The Austrian who fell for Wayang puppetry

CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Bodily Reveries

Courtesy of Theatermuseum, Vienna

Richard Teschner (1879–1948) is famous for developing the artistic potentials of traditional Indonesian Wayang puppetry for a Western audience. While his first major play in 1906 used string puppets, his practice changed forever after encountering Wayang puppets in an Amsterdam museum in 1911 during his honeymoon.

Wayang puppetry is an ancient form of rod or shadow puppet theatre that originated on the Indonesian island of Java in which highly stylised figures with elongated, curved bodies fashioned from elaborately painted and perforated leather are used in religious ceremonies or to recount myths and stories.

Teschner’s encounter with Wayang puppetry inspired him to break from what he saw as the “nervous agitation” and “dangling motion” of marionettes and to develop his practice into a more artistically ambitious form. So, on return from his honeymoon, Teschner and his wife were accompanied by a collection of Wayang puppets, as well as two volumes of Volksdichtung aus Indonesien: Sagen, Tierfabeln und Märchen (Folktales from Indonesia: Sagas, Animal Fables, and Fairytales).

Volksdichtung aus Indonesien by Sagen, Tierfabeln und Märchen, 1904

One year later in 1912, Teschner produced the first of his rod-puppet plays. Although these plays are based loosely on Javanese myths, and like Javanese myths they tell stories of interactions between humans and the divine, none of Teschner’s plays can really be considered part of the Wayang tradition of storytelling.

Instead, Teschner’s practice is best thought of as a kind of hybrid cultural form which was borne out of earlier global flows of Wayang puppets from Indonesia to Europe. I think this is an exciting way of looking at Teschner’s practice; on the one hand, this global flow of Wayang puppets mirrors the supply chains and transnational connections that stretch across the sphere of today’s globalised world, meaning by studying them we can learn more about how we exchange art forms today.

Die unbeteiligten Zuschauer, 1916

Die Verlobten, 1925

These global flows shaped the conditions Teschner was working in. By acknowledging the journey taken by the Wayang puppets from Indonesia to a museum in Amsterdam we are afforded a deeper perspective on the cultural context in which Teschner produced his puppet shows.

What does it mean for Teschner to use inspiration gleaned from his encounters with Wayang puppetry to breathe life into a distinctly European form of rod-puppet theatre? Is this purely appropriation, or is it something else?

Teschner first encountered Wayang puppets in an Amsterdam museum because at the start of the 19th century, Wayang puppets were being transported to Europe in increasingly large quantities. T. S. Raffles, governor of Java during the British interregnum (1811–1816), returned to Britain with hundreds of puppets, leading the British Museum to open the Raffles collection after his wife’s death in 1858.

Once Holland regained control of Java in 1816, many Dutch colonial civil servants would return home with puppets as souvenirs, and there were frequent colonial exhibitions at which wealthy visitors could purchase Wayang puppets for their own personal collections.

Prinzessin II, 1920

Der Rote, 1913

Zipzip, 1916

Der Gelbe (1913), Der Graue (1913), Harlekin (1937), Nawang Wulan (1912) (left to right)

Basilisk, 1937 (left) and Der Graue, 1913 (right)

This European encounter with Indonesian puppetry follows a more general pattern of colonial exploitation: seen in economic terms, the global flow of puppets from Indonesia to colonial exhibitions, stately homes, and museums in Britain and Holland can be described as a form of cultural alienation, where the Wayang puppets lost their ties to the people who crafted them and the conditions in which they were produced.

Javanese Wayang Figures, A Book of Marionettes (1920)

There were similar processes of cultural alienation taking place in Europe at the time, which had been set in motion by the Industrial Revolution (1840) when an immense shift in manufacturing techniques from hand production methods to machines.

In this European context, the work of the craftsman was losing importance as factories were able to mass-produce traditionally handmade products at increasingly cheap rates, and as a result, the standing of skilled artists and artisans such as Teschner was in many ways a precarious one.

