Wayang Kulit Jawa

The wayang Kulit Jawa is baasically the Javanese wayang kulit purwa and is performed by peoples of Javanese ancestry in the Southern Malaysian states of Johor and Selangor. Performed in the Malay language along with passages in old Javanese, this type of shadow play retains the characteristics of the parent form, the Javanese wayang kulit purwa, including the use of the Mahabharata chacacters and stories. The finely carved and gilded puppet characters are made from leather in shapes, sizes, and colours which are distinctly Javanese in design.

The gamelan of Central Java, which traditionally accompanies the wayang kulit purwa, consists of a large number of hanging bronze knobbed gongs (the gong agung, suwukan, and kempul), as well as several pot-shaped knobbed gongs (the kenong, ketuk, and bonang) in various sized sets places horizontally in wooden racks. These hanging and potshaped gongs have a time-marking function in the music, ultimately denoting specific musical forms such as those called sampak, srepegan, and ayak-ayak, the three main musical forms used to accompany the Javanese wayang kulit. The bronze-keyed metallophone instruments of the gamelan, such as the sarun, demung, slenthem, and gender, and the wooden xylophone called gambang are also percussion instruments, and provide both the basic and ornamented melodies in gamelan shadow play music.

[Wayang Kulit Gedek][Wayang Kulit Melayu][Wayang Kulit Siam]
| Wayang Kulit In Kelantan | Wayang Kulit In Malaysia |
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Source : Malaysian Shadow Play And Music : continuity of an oral tradition, by Patricia Matusky.