My Bodies
The Performer in West Java
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14997343 |
|---|---|
| Authors | K Foley (0000-0002-3036-8493, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 62 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TDR/The Drama Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1054-2043 • E-ISSN: 1531-4715 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1146027 |
| OpenAlex | W2331924729 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 2 |
soul changes its abode, the soul changes its abode, changes its garments, sings the dalang (puppetmaster) of the wayang golek, the Sundanese puppet theatre of West Java, Indonesia. While chanting, the performer replaces one puppet with another; a refined lady becomes a dynamic warrior; a fanged ogre sports the svelte body of Arjuna, playboy of the Eastern world; a fat, hermaphroditic clown appears in the glorious form of a divinity. The Sundanese do not necessarily feel, as I believe most Americans do, that our individual human body and soul are inextricably bound together till death do us part: This lyric on the moveable soul, sung for each of the many transformations that may occur in a performance, tells us as much. It would not occur to the Sundanese to worry, as I did in the back rows of my Catholic school classroom, about the age and state of development my body would have reached when Gabriel's horn called it forth for eternal reunion with my soul at the world's end. Memoirs of a Catholic girlhood may seem an odd beginning to a description of how performers in West Java learn to multiply their bodies in performance by learning to play via masks (topeng) and puppets (wayang). Yet the recollections, I hope, suggest the distance I have traveled in my 15 years of studying the theatre of West Java. Though I speak as an individual, my experiences participate in the cultural distance that exists between a contemporary Westerner's passionate embrace of the individual body, personal identity, and history as the beginning point from which an artist works to sketch her/his view of the world, and the way the Sundanese and Cirebonese people of West Java work against individual mannerisms, personality, and history to find the range these circumstances of life limit. The distance I have traveled, though it seems vast, is no longer than the three-foot trip up the human spinal column: the stylized characters that each performer learns to dance as masks and manipulate as puppets are, I will reveal, ways of introducing the performer to different energies and balance points that are latent in each human body. Through the one body we inhabit in this life we can, with the help of these puppets or masks and the ideas they encode, embody the whole cosmos
Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Memoir · Performing arts · Soul · Theology · Asian Studies and History · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1998 - 2021 (24) |
| Highly cited | No |