Description
Book SynopsisJavanese shadow puppetry is a sophisticated dramatic form, often felt to be at the heart of Javanese culture, drawing on classic texts but with important contemporary resonance in fields like religion and politics. How to make sense of the shadow-play as a form of world-making? In
Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind, Bernard Arps explores this question by considering an all-night performance of
Dewa Ruci, a key play in the repertoire. Thrilling and profound, Dewa Ruci describes the mighty Bratasena’s quest for the ultimate mystical insight.
The book presents the Dewa Ruci as rendered by the distinguished master puppeteer Ki Anom Soeroto in Amsterdam in 1987. The book’s unusual design presents the performance texts together with descriptions of the sounds and images that would remain obscure in conventional formats of presentation. Copious annotations probe beneath the surface and provide an understanding of the performance as a highly sophisticated and multi-layered creation. These annotations explain the meanings of puppet action, music, and shifts in language; how the puppeteer wove together into the drama the circumstances of the performance in Amsterdam, Islamic and other religious ideas, and references to contemporary Indonesian politics. Also revealed is the performance’s historical multilayering and the picture it paints of the Javanese past.
Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind not only presents an unrivalled insight into the artistic depth of wayang kulit, it exemplifies a new field of study, the philology of performance.
Trade Review"This voluminous and meticulously crafted book is different from the currently 'normal' books in the Indonesian Studies that are often revised versions of PhD theses. Rather, it represents the result of almost thirty years of work [...] Annotations and appendices make up the remaining roughly 200 pages. It is these annotations, together with the Introduction, that make the book so valuable, as they contain in-depth explanations and references to the rich body of scholarly knowledge of Javanese philology. [...] In other words, Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind
might represent an example of a sub-field of Indonesian studies that is increasingly rare. — Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG)
