Over the last few years, a group of young arts practitioners - visual artists, stage performers, musicians, graphic designers, writers - have been working towards understanding the Wayang Kulit Siam performance, the Kelantanese variant of the South East Asian shadow puppetry form.
This understanding is then translated into new performance forms - experimentations, really - that help to consolidate our findings or to articulate certain questions we have about what we have found so far. Working from form and traveling inwards into the narrative structure of the wayang form, we have had to attend to questions as elementary (though not simple) as "Why the use of leather?", "Why electric bulbs and not an open flame?", to "What does it mean to improvise?", among many others.
We hope that through learning this wayang form as a point of departure, we can eventually acquire some measure of performance sensibility and a degree of understanding of why wayang developed like it did in Kelantan (and also its sister forms in Java, Cambodia, Thailand, et al), and how a city like Kuala Lumpur (where most of us are currently based) can tell her stories through her own form of wayang.
This blog is a collection of exploits, thoughts, and articulations of our adventures in wayang.
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