Hanuman fights Ravana at wood puppet performance in Yogyakarta
About this photograph
- Creator
- Margery H. Freeman
- Date created
- Unknown
- Location
- Yogyakarta, Indonesia
- License
- This photograph copyright ©2006. Terms of use
Related media
Learn more
- Search LEARN NC for demons, Hanuman, Indonesia, performance, puppets, Ramayana, Ravana, theater, woodcarving, and Yogyakarta.
In the classroom
- See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
Hanuman fights a red-skinned Ravana at a wooden puppet performance held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia during July 1986.
The white Hanuman puppet on the left wears a royal Yogyakarta-style batik sarong while the demon puppet, with red skin, is dressed in similar clothes but a red jacket. 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. In this photograph, the right hand fingers of the puppeteer are visible at left as they hold the Hanuman puppet and manipulate the sticks to Hanuman’s extended arms. The top of the puppeteer’s headdress is slightly visible between the two puppets at the center stage 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.
