Wayang shadow theatre In Bali Part 8

Genre occupies the bottom of the triangle serving as the foundation or base, which accommodates the story and the characters. Among the three components, genre is the most identifiable feature, establishing an autonomic form. While the same story and characters may appear in a few different genres, the form will be clear from the genre. Almost the entire structure of the genre, music, style of costume, customary way of improvising a performance, etc., may be seen in one single holistic presentation, but only the selected parts of the story and characters will appear in that performance because the genre has very limited space to accommodate dramatic scenes. For example, in the Wayang genre, the dalang typically selects only one sad scene, one love scene and one climax for each performance, although the narrative from which he draws has many more scenes of

each type.

The story and characters slope up from the foundation to form a perfect triangle. These two slanting positions are appropriate, because story and characters are relatively less stable/crucial than genre. Dalang artists do not often reveal the story and characters they are going to perform until the show begins. Sometimes the artist does this to surprise the audience with a

Wayang Kulit

new story. At other times he may want to access rumours and gossip among the performance patrons before making a choice of the story to perform. Even when a story has been pre-selected by the artist in accordance with the type of a ceremony, local circumstances may prompt the dalang to suddenly change the story to a more appropriate version. He constructs a play in one of three ways:

1. by excerpting the plot from the main line of the potential story as given in Kawi literature (kakawin);
2. by reconstructing a play from an existing Wayang play he has seen (pakem);
3. by creating new stories (lakon carangan) based on minor incidents in

the main body of the epic. No matter how the dalang generates the story, the bottom line is always to activate the harmony between genre, story and character. Modifications to the story and the characters are adjusted to comply with the necessary form of the genre, until all parts of genre–story–character are harmoniously balanced.