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Rama and Sita in wooden puppet performance of Ramayana at Yogyakarta

About this photograph

Creator
Margery H. Freeman
Date created
Unknown
Location
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
License
This photograph copyright ©2006. Terms of use

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Rama and Sita in wooden puppet performance of Ramayana at Yogyakarta

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Rama and Sita figures converse in the foreground during a wooden puppet performance of the Ramayana at Yogyakarta in July 1986. A third puppet listens in the background at right.

The faces of the wooden puppets are carefully painted, and the bodies are dressed in cloth costumes. A single master puppeteer controls the arm and leg sticks of all the puppets and speaks all the voices during a single performance. The rounded top of the puppeteer’s headdress is slightly visible here at left on the platform horizon line.

Around some ancient royal court areas of Java in Indonesia, there is still an active wooden puppet theater tradition known as wayang golek. The wooden puppet tradition is related to a more popular leather shadow puppet (wayang kulit) genre and similar masked dances called .

All these theater styles were performed in the ancient Hindu and Buddhist court centers of Java, and similar theater forms emerged in other Southeast Asian kingdoms. They remain regionally popular in the Indonesian island of Java to this day, even though the majority of the island’s population is now Muslim.