Wayang Skotlandia: Bima Meets Cuchulain

5 & 6 April 2002 

An intersection of two imaginary worlds, the world of Celtic legend and the world of Javanese myth, featuring shadow puppet and live gamelan music.

Puppeteers: Joko Susilo and Matthew Isaac Cohen
with musical accompaniment by Gamelan Naga Mas

Wayang Kulit, shadow puppet theatre, is an art form intimately associated with the Southeast Asian island of Java, Indonesia. Puppet theatre in Europe is thought of primarily as a children’s art form, but Wayang Kulit is enjoyed and appreciated by adults and children in Java. It is Java’s most important living repository for classical rhetoric, philosophy, traditional etiquette, music and theatre. The solo puppeteer, or dhalang, is a total artist who weaves tales, manipulates puppets, sings songs, provides percussive effects with a wooden knocker and metal plates, utters the occasional incantation, and entertains audiences of all ages with the rough humour of the clowns. Puppets, made from carved and painted buffalo hide, are back lit, casting their filigreed shadows on a white cotton screen. The performance can be watched from both sides of the screen—Wayang Kulit is thus both shadow theatre and puppet theatre simultaneously. Performances tend to be lively social events, with eating and drinking, socialising, gambling and cavorting, as well as spectating.

Musical accompaniment for Wayang Kulit is provided by a Gamelan, or gong-chime musical ensemble. Gamelan is both the name of a set of instruments and of a form of music. A Gamelan orchestra is composed of a variety of metallic xylophones, gongs, sound kettles, drums and other instruments. Gamelan music, figuratively compared to the sound of rippling water, is highly stratified and polyphonic, but not based on Western harmonies. There are two basic tunings—the pentatonic slendro scale and the heptatonic pelog tuning. This performance uses the pelog tuning, a scale usually associated with dance and theatre.

Wayang Kulit might be closely associated Java, with a classical reputation and ancient origin. But that does not make it the exclusive cultural possession of Indonesia nor does it mean that Wayang Kulit has not changed over the centuries. It is a living, vital art form that has made a significant contribution to world theatre, inspiring European and American theatre artists including Edward Gordon Craig and Julie Taymor, as well as generations of Asian playwrights and designers. This production is an attempt to synthesise Indonesian, British and American sensibilities about theatre and event. Wayang Skotlandia (Scottish Wayang), as we have imagined it, uses two puppeteers (traditional Wayang Kulit uses only one), and a variety of rod, shadow and other puppets from Indonesia as well as puppets newly designed by Joko Susilo for this production. It both builds on tradition and departs from it. The puppetry is strongly influenced in particular by techniques of Wayang Sandosa, an experimental shadow puppet form developed at the arts conservatory of Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia Surakarta (Central Java). The social atmosphere is purposefully relaxed, with Indonesian food for purchase, casual seating, and a bar (for adults only!).

The story is an intersection of two imaginary worlds, the world of Celtic legend and the world of Javanese myth. The core of the Celtic part of the play is the story of the marriage of Cuchulain, the Celtic world’s great culture hero. (Our telling is based primarily upon Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and T.W. Rolleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race.)

The Javanese myth concerns Bima, the second-born of the five Pendhawa brothers, The Pendhawa are the central protagonists of the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, which has been known in Java for 1500 years or more, is one of the two great pan-South and Southeast Asian epics. (The other is the Ramayana.) The Mahabharata’s core story concerns the conflict between the warring clans of the Kurawa and the Pendhawa, which ends eventually in the cataclysmic Bratayuda war. In preparation for this war, both sides seek out numerous weapons and boons. Puppeteers are free to weave their own, new stories about such preparations for war, and compose other incidental events that might befall the principal characters of the epic, remaining true to the contours of the characters and situations, but introducing new twists and variations on familiar themes. These newly created plays are known as lakon carangan, or branch plays. (Canonical tales are known as lakon pokok or trunk plays.) The Javanese tale dramatised in this play, Bima’s search for enlightenment and mastery of self, is one such lakon carangan, though closely based on the canonical play Dewa Ruci (The Subtle God).

The performers

Joko Susilo is an eighth generation puppeteer born in Sragen, Central Java, Indonesia. He holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Otago University (New Zealand) and has been a lecturer in puppet arts at Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (The Indonesian Conservatory for the Performing Arts) in Surakarta, Central Java since 1987. Dr Susilo is well known among his generation of puppeteers and has performed internationally in New Zealand, the United States and Great Britain. He is currently Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence at the University of Glasgow and puppeteer-in-residence at the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre. Dr Susilo can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Matthew Isaac Cohen began his studies of Wayang Kulit in 1988, with a Fulbright grant to Indonesia. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Yale University (United States) and is a lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Glasgow. In addition to writing extensively about Indonesian performance, he also practises what he preaches; he has performed Wayang Kulit in Indonesia, the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Dr Cohen can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Gamelan Naga Mas is a community arts group founded in 1990 and currently based at the Tramway. It has performed throughout Scotland and is very privileged to be tutored by Dr Joko Susilo for the academic year 2001-2002 with support from the Glasgow City Council.