Light and shadow: Wayang kulit's intangible cultural heritage
Adel Ahmad, managing director of performing arts group Sri Warisan, speaks to Kaya on how traditional shadow puppetry has brought him closer to his heritage, and how he developed a “Singapore style” of wayang kulit.
- 1 Nov 2024
Wayang kulit’s name translates to “shadows in [animal] hide” from Javanese.
What is heritage? Is it great monuments that still stand tall, centuries or even millennia after they've been built? Or famous works of art that attract adoring visitors from around the world?
All the above can be considered heritage. But heritage can also exist in things that we cannot see or that are interactive, such as ideas, practices, or even performances that are not inanimate, but constantly moving and changing.
Sometimes it can be hard to discover these facets of one’s heritage when they haven't been passed down the way they used to be. Puppeteer Adel Ahmad says that growing up, he didn’t really understand what it meant to be Javanese.
“Once in a while my family would eat Javanese food or holiday in Yogyakarta,” he recalls, “apart from that I didn’t speak the language or have much knowledge.”
All the above can be considered heritage. But heritage can also exist in things that we cannot see or that are interactive, such as ideas, practices, or even performances that are not inanimate, but constantly moving and changing.
Sometimes it can be hard to discover these facets of one’s heritage when they haven't been passed down the way they used to be. Puppeteer Adel Ahmad says that growing up, he didn’t really understand what it meant to be Javanese.
“Once in a while my family would eat Javanese food or holiday in Yogyakarta,” he recalls, “apart from that I didn’t speak the language or have much knowledge.”
But everything changed in the early 2000s, when Adel returned from studying mass communications in Canada and attended a Malay cultural workshop that inspired him to investigate his heritage further.
“I realised I wanted to build a stronger personal connection to my cultural history,” he says.
Adel was particularly intrigued by wayang kulit, a form of shadow puppetry that flourished in earlier decades of Singapore’s history but had almost died out by the millennium.
Adel has become a leading figure in Singapore’s wayang kulit revival.
Into the shadows
Javanese wayang kulit is an ancient artform where colourful shadow puppets made of animal skins are projected onto a cotton screen. Typically reserved for grand ceremonies or special occasions, performances retell important Javanese myths about good vs. evil.
Wayang kulit is a form of Singapore’s intangible cultural heritage (ICH). ICH can take the form of knowledge, practices, and crafts that have been passed down through generations, the preservation of which helps us appreciate and respect the world’s inherent diversity.
"I thought about the history of Kampong Glam and how it must have been like before TVs or phones,” he says, “when the screen people sat in front of had puppeteers behind it. I wanted to revive wayang kulit as an artform and make it an industry.”
Having recently become managing director of his mother’s performing arts company Sri Warisan, Adel and his team began studying wayang kulit under various masters from Indonesia.
They learned to play musical instruments like the gamelan and angklung, voice act, and puppeteer, however there was a nagging sense that the Javanese myths they were rehearsing “didn’t really reflect our lives in Singapore,” says Adel.
Audiences delight in seeing two-dimensional characters brought to life through artful puppetry.
Something new
Over the years, Sri Warisan developed what Adel calls a “Singapore style” of wayang kulit, or “wayang kulit Singapura”.
The company first began creating original puppets of lions and legendary local figures. Later they got more creative, putting an anachronistic spin on Singapore’s founding myth featuring motorcycles and other modern touches.
Wayang kulit performances are usually soundtracked by a gamelan orchestra.
“Before Marvel movies got popular, we made puppets of superheroes that were more familiar to kids,” says Adel, “then we used them to introduce ‘ancient superheroes’ like Rama and Hanuman.”
As a form of living heritage, Sri Warisan’s wayang kulit has evolved to meet the times. These days, the company’s ensemble of characters spans everyone from Superman to schoolboys to Sang Nila Utama, reflecting the heroes of different generations and stages of life.
Pop culture icons like Superman have been incorporated into Sri Warisan’s tales of good triumphing over evil.
Schooling the children
Adel says that he and his troupe perform almost every other day, when they bring wayang kulit to Singapore’s schools through multi-day workshops.
The school environment sometimes stretches the artform to its limit.
A classical wayang kulit performance is “outdoors, can start at sunset, and last till sunrise,” Adel says, “at school it’s daytime, we must find a way to make the classroom dark, and each session has to be very chop-chop, no more than 45 minutes.”
Although schoolchildren’s excitement for Sri Warisan’s wayang kulit workshops is rewarding, Adel says there is nothing quite like a full-scale live performance like the one the company mounted at the recent Singapore Night Festival.
A “wayang kulit jumbo” experience can involve three-metre wide screens, animated LED backdrops, and puppets leaping in front of the screen to play with human performers. “People love the interactivity,” Adel says.
Adel and his team have performed at outdoor venues all over Singapore, bringing wayang kulit back to its nocturnal roots.
Continuing the tradition
Sri Warisan also participates in international festivals with the ASEAN Puppetry Association and UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette), where they get to meet puppeteers from different traditions.
Adel is sometimes concerned about how people will react to Sri Warisan’s innovations in wayang kulit, but the troupe’s new ideas have largely been well-received. “We have been surprised by their response, and more importantly encouraged,” he says.
Asked about what his hopes are for wayang kulit’s future, he is more than just hopeful: “There are many, many possibilities. For as long as people invite us to perform, we will be there.”
