Merging Of East And West -- `Visible Religion,' A Shadow Puppet Show, Blends Elements From Several Cultural Traditions

In Bali, shadow puppet plays are outdoor affairs that often begin at 9 p.m. and wind up at dawn. Frequently they are held in conjunction with a funeral, a wedding, a coming-of-age teeth filing or one of the many other ritualistic occasions observed with relevant puppet dramas drawn from two sacred texts: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

There is no way a Western theater could replicate the ambience of sitting in a balmy courtyard under a full Indonesian moon, watching into the night with a group of chattering, bright-eyed children and their parents, as a great dalang (shadow puppeteer) works his magic.

But the American and Indonesian artists creating "Visible Religion," a new multimedia shadow puppet production that premieres Thursday at On the Boards, are not trying to re-create that.

A hybrid panorama

Instead, they have devised something new: a hybrid panorama of light, shadow, puppets, dance and music based on a tale from the Mahabharata, but merging elements from several cultural traditions.

Sponsoring this East-West collaboration is Gamelan Pacifica, a 14-year-old Seattle organization that makes music on the vibrant array of gongs, drums, chimes, xylophones, flutes and stringed instruments that comprise the traditional Indonesian gamelan orchestra.

The 12-member group will be joined by singer-narrator Thomasa Eckert in "Visible Religion," and by master Javanese puppeteer Sri Djoko Rahardjo, esteemed Balinese dancer-puppeteer I Made Sidia, and top Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo.

Contributing an overlay of abstract slide projections and creative supratitles to the assemblage is Chicago opera scenic designer John Boesche.

Gamelan Pacifica director Jarrod Powell, who composed the music with Prabowo, says the story enacted by the rod-mounted, cut-out leather puppets and punctuated by the shimmering sounds of the gamelan is also a cross-Pacific blending.

"Basically it's a multilingual piece because we're using Balinese, Javanese and English in the supratitles and spoken text," he explains.

For a plot, he and director Kent Devereaux chose the "Bima Suarga" story from the Mahabharata. It's about a mission to hell by Bima, one of the five mystical Pandawa brothers, to retrieve his father from the King of Death. (To take a crash course, rent "The Mahabharata," the video of Peter Brook's 1989 film dramatization of the holy Hindu book.)

"When Kent and I were looking at the Bima story, we immediately saw its cultural similarities to Dante's `Inferno,' " Powell notes. "So we also began to go to the `Inferno' for text and visual ideas. The funny thing is that in Seattle today, the Dante reference is probably as obscure and unknown to most people as the Mahabharata is."

Creating a context

Indonesian audiences, however, would know all about Bima Suarga's excellent adventure. So one of the challenges of the piece is to create a meaningful dramatic context for it for American viewers. After a limited run through Sunday at On the Boards, the production (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Seattle Arts Commission, among others) will play engagements at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre.

"Gamelan Pacifica has presented a shadow-puppet play before, but the scale of this project is much more ambitious," Powell observes. "We're using a very large screen that's cinematic in scope. We're having more than one puppeteer at a time - which is not what you'd see in a village performance.

"And we're showing both the Javanese style of puppetry, where the audience watches the puppeteer perform in front of a screen, and the Balinese style, where the puppeteer stays hidden behind the screen. We're also using Western multimedia technology, and formatting it as a two-hour show with an intermission. Those are departures from tradition, too."

Powell's primary goal is to avoid the sterilizing "ethnomusicology" style of academic presentation that demystifies the humor and spontaneity of the wayang kulit (shadow puppet) form.

"When these things are brought to American colleges, they're scheduled in some lecture hall usually. Kent and I always wanted to present this in a more theatrical venue, working with younger Indonesian artists who are not viewed as old cultural artifacts."

Though from an American vantage point the 1,000-year-old Indonesian dance, music and puppet forms may seem antiquated, in Bali and Java they are as contemporary as the latest rap album or TV show.

Shadow puppetry skills tend to run in families (Rahardjo is a seventh-generation puppet master) and the best young dalangs become village celebrities. They spice up their performances with expert mimicry, topical jokes and lively on-the-spot improvisations. And since cultural tourism to Indonesia gained momentum in the 1980s, Balinese and Javanese performers have been very open to sharing expertise with Westerners.

Powell, who has spent time in Bali, points out that a popular artist such as I Made Sidia "has a special magnetism and charisma that are very powerful. We want that to come across unhindered."

Whatever this collaboration produces, Powell says, Indonesia's living, flexible traditions are at the heart of "Visible Religion."