal were shocked at first by his outlandish style. Even his grandfather and father were dismayed by his violation of wayang golek standards. 'But in the end, they understood. Times have changed and the standard version mostly doesn't fit our modern times. If the audience can't follow a story, nobody will be interested in wayang,' added Waluyo, who performed at Jakarta's Salihara Theater in 2012.
He went on to describe two technical styles of wooden puppetry maneuvers, Kebumen and Tegal. Based on the Kebumen technique, the dalang or puppeteers move their puppets by adopting the dance steps of wayang orang.
With the Tegal style, the puppets are manipulated to produce, as far as possible, actual human movements. Waluyo cited a fight scene as an example, in which Kebumen masters only use the puppets' scarves to hit their opponents, whereas Tegal puppeteers present the fight with punches and kicks.
'Although the Tegal technique is more dominant in my shows, I have always tried to combine both styles. That's why my group is called Cing Cing Mong, meaning 'going hand-in-hand', to symbolize Tegal and Kebumen joining hands,' he said.
Cing Cing Mong was set up in 2008 with several performers from Surakarta, and very soon adopted a concept of colossal performances on a big screen. 'But such large-scale shows can only be staged at major events, not smaller occasions,' said Waluyo, whose troupe participated in the International Wayang Festival in Ubud, Bali, in September.
In July, Cing Cing Mong stunned visitors to the Indonesian Wayang Festival 2013 in Jakarta by presenting five puppet masters at the same time, besides displaying their unique way of entertaining their audiences.
'I design the wooden puppet characters myself, but craftsmen from Yogyakarta make the puppets as I don't have enough time to do so,' said Waluyo, who will be heading back to Bali with his group in November. Despite having developed his own unique performance style, Waluyo still occasionally stages wooden puppet stories based on the Tegal chronicle or local legends.
'I follow their main storylines but I have my own angles. The character Jamaludin, for instance, is a robber. But I present him as a Robin Hood-inspired character, who helps poor people by sharing his loot,' he concluded.
