Shadow Puppet

When you spend the night in Yogyakarta while enjoying leather puppet show, you feel alive. The melodious rhythm of the gamelan in harmony with the voices of women singers will not let you sleep. The history presented by the dalang as the puppeteer, as well as the narrator takes you to be one of the characters in the story. You soon learn the greatness of Javanese culture in the past.

Shadow puppet show is a performance art that has been over half a millennium old. Their presence has its own history, in connection with the entry of Javanese Islam. This approval was made from shadow puppet show has been attached to the Javanese people so that they became good media to spread Islam, while Islam prohibits the visual arts. Consequently, shadow puppets are made so that people can see the shadow.

Shadow puppet show is performed by the puppeteer who is also the narrator who is possibly the best artist in the world. All night, he plays all the characters of the puppets of leather that form the human characters from buffalo skin decorated on the occasion of the proceeds of leather carving. He has to change the character voice, change the pitch, the production of humor and even sing. In order to live the atmosphere, the narrator is assisted by the musicians who play gamelan - a traditional Javanese musical instruments - and the woman called sinden singers who sing songs Javanese. The leather puppet show begins when the dalang pulls out a puppet in the form of a mountain called Gunungan.