Shadow theatre: from the wayang of Java to the cabaret of Montmartre
Leather figures, oil lamps and summoned souls: the history of shadow theatre in China, Java and Turkey and in the Paris of the Chat Noir cabaret.
A lamp, a stretched cloth and a few cut-out figures are enough to create a world. Shadow theatre is one of the most widespread and ancient forms of performance in Asia, and in many cultures it has been linked to the world of spirits, ancestors and gods. Its figures do not show bodies directly but their projection, and for this very reason they lend themselves to representing what belongs to another dimension.
The Chinese legend of Lady Li
In China an ancient legend connects the origin of shadow theatre to an episode at the Han court. According to the story, reported in the dynastic histories, Emperor Wu, inconsolable at the death of his favourite consort, Lady Li, turned to a magician called Shaoweng, who one night showed him behind a curtain the figure of the woman he loved. The emperor saw her from afar, unable to approach her.
The story should not be taken as historical evidence of the invention, but it reveals a profound idea: the shadow is a way of making the absent visible. Chinese shadow theatre developed above all in the Song period, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, with figures of donkey or ox hide finely pierced and coloured, and for centuries it remained a popular show linked to festivals and family rites.
The wayang kulit and the dalang
In Java and Bali shadow theatre is called wayang kulit, literally leather shadows. The narrator, called the dalang, sits behind a white screen lit by an oil lamp, the blencong, and single-handedly works dozens of figures, gives them their voices and leads the gamelan orchestra. Performances can last all night and draw on the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, reworked by local culture.
The dalang is not just an actor: in the past he was credited with a ritual role and sacred knowledge, and some performances accompanied ceremonies of purification or protection. According to a traditional Javanese interpretation, the screen represents the world and the lamp the divine light that gives life to forms. In 2003 UNESCO recognised the wayang as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.
Karagöz and the shadows of the Mediterranean
In the Ottoman Empire shadow theatre found its protagonists in two characters, Karagöz and Hacivat: the first a man of the people, blunt and impetuous, the second learned and pompous. Their comic quarrels, performed with figures of translucent, coloured camel hide, were among the typical entertainments of Ramadan nights. Local tradition links the two characters to Bursa, where monuments are dedicated to them.
In Europe ombres chinoises arrived in the eighteenth century and became a fashionable pastime. The high point came in Paris, at the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre, where between 1886 and 1897 the artist Henri Rivière staged shadow shows of great refinement. Among the most celebrated was La Tentation de saint Antoine, of 1887, with demons, queens and visions projected in elaborate sequences.
Shadow theatre inevitably recalls the myth of the cave told by Plato in the Republic, in which the prisoners mistake the shadows cast on the wall for reality. But in the Asian traditions the shadow is not only deception: it is the language through which the invisible allows itself to be glimpsed. In this ambivalence, between illusion and revelation, lies the deep bond between the leather figures and the later art of cinema.