National Gallery of Victoria: Gods, Heroes and Clowns

The puppet and mask theatre of Java and Bali are the focus of an exhibition at Melbourne’s NGV.

KASHMIRI Bhagavad Gita (mid 19th century) ink, opaque watercolour and gold paint on paper, cotton and cardboard cover, stitched binding 9.8 x 16.8 cm (page) 11.0 x 17.4 x 3.8 cm (closed) 11.0 x 35.0 x 1.9 cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1965 1515-5 From the exhibition: Gods, Heroes and Clowns Performance and Narrative in South and Southeast Asian Art NGV International To be used in conjunction with exhibition only; must credit

Plutarch quotes Gorgias, best known today as the protagonist of one of Plato’s dialogues, as saying that in the deception of theatre, one who deceives is more just than one who does not deceive, and one who is deceived is wiser than one who is not. The Greek language allows for a pithier and more concise articulation, but the idea is an important one: we lend ourselves willingly to the illusion of theatre because there is something important to be gained by allowing ourselves to be deceived.

And the illusion of theatre, as I observed a few weeks ago, is much more gripping than that of cinema: we sit on the edge of our seat in the former and recline passively in the latter. This too is a paradox, for theatre is far more artificial than film, far more patently an illusion. The intensity of our attention seems to be inverse proportion to the degree of literal naturalism, which is why modernist theatre in the 20th century turned away from naturalism to embrace more abstract and artificial forms inspired by ancient Greece, Japan or medieval Europe.

Puppet theatre is of necessity more artificial than one with human performers, and no puppet tradition is more stylised than wayang kulit, the shadow puppets of Java. Many years ago, during a stay in Jogjakarta, the ancient cultural capital — Jakarta was originally the Dutch trading port of Batavia — I attended a nocturnal performance at the Sultan’s Palace, the most memorable of several I have seen because it was not designed or in any way adapted for tourists and felt as though it would have been exactly the same a century or two earlier.

The audience sat facing the white sheet on to which the shadows were cast, although it was also permissible to walk around the other side of it and apparently some connoisseurs preferred the view from this side. There one could see the dalang, the single puppeteer sitting cross-legged with the sheet in front of him and a light hanging above to cast the shadows. Before him was a banana trunk, and into its soft and spongy body were fixed the puppets, dozens of them, to his left and right.

I had the good fortune to visit one of the finest makers of these puppets and see the whole process, from the stretching of buffalo hides to the shaping of the horn wands on to which they are attached, pointed in order to drive into the banana trunk. Most fascinating of all was to watch the design and cutting of the intricate and highly stylised tracery with which each of the figures was decorated. It was easy to see the difference between the exquisite refinement of a puppet made by a master for use in performance and the cheap and relatively crude ones produced for the tourist market.

In the performance, the dalang would take a puppet from the trunk and hold it against the white screen, bringing it to life through tilting, shaking but above all by moving its two long arms, articulated at the shoulder and the elbow and each with its own thin wand attached at the wrist to control them. All this, moreover, would be done with one hand because he would probably have another puppet in the other. At times he might be holding three, four or even more at once.

Meanwhile, the dalang kept up a rhythmic drumming with one foot — in effect conducting the accompanying gamelan ensemble — and also sang the narration and the spoken exchanges between the puppet characters. The performance lasted for many hours, a remarkable feat of energy, focus and sheer endurance.

The stories were drawn from the ancient Indian epic tradition of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, both of which go back in some form to remote antiquity but were written down in their present and definitive state about the fourth century AD. Their oral transmission in the intervening centuries is almost incredible, considering their enormous length: the Mahabharata, for example, has about 200,000 lines, compared with almost 15,700 for the Iliad. The presence of these stories in Java testifies to the fundamental importance of Indian civilisation in the whole of Southeast Asia, and it is significant that they have survived even the later arrival of Islam, and remain the basis of all forms of theatre in Indonesia.

All cultures love to rehearse traditional stories, and the episodes of the ancient epics regularly used in wayang kulit performances were so familiar to the local members of the audience that they had no difficulty picking up the thread from any point; consequently people would come in or leave at what seemed random moments, and as it was so late in the evening, some even curled up for a nap before waking to watch again. The performance would last until dawn, but having already spent hours watching an extraordinary mask dance performance of the Ramayana under the full moon on the outdoor stage at Prambanan, I decided another hour or two would suffice.