Instead of relying on the narrative of scientific progress and rationality, Teschner subverts the rationality of science by creating his own myths and stories which fill the cultural gaps between European modernism and the traditional myths and legends of Wayang.

Matthew Isaac Cohen (2007) has described how in Indonesia the prevalence of traditional norms and values prevented radical experimentation with puppet theatre until the postcolonial era, since Wayang puppets were regarded as ‘pusaka’, or sacred objects. Cohen describes how Wayang puppetry in Indonesia is an “earthy” folk form - what he means by this is that the three-dimensionality of Wayang puppets allows for direct communication with the audience.

Marionettes of Richard Teschner, A Book of Marionettes (1920)

An important part of this audience–puppet interaction is the contrast between the head of the puppeteer, which is visible, and the heads of the puppets he is controlling.

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Since the heads of the Wayang puppets retain a limited degree of animation, the audience reads expressions of joy, anger, proudness, or slyness on the puppeteer’s face as a way of gaining a deeper understanding of the story. This explains why Wayang is followed by the word ‘golek’ in Indonesia, meaning to search or to look for: the puppeteer facilitates the search for meaning by remaining visible throughout the performance.

In contrast, Teschner went to enormous lengths to conceal the control rods that he used to animate his puppets, and to hide himself from view. To do this, he constructed a special stage he called ‘der Figurenspiegel’, a three-winged screen lit from within with a circle of crystal and muslin separating the audience and the puppets.

This allowed for beautiful, cinematic manipulations of illumination and focus, but had the effect of sealing off the puppets from spectators.

What this seems to suggest is that while Indonesian Wayang puppets remained both firmly rooted in tradition (as a way of preserving traditional norms and values, and perhaps to further popular understanding of myths and legends) and ‘transparent’ (the puppeteer remained visible and played an integral part in the telling of the story, which broke the fourth wall and made the audience aware that the play was not a reality), Teschner deliberately adapted and appropriated traditional Wayang techniques, looking to mystify the audience by concealing himself while he staged shows.

These differences in artistic presentation reflect the aims of Teschner’s cultural hybrid practice: I think that Teschner deliberately concealed the workings of his puppet shows in order to subvert the logics of 19th-century science by appearing to animate otherwise lifeless forms, in doing so reinforcing and exaggerating the sense of otherworldly magic and enchantment that he was able to convey.

Teschner had access to Wayang puppets in museums in Europe, but never had the opportunity to study with a puppet master in Java. Yet I think it is partly because of his partial knowledge of Indonesian culture that the Wayang puppets sparked his creativity, allowing him to create his own myths and stories.

It meant that Teschner was able to rework the puppets and alter their technology. They moved in different ways as Teschner applied new techniques to them, creating hybrid forms that were in a process of constant modification and improvement.

I think that Teschner’s puppets should be read as an exciting, hybrid cultural form that demonstrates how global flows of art and ideas, while they can be exploitative, also leave gaps for people to move in new artistic directions and inspire us to live our lives in different ways.

The cultural gaps between Wayang puppets and European modernism allowed Teschner to take new artistic directions, developing new kinds of stories and myths that re-enchanted the secular, rational world in which he lived.

This is especially interesting since the movement of Wayang puppets from Indonesia to Europe during the colonial era seems to foreshadow the supply chains and global flows of ideas and capital that are characteristic of today’s globalised world, and therefore by studying this we might gain further insights into what the exchange of art and stories means today.

His ethereal, mystical puppet creatures make us question what it means for an object to be animate, and remind us of the evocative power of stories and myths, which often have the mysterious power to point past the human.

Maybe, a lot like the ‘pusaka’ puppets in Indonesia, Teschner’s puppets continue to be in some way sacred or spiritual, as they subvert and resist contemporary, dominant models of scientific rationality in favour of something magical, where almost-human creatures are neither alive nor dead.

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