A Wrinkle in Time: The Shadow Puppet Theatre of Banyumas (West Central Java)

Abstract

This article is about a wrinkle in time, what the writer Madeleine L'Engle whimsically calls a tesseract, when the space-time continuum seems to fold up on itself, bringing together alternate times and places. Specifically, it is about a wrinkle in the flow of dramatic time during performance of Javanese shadow puppet theatre, or wayang kulit. This wrinkle brings about a peculiarly sustained moment of timelessness squarely in the middle of an all-night wayang story. It is a part of the evening's performance in which dramatic time is disrupted and clowns make their appearance to entertain, with songs and general tomfoolery, both the audience and characters of the story. This part of the wayang performance is known as gara-gara, a term that is common coin in both the Javanese and Indonesian languages and widely used to describe conditions of mayhem, uproar, confusion, and general unhappiness. In Central Javanese wayang kulit, the term gara-gara has even greater implications and refers to a specific dramatic phenomenon in the performance. Brought about through a crisis in the narrative, gara-gara represents an upheaval of the wayang cosmos-a retreat into

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