The Puppet Museum in Jakarta, which is also called the Wayang Museum, is a museum that focuses on traditional Javanese puppetry. It is located near Fatahillah Square and is a terrific place to visit, especially if one is interested in soaking up the local culture. Established in 1975, the site occupied by the museum building once belonged to the Old Dutch Church, although the church itself now no longer exists.
Before the Puppet Museum was started, the building it is now in was the premises for the Old Batavia Museum, which was run by the Dutch. However, once Indonesia gained freedom, control of the building went to the Ministry of Education and Culture, which was highly instrumental in starting the Wayang Museum. The museum houses a vast collection of puppets or wayang. ‘Wayang’ is a Javanese word that originally meant ‘shadow’. However, in modern parlance, it has also come to be used to mean ‘puppet’ or ‘puppet theatre’. The two main types of puppets found here are used in wayang kulit and wayang golek. Wayang kulit, which is shadow puppetry, consists of highly stylised puppets. The puppets are moved in front of a light source that is used to project shadows onto a screen made of leather.
Wayang golek, are simple wooden dolls that are operated by using control rods attached from below. Despite their simple construction, the dolls have an astounding range of motion and are even able to perform complex dances. In addition to puppets from the two main forms of Javanese theatre, the museum also contains puppets from Cambodia, India, France, Thailand, Malaysia, China and Vietnam. Visitors will also find wayang paintings and sculptures and even gamelan (an Indonesian ensemble containing mostly percussion instruments) sets.
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