Wayang Golek – Sundanese Puppet Theatre (Indonesia)
Wayang Golek is the wooden puppet theatre tradition of the Sundanese people in West Java. Each performance combines elaborate rod puppets, gamelan music, and a dalang (puppet master) who voices dozens of characters. Drawing upon Hindu epics (Ramayana, Mahabharata) and local legends, it dramatizes moral dilemmas, political satire, and cosmic order.
Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence
In Wayang Golek, the puppet master is not merely a storyteller but a technologist of transformation. Foucault’s late philosophy, especially in The Care of the Self, encourages us to see subjectivity as a crafted artifact, not a fixed essence. In the world of Wayang Golek, characters are indeed artifacts—literally wooden figures—but through voice, rhythm, and gesture, they are imbued with ethical temporality and social commentary.
Foucault saw “technologies of the self” as practices that allow individuals to work on themselves, not by obedience to law, but by creative and reflective self-formation. The dalang, as mediator between myth and audience, guides spectators through an ethical labyrinth—each scene offers models of behavior, deviation, consequence, and above all, ironic introspection. The audience, in absorbing these stylized performances, performs care of the self as spectators, refining their moral perception and cultural memory.
Moreover, Wayang Golek functions as a resistance against historical erasure. Like Foucault’s concern with counter-histories, this theatre preserves indigenous cosmologies and ethics under threat from colonialism, nationalism, or modernity. Its use of double layers—serious epics and comic interludes—echoes Foucault’s fascination with how truth is always layered, discursive, and contingent.
Each puppet becomes what Foucault calls a “speaking self”—not a bearer of transparent truth, but a carefully modulated subjectivity, formed through artifice and performance. Just as the puppet’s limbs are moved by unseen rods, so too are human actions shaped by invisible structures of power, language, and desire.
Wayang Golek, in its reflexivity, becomes a space not only for communal entertainment but for a ritualized pedagogy of care—an unfolding theatre of who we are, who we pretend to be, and who we might become.