Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
help of a dalang actually performs the story.
There is a restitution of the winds and the
spirit, and the patient is treated ‘for now’.
There is always a condition, a qualification, at
the end of the ritual in which they tap you,
beat you and push you into awakening and
then they cleanse the ritual stage by tearing
down every single object there so that all the
bad stuff scuttles away. The patient is brought
back to his original condition, that condition
being ‘for now’; the audience is quite aware
that it will happen again and again.
Training the Dalang
So where does the Rama story or the Ravana
story fit into this consciousness? It is a very
important aspect in the training of a dalang.
Not just anybody can be a puppeteer. You
need to have the Angin, the wind, you need to
have the Semangat or the spirit of a
puppeteer. This is how a potential dalang is
identified: A child of about five or six would
have an obsession with Wayang. He would go
for every single performance, try to get onto
the stage, and so on. All this is observed by
the dalang, and if he sees the child often
enough he would get a sense that this child
could be a dalang. Or else the child might
display a passion for the form by making
puppets with leaves and paper. When that
happens, the family brings the child to a
master puppeteer. They build a shed in which
the boy can be trained, give offerings to the
puppeteer in the form of tobacco, rice, biscuits