EPISODE ONE. INDONESIAN GAMELAN AND WAYAN KULIT THEATER.

In the first episode of our course, we will talk about gamelan - the amazing Indonesian orchestra that can be heard in the Indonesian shadow puppet theater. Europe first became acquainted with gamelan relatively recently, just over a hundred years ago. This happened in 1889 at the World Exhibition in Paris. It was an exhibition of achievements in European industry and the most exotic artifacts from all over the world. In particular, there was a Javanese pavilion where you could watch Javanese dances and listen to traditional music. The listeners even included composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. Debussy heard in gamelan what he himself was looking for in music - new soundscapes, unusual combinations of sounds. It is believed that gamelan greatly influenced his work, as well as Satie's work. We can find traces of the influence of gamelan in the music of Benjamin Britten, John Cage, the rock band King Crimson, Radiohead and so on - it is quite an influential sound phenomenon.

How is it constructed? This is an Indonesian orchestra, consisting mainly of very large bronze gongs and huge metallophones with a long fading sound. There are also drums, rebab, flute, there may be vocals, but the basis of the gamelan sound is this flowing, shimmering, copper-bronze sound mixture.

Gamelan has its own tuning. There is no other tuning like it anywhere except in Indonesia. Moreover, Java has its own, and Bali has its own. And moreover, each individual gamelan has its own tuning. That is, all the instruments within the orchestra are tuned in a certain way and you cannot take an instrument from one orchestra and move it to another - they will not match.

Within the orchestra there are paired instruments. That is, two identical types, for example, large metallophones, which are tuned slightly differently, one slightly higher, the other slightly lower. And one is called "inhaling" and the other "exhaling". The overlapping sound waves create beating. And this beating is associated by Indonesians with the beating of the human heart. Breathing, heart beating - that's how life appears in gamelan. This is what gamelan listeners value highly.

Most often, gamelan can be heard at performances of the traditional Indonesian shadow puppet theater called "wayang kulit".

Gamelan is quite an ancient tradition, it has existed since the 9th century. But the Indonesian shadow theater is much older. Despite the fact that all performances are based on excerpts from the Indian epics - the Mahabharata, the Ramayana - Indonesian scholars believe that "wayang kulit" is older than that, that there is not only Indian influence in it. And perhaps the origins of this theater should be sought in Ancient Egypt or Babylon.

The Indonesian shadow theater is famous for its long performances. They can last all night, starting in the evening and ending in the morning - eight, nine hours. And the main person in this theater is the dalang, the puppeteer - he does everything alone. He works with all the puppets at once. He controls the light. He speaks all the texts, and there are a lot of texts there. He sings and speaks for all the characters. And he also conducts the gamelan orchestra that sits behind him. Since his hands are busy, he cannot speak either, between his toes he has a special mallet with which he taps on the wooden box with puppets and thus signals the orchestra.

The orchestra, in turn, has a very large and diverse repertoire suitable for different scenes: music for love scenes, battles, farewells, introductions, finales. And the dalang gives signals so that the musicians smoothly transition from passage to passage, partially improvising, but on the whole rather assembling their sound canvas.

