maRia Bodmann - America's First Female Dalang

I have always been intrigued by the traditional art form called wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) which translates to “theatre of skin.” This beautiful art form was not very common in Kuala Lumpur while I was growing up, so I never got the chance to see it performed live.

So, you can imagine my surprise when a couple of months ago I learned about the free Balinese wayang kulit workshop MaRia Bodmann would be teaching on Saturday afternoons from February through April 2018. I jumped at the opportunity to attend.

MaRia is America's first female dalang. She is an alum of the prestigious CalArts (based in Southern California) and spent many years in Bali studying traditional gamelan music and later shadow puppetry. 

MaRia eventually founded Bali & Beyond in Los Angeles with a mission to share and promote the incredible Balinese culture and traditions with Westerners. She describes wayang kulit, an ancient Asian tradition over a thousand years old, as the “epitome of multicultural art.”

Not only do I admire MaRia’s passion, commitment, and dedication for learning and later teaching Balinese wayang kulit, but I’m also fascinated by the fact that she is a female dalang, which is extremely rare because, traditionally, dalangs are male. I was very curious to know more about MaRia’s experience learning to be a dalang in Indonesia as a white, female American.

I was also interested to see how she would incorporate modern Western puppets and stories into a wayang kulit performance to make it more exciting and relatable to American audiences.

In the end, I think it’s both funny and ironic that I ended up finding ways to learn both gamelan (which I learned in graduate school in Illinois) and the wayang kulit here in the United States rather than in my homeland of Malaysia, although, it was not for lack of trying.

I guess the universe has other plans for me. Like they say, sometimes you have to travel the world to find home.

MaRia Bodmann passed away peacefully accompanied by her friends and her beloved cat on April 29th, 2019. Her loved ones held a symbolic cremation in Bali in her honour. MaRia was a respected and deeply loved member of the community and helped pioneer gamelan music in the United States. I’m so grateful to have interviewed and me with her. Her memory lives on.