CATEGORY

"The pages that follow are an account of a personal excursion into the world of the wayang golek puppet theater of Indonesia, a world populated by marvelous puppets, the carvers who create them, the musicians whose orchestra accompanies the puppet theater, the audiences whose lives they influence, and the puppet masters themselves, whose powers are respected by villager and city dweller alike.... My original intention was to write a history of the origins of the wayang golek theater, but I quickly realized that the puppeteers are as fascinating as the puppets. The project shifted to an oral history of wayang golek, told in the voices of the puppet masters themselves. Their interpretation of the ideas embedded in the structure of the wayang, their individual philosophies, and their personal reminiscences, interspersed with anecdotes of supernatural events, convey the world of the wayang golek theater directly and personally, in a way that traditional analysis cannot." --- from the Preface