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Hanuman and demon king Ravana wooden puppets in battle at Yogyakarta performance

About this photograph

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

See this photograph in context

  • The Ramayana: The Hindu epic The Ramayana is retold through the mural, painting, and dance of Southeast Asia. (Page 3.9)

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Hanuman and demon king Ravana wooden puppets in battle at Yogyakarta performance

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The monkey god Hanuman and the demon king Ravana puppets face each other in battle at a July 1986 performance in Yogyakarta. Once Ravana’s guards capture Hanuman, Ravana tries several methods of killing him, which all fail because of Hanuman’s immortal powers.

The white Hanuman puppet on the left wears a royal Yogyakarta-style batik sarong while the Ravana puppet, with a moustache and red skin, is dressed in red. The faces and crowns of the wooden puppets are carefully painted, while 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.