Last week, I had the pleasure of assisting with a wayang gamelan performance for the 60th anniversary of the Indonesia Project at ANU. If you’ve never seen wayang before, a form of Indonesian (mainly Javanese and Balinese) theatre. It uses shadow puppets, which has a big screen with a light projected onto it, with the puppeteer behind the screen with beautifully detailed stick puppets. On the other side of the screen, the audience gets a black-and-white representation of the characters from behind the screen. The puppeteer narrates a story from the Hindu epics the Ramayana or Mahabharatha, but often will add their own spin on the events from the story. A gamelan, the traditional percussion instrument, also accompanies the action constantly.

Oh yeah, it’s also 9 hours long (typically). If you’re used to performance as a tradition where you go and sit and observe something for a period of time, or even in a modern pop concert setting, stand, dance and jump up and down for a period of time, you’re still not going anywhere near 9 hours. Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour was famously long at 4 hours, so you’re looking at over double that for a typical wayang performance. It’s longer, even, than a day’s worth of Test cricket, where the players break for lunch and tea.

Now they did not perform the full 9 hour epic. They did a 40 minute, rapidly condensed version (and even this took some time; talking to the performers their rehearsal the previous night was an hour and a half long). This led to some confusion among the crowd – what are you meant to do during such a long performance? The answer: whatever you want.

Wayang is not like most Western performance traditions, where you are fully focused on the event in front of you. Instead, you are encouraged to go get food and eat during the performance, smoke at the back, talk with friends, and come and go as you please. The performance acts as both a social event to bring together the community, as well as the glue that binds the community together for that night. It’s worth remembering then that performance does not mean one thing in particular. It can mean a range of things, and look like all sorts of things depending on where you are in the world. I, for one, would like to see Western Art Music become more open to interactivity beyond the singular applause at the end of each piece (God forbid you want to applaud the end of a rousing movement).