Here's a post from Global Christian Worship featuring a contemporary shadow puppet play by Dan Stevers that tells the story of Pentecost. The video comes at the end, preceded by some background information about the cultural history of shadow puppetry in Asia. For more information about traditional Indonesian Christian Shadow Puppetry, click here and here.
I recently came across this art show video (see below) of Christian Indonesian shadow puppets, or Wayang Wahyu. The puppets were created by Indonesian businessman and graduate student Baroto Murti Anindito and was first shown at Anindito's school, the University of Santo Tomas in Manilla, Philippines, from August 16 to September 21. The show is currently on display at the GSIS Museo ng Sining (Museum of Art) in Pasay City, Philippines through October 29th. The multimedia exhibition features some of the original shadow puppets done by Baroto, photographs and an audio-visual presentation that shows how the intricate puppets are made and how they are actually handled during an actual Wayang performance.
Wayang is an Indonesian form of shadow puppet theater that dates back to sometime during the first millenium A.D. Wayang Wahyu is a Catholic form of shadow theatre created in 1960 in central Java by Brother Timotheus L. Wignyosoebroto as a way to communicate the stories and ideas in the Bible. You can read more about Wayang Wahyu in a previous post of mine.
Photographs of some of the exhibit's 40 puppets can be seen here and here.
Today I'd like to discuss the Indonesian art form of Wayang, or shadow puppetry, and its use by Christians to express the Gospel. Much of my information for this post came from an article by Marzanna Poplawska for the Asian Theatre Journal. In order to download a copy of the article, I signed up for a free trial account on Questia, downloaded the article, and then cancelled the subscription. It's well worth a read.
