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Wooden Hanuman puppet in Ramayana performance 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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- Search LEARN NC for Hanuman, Indonesia, performance, puppets, Ramayana, theater, woodcarving, and Yogyakarta.
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A wooden Hanuman puppet used in a Ramayana performance at Yogyakarta in July 1986 wears a royal Yogyakarta-style batik cloth wrapped around its waist. Above the waist, the puppet is covered in white fuzzy cloth to represent Hanuman’s monkey fur. Hanuman’s carved wooden head has an open mouth, showing monkey teeth, and a Javanese style crown.
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.
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.