Both puppet and mask theatre, principally from Java and Bali, are the focus of an exhibition at the NGV International that is especially absorbing if you have some idea of the way these objects are used in practice. The puppets are supplemented by painted wall hangings that emphasise the pervasiveness of the Indian epic stories and their main characters, as well as the way local tales could be formed on the same template.

Thus the story of Prince Panji and his beloved Chandrah echoes that of Rama and the princess Sita, carried off by the demon Ravana, the most popular episode of the Ramayana. That story is told in a Balinese wall-hanging that represents the climactic scene when Rama, himself an avatar of Vishnu, overcomes Ravana with the help of the monkey-god Hanuman. At the start of the sequence, a real monkey tackles a demon, as in anticipation of the arrival of the divine monkey army, one of whom is seen gruesomely tearing off the head of a demon.

The most beautiful objects in this exhibition are without doubt a group of exquisitely cut Java­nese wayang kulit puppets, cleverly installed to cast shadows on the wall behind them, giving a sense of the almost magical appearance of the lace-like silhouettes in performance. Compared with these, another group of leather shadow puppets from India is vivid and attractive, but far coarser in workmanship: a manifestation of folk art, while the Javanese puppets are the expression of a highly refined court culture, even if the perform­ances incorporate burlesque interludes between the epic confrontations of traditional heroes.

Another Javanese puppetry tradition occupies the central space as we enter and is likely to be the most striking part of the exhibition for the casual visitor. These are the three-dimensional puppets known as wayang golek, characterised by large carved and painted wooden heads attached to the central rod, for they too are activated from below, not from above as in the case of Euro­pean marionettes.

Here too there are many characters, some from the Indian epic tradition and some from local folk stories, but, although their solid heads make these puppets more similar to the ones that we know and less abstract in form, they are also less sophisticated in a range of expression and less refined in form than the shadow puppets.

Among the other items in the exhibition are a couple of Balinese masks, one of Prince Panja and the other of his brother-in-law, which belong to the temple-dance tradition that tourists to Bali may have seen, especially in Ubud, where they used to be performed almost every night in one temple or another. The Legong dances performed by very young girls are, however, the ones likeliest to be brought into resorts to give mass tourists the illusion of encountering Balinese culture between the pool and the facial treatment.

There are several fine wall-hangings and painted cloths, one from India and relating to a folktale tradition, lively, dense but full of narrative motifs that are hard to untangle without knowing more of the relevant myths.

In contrast, there is another Indian painted cloth from a little more than a decade ago, but made by an artist whose family has been painting such traditional scenes for the same temple complex for several generations.

This one narrates the adventures of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu and, with his youthful, even androgynous figure and blue skin, one of the most familiar figures in Indian iconography.

The reason, readers may recall, that Vishnu is represented by several emanations known as avatars is that he cannot act directly in the world himself. One of the two most important gods in the Hindu religion, he stands for preservation and continuity just as Shiva represents change, destruction and rebirth. He maintains the continued existence of the world by sleeping, and that is how he is often represented; his avatars, meanwhile, are involved in numerous adventures.

Here, in an elaborate mosaic of scenes, we see the birth of Krishna and childhood escapades, before scenes of his adult life, including his time as a shepherd when he was pursued by young milkmaids called gopis, enchanted with his beauty. In one scene, the gopis are bathing naked in a river, while one of them climbs a tree in which Krishna has taken refuge after stealing and hiding their clothes.

One of the most serious stories about ­Krishna is also recalled, when he acted as the charioteer of the Pandava prince Arjuna in the section of the Mahabharata known as the Bhagavad Gita, among the most famous spiritual texts in the world and the only part of the Indian epics that many Western readers have read.

Near this hanging is a beautiful little edition of the Bhagavad Gita from Kashmir in the 19th century, with a frontispiece illumination of Arjuna and Krishna standing in the chariot. Although we can see from the convention of his blue skin that this is Krishna, Arjuna is not at first aware that his charioteer is a god.

The prince is reluctant to go into battle against his adversaries, many of whom are relatives and one of whom is his former teacher. His charioteer urges him to do his duty and teaches him the concept of acting without attachment. But this is not enough. Arjuna remains unwilling to enter the battle until at last Krishna reveals himself in an overwhelming theophany.

The awestruck Arjuna recognises his divinity and adores him; and Krishna, in one of the most unforgettable passages in any literature, declares that he is time itself, that all this has already happened. The enemy is long dead; he has killed them. All that remains for Arjuna is to perform his duty.

Gods, Heroes and Clowns: Performance and Narrative in South and Southeast Asian Art

NGV International, Melbourne, until October 4