The Art and Craft of Shadow Theatre

The traditional art of wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) is something that’s interested me for a very long time. Wayang kulit translates to “theatre of skin” in English. This wonderful art wasn’t very common in Kuala Lumpur while I was growing up, so I never got to see it performed.

You can imagine my excitement after I learned about MaRia Bodmann’s free Balinese wayang kulit workshop. She teaches on Saturday afternoons from February-April.

Maria is the first female dalang (puppeteer) in the U.S. She attended the prestigious California Institute of the Arts and spent many years in Bali studying traditional gamelan music and shadow puppetry. She then founded Bali & Beyond here in Los Angeles with a mission to share and promote Balinese culture and traditions with anyone willing to learn. Maria describes the ancient art of wayang kulit as the “epitome of multicultural art.”

I admire Maria’s passion and commitment to teaching wayang kulit. I also admire her for becoming a dalang, which is traditionally something only men become. I was curious to learn more about Maria’s experience as a white American woman training to become a dalang in Indonesia. I was also interested to see how she would fuse Western puppets and stories into her performances.

The first thing I noticed when I went to class was the amazing shadow puppets she put on display. Some were traditional and others modern, such as her version of the Mad Hatter from Alice and Wonderland.

Our first assignment was to make a puppet. Maria told us to pick out sketches of one of her puppet characters. She let us know which characters would require the most work. I chose a horse character because I’ve loved horses since I was very young. 

After picking characters, we were each given a plastic chopping board, a wooden mallet, nails, and chisels. Maria instructed us to nail the cardboard to the chopping board. With our mallets and chisels, we carved out the bodies of the puppets by tracing the sketches. For nearly three hours we hammered away at the puppets, which sounded like a symphony of percussion instruments.

In our second class on the following Saturday, we each picked out another character to make. From the next class onward, we’ll write stories for our characters and rehearse for a play, which we’ll perform in front of a live audience at the end of April.

I’ve gotten to meet wonderful people from these workshops. There’s Julia, an elementary school music teacher; Cynthia the animator; and Janet, an expert on gamelan music whose daughter, Lydia, is one of the founders of a band called GamelanX. Lydia’s band plays a mix of samba and Balinese gamelan music they call “Sambelan.” Lydia interested me so much that I’ll write about her and feature her on my upcoming YouTube series.

I think it’s funny and ironic that I ended up learning how to play the gamelan and wayang kulit in the U.S. rather than Malaysia. I tried really hard to learn this back in Malaysia, but it was extremely difficult then. Hopefully there will be more opportunities in the future.