The dalang is a very respected person in Indonesian society, because he composes special plays for all important events in the lives of clients. Wedding, building a new house, birth of a child... The dalang composes a play about the future life of the little Indonesian. And of course, he holds great power in his hands. It is no coincidence that many perceive the dalang as a shaman. The shadow theater is seen by many as a metaphor for the world, where the dalang is God, the puppets are people, the open-flame lamp is the sun, the banana log into which the puppets are stuck is the earth on which we walk. That is, he controls a small universe. And he also controls the sound, which is very important.
It is very interesting to listen closely to this sound. It is a separate sound world that can greatly expand our acoustic perceptions. Gamelan is easiest to use this way. Try to figure out these intersecting rhythms, and complex melodies, expand your auditory perception - and this can influence how you listen to music in general.
I would highlight two directions in studying gamelan - the mystical and the practical. Speaking of the mystical, I mean the idea that all the musicians of the gamelan, playing at the same time and listening to each other very carefully, reveal a hidden unplayed melody. One big melody of the orchestra manifests itself only when everyone plays at the same time and listens to each other. You may not hear it, and even the musicians themselves may not, it is hidden - but it is there. And this can easily be translated as a metaphor for the work of any creative team. When you do something together, create something new, by feeling each other, you reveal this hidden melody. And only when it sounds, everything starts to work. It is important to note here that there is no conductor in gamelan, it has a horizontal structure in which the most important thing is the sense of community, the sense of one's neighbor. And there is no room for virtuosity. Although each individual musician plays quite skillfully, there is no place for soloists here - or rather, everyone is a soloist.
There are now many recordings of gamelan, which can be used very effectively in theatrical productions. This is very meditative, fairy tale music that quickly immerses the listener into a trance state. Of course, it works especially well live. If you have the opportunity to use live gamelan or even just a set of gongs, the vibrations emanating from them are felt not only with our ears but with our whole body. It is a very physical feeling that works strongly.
In addition, if you understand how the musical passages are edited within the large wayang kulit performance, this skill can be useful when creating any production. Because the editing of live music, which the dalang skillfully weaves into his narrative, is something worth learning.

EPISODE TWO - INDIAN SHADOW THEATRE
An ancient Indian legend tells of how the gods decided where to hide universal wisdom from humans. On the highest mountain? Humans would most likely get there. In the ocean? They would be able to dive down. And so the gods decided to hide wisdom in dreams. Commentators add that reflections of this wisdom can also be found in epic texts. What happens when you combine dreams and epic tales? You get the Indian shadow theater that we are talking about in this episode.
Indian shadow theater is one of the most ancient theatrical traditions on the planet. It obviously influenced the Indonesian wayang kulit that we discussed last time. Apparently, the European tradition of marionettes also originates from it. This art form took shape around the first millennium BC.
And it's no wonder that there are so many different theatrical schools in India. There are more than twenty different puppetry schools. And there are more than six types of shadow theaters. And when I say different, I mean they are really different.
For example, the Tolubommalata tradition from the state of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu: the puppets are huge, one and a half to two meters, that is, literally human-sized. Bright, colorful, transparent, and jointed. And the puppeteers literally dance with them, it's a kind of shadow dance. They wear special anklet bells on their feet, and they also keep the rhythm by stomping their feet on special wooden planks. This is a dance shadow performance.
And the Ravanachayya theater from the state of Odisha - these are black, opaque, small puppets. They are not jointed, the movements are quite simple. But there are a lot of puppets, up to 130 can be used in a performance, handled by about five people.
And in the state of Kerala, shadow theater is the domain of professional poets. Therefore, their shows are full of very stylized and vivid poetry and prose readings.
And in the neighboring state, it is not poets but hereditary musicians who are engaged in it. Therefore, this theater is very musical, there is more music there than in other places.
These are really very different traditions.
But there is also what unites them.
Firstly, all these puppet traditions, and in general the whole of Indian theater and dance, are united by the theory of rasas - the theory of emotions. The main task of the theater is to pull the listener out of this reality and place them in another one, where they can observe the quirky workings of their own consciousness and solve spiritual and moral issues.
Therefore, a complex system was developed that allows the creator of the performance to convey certain emotional states, complexes - they are called rasas. There is a love rasa, comic, tragic or heroic. Each rasa corresponds to its own set of theatrical techniques, colors, movements, poses, eye movements. The color of the puppets, the color of the background, the music - everything has its meaning.
This is what unites any theatrical schools in India, and dance as well.
Indian shadow theater and puppet theater is a very rhythmic affair. The performance is accompanied by at least one percussionist using one of the varieties of Indian drums. Singing can be added, sometimes an accordion, small drums with a harsh sound. But basically, it's a percussive soundtrack.
It is based on a system called konnakol. This is a system of vocalized syllables. Each syllable resembles a certain drum stroke. When learning this art, you first learn to rhythmically speak in syllables, and then play.
At some point Western musicians discovered this system. Jazz and rock musicians use it.
Speech has its own melodic line, and any phrase has a rhythm that can be extracted, transformed and used from it.
And this is what works well in any production, music, or creative endeavor. When you understand how music works in Indian shadow theater, you inevitably learn to understand rhythm. As well as understanding Indian classical music, which is a separate musical universe.
Many shadow performances can last a day, a week, there are even three-week-long productions. Every evening is another episode, somehow connected with the previous one. This is a different, unfamiliar type of form for us, which is not very easy to work with, it combines different multimedia things.
It is used by many directors. One example is the productions of Robert Wilson, who traveled to India in the 1960s to get acquainted with local theater and was very inspired by it. And the music of Philip Glass, who accompanied Wilson on these trips, is an example of how you can come up with completely new minimalist music based on ideas from Indian classical music.

