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which would have made his shadow even more dramatic during
performance. Bima's face is black, but he's wearing gold clothes and
brightly coloured decorations. Although he's lifeless and fragile now,
about two hundred years ago, Bima would have enthralled
audiences in all-night performances at a Javanese court. This kind
of performance was known then, and still is known, as the Theatre
of Shadows.
As we're going to see in this programme, our puppet's actual shape
is the product of one of the most dramatic religious changes of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Spain was converting the
New World to Catholicism, Islam spread across what is today
Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines.
By 1600, most Javanese people were Muslim, but the Theatre of
Shadows had been a feature of life in Java long before the arrival of
Islam. Bima himself is a character known not just in Java, but across
the whole of India, because he figures in the great Hindu epic, the
Mahabharata. In Java, though, this Hindu character came to be
operated by Muslim puppeteers, and he performed in front of
audiences who were also mainly Muslim. Nobody seems to have
minded - and the Indonesian Theatre of Shadows has continued to
combine pagan, Hindu and Muslim elements right up to today.
Making a puppet like our Bima was, and still is, a highly skilled job,
requiring several different craftsmen. Bima is made out of carefully prepared buffalo-hide, that has been scraped and stretched until it
becomes thin and translucent, and it was this material that gave the
Javanese name for the theatre itself, wayang kulit' - skin theatre.
The puppet was then gilded and painted, moveable arms were
added, and handles were made from buffalo-horn fixed to the body
and arms to control its movement. Historically, performances in the
Theatre of Shadows lasted throughout the night. Light from an oil
lamp behind the puppeteer's head cast the shadows from the
puppets onto a white sheet. Some members of the audience usually the women and children - sat on the shadow side of the
screen, while the men would sit on the favoured other side, where
the features and colours of the puppets could be seen. The
puppeteer, known as a dalang', would not only control the