A contemporary artist brings new life to a moribund Indonesian theatre genre

Assistant Professor (Practice) Margaret Chan writes about the art-form of Wayang beber. Indonesian artist Dani Iswardana had created four such scrolls intended for use in performance, of which the fourth was done during his artist-in-residency at SMU in late 2009. The fully-drawn scroll has not been completely painted and tells of a visit to Singapore by Semar, the corpulent wayang clown much beloved of Javanese audiences.