| This thesis is a study of the gender-construction and aesthetics of the so-called female style of gender playing during the all-night performance of shadow-puppet theatre in Central Java. It was once usual for the wife of a Central Javanese dhalang or puppeteer to perform on the gender as his main accompanist. During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this practice became less and less common. At the same time, the musical and theatrical practice of shadow-puppet performance in Central Java became more codified and rule-bound in ways which reflect male Javanese preoccupations with issues of potency and order. The style in which urban, educated Central Javanese male musicians and dhalang now perform is considered the norm, the "essential" Central Javanese style, the creation and development of which is located in the realm of "the ancients", that is, the Central Javanese courts. This process has defined everything else--Central Javanese village styles and other Javanese regional styles--as marginal, as aberrations, as dilutions of the "pure" or "true" Central Javanese court style, as "other". Female-style gender playing falls into the latter category. It is described as uncontrolled, rule-less, and guided by feeling or rasa. Yet, it is this style of accompaniment, in contrast to the rule-bound, refined performance of male-style genderan, that many wayang enthusiasts and performers still feel is most suited to the traditional performance of wayang. Based on sources ranging from the twelfth-century Javanese version of the Bharatayuddha to wayang performances from 1995, my analysis of female-style genderan examines this seeming paradox and begins the reconstruction of an older Central Javanese aesthetic in which the interaction between maleness and femaleness--as the generative interaction between chaos and order--was expressed on many levels in wayang from the stories told to the aural interaction between the "female" sounds of the gender and the "male" sounds of the dhalang's voice. |
