Museu da Marioneta

Wayang Golek and Wayang Klitik

The Golek and Klitik theatre puppets are made of wood and are rarely more than 60 cm tall. In the Golek, the head has carved and painted face details and is fixated on a wooden support that goes through the body and has a sharp end, often strengthened and coated in metal in order to facilitate its fixation. The manipulation of this support allows rotating the puppets’ head and these movements are accompanied by the arms and hands. The arms are connected to the puppet’s body, maintaining their mobility on the shoulders, elbows and hands. The arms’ and hands’ movement is made through thin wooden sticks—or, more rarely, buffalos’ horn—fixated to the hands. This way the puppeteer is able to articulate the movements of the head, arms and hands.

The puppets rarely have legs and usually wear a sarong, a sort of skirt almost always made of batik, which covers their body and hides the support that goes through it and connects to the head. The female characters’ body also wears a sort of blouse which may be made of beautiful lace and adorned with buttons and adornments, in the case of the Gambyong puppets.

The puppets with legs are used to create mythological beings, such as the garuda bird or horses. Each of these animals may be used by different puppets, adding magic and realism to the scenes they perform.

The colour of the puppets’ face is an important identification sign of the respective character. Gold is reserved to characters of divine nature, white and green to princes and nobles, white to servants, and red and brown to demons and aggressive and evil characters.

The Klitik puppets are created from of a wooden board on which the character and the respective support are engraved. Only the arms, made of leather, are movable, thanks to two thin sticks made of wood of buffalo’s horn and fixated to the hands. The two sides of the puppet are contoured and painted with a rich decoration. The character’s clothes, painted in colours and gold leaf with many and delicate details, strengthen and indicate its status.

Similarly to the dances with masks (Topeng), the art of the Golek puppets is usually related to the Saints of Islam, characters who played an essential role in this religion’s expansion in the 16th in Java—traditionally a place of Hindu and animist culture.
The hero of Wayang Golek is Amir Hanzah, a Muslim figure from the Menak cycle; and the hero of the Wayang Klitik is Daman Wulan, a character from the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit. However, in both cases the enacted episodes use a repertoire inspired by the Indian epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata and the adventures of prince Panji.

As in the art of Wayang Kulit, the Dalang is invested of a magical and religious quality and has the liberty to introduce variations in each story. The shows are accompanied by music and combine speech, singing and narrative description of the action. The sung parts use an ancient language called Kawi, and the narrative is told in Indonesian, derived from Malayan.

The shows are long, usually over 9 hours, lasting since the beginning of the evening until early in the morning. This is why the variations introduced by each Dalang are important: watched by the audience and surrounded by the singers and the gamelan, a gong ensemble, drums, flutes and string instruments, he has to pay attention to the continued interest of his sometimes restless public.