EPISODE THREE. 20TH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNING OF NEW MUSIC
Up until the beginning of the 20th century, everything was clear. Music was made by specially trained people - musicians, who were given music written by other specially trained people - composers. All this was performed in special places - concert halls, philharmonics. In highbrow music, the ability to work with form, harmony and counterpoint was valued. And in more popular music - the ability to create a memorable melody. Highbrow music has never been harmed by this either.
What happened next?
Under the influence of what surrounded the world of music, composers began to abandon the usual foundations and techniques.
All was discarded. New compositional techniques appeared. The most influential is called the twelve-tone or dodecaphonic technique, the term "serial music" is also still in use, because in its composition series of sounds are used. The composer writes out a series of notes, and after choosing one, cannot use it until he has used the others. This is a kind of musical combinatorics. In this system, you cannot write, for example, three repeating notes in a composition. This system was devised by composer Arnold Schoenberg. And he was sure that this would create completely new music that would glorify his native Germany.
In this music there is no strong or weak, stable or unstable, all sounds are equal, and it seems to hang in airless space. It lacks the gravity we are used to. That's why it sounds disheveled, nervous, a little alien. Very expressive, but far from previous notions of "melody" and "harmony". Not everyone succeeded in falling in love with it right away, and it’s no coincidence that at one of Schoenberg's premieres in Vienna, listeners tried to stop the concert by force, fought and had to be separated by the police - this went down in history as the "Skandalkonzert".
There was a strong interest in new and unusual rhythms and polyrhythms. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" is one such example. Its "barbaric rhythms" amazed listeners at the time. Bela Bartok did the same, extracting unusual rhythms from Hungarian folklore. Later Steve Reich studied African rhythms in New York. And so on.
Also - new and unusual sounds and their combinations. It was a time when everyone was interested in new instruments. New electroacoustic instruments were invented - theremin, early synthesizers, sound machines. Composers tried to listen to the industrial world around them, it was a time of worshiping machines. Music was written where the symphony orchestra imitated the sounds of a factory or steam engine, while on the other hand, symphonies were written for sirens, factory horns and artillery brigades. The Futurists wrote in their manifestos that the real sounds of new machines and everything around us should finally penetrate into concert life. There was more and more such music.
As a result, by pushing aside interest in melodies and harmonies, composers began to listen to timbres. It turned out that the sound of a creaking chair was no less interesting to a composer than the sound of a violin. You can write music for absolutely any sounding objects - not just musical instruments.
Now music is performances, happenings, sound installations - and it can be performed by any volunteers. And not necessarily on musical instruments. It can be anything and with anything.
As a result, music was reduced to John Cage's short definition: "music is sounds and silences". And even more than that. Everything we do is music, Cage said.
Now listening to the timbre of a sound, unusual sound combinations and what happens on stage has become an important part of the theatrical profession. Especially, of course, when we talk about "object theater".
The ability to record a complex sound score, including not only sound, but everything around it - light, movement - has become not only a compositional craft, but also a directorial one.
We can give another maxim from Cage: "The viewer has not only ears, but eyes." A theater director should flip it and remember that the viewer has not only eyes, but ears. What the viewer hears is no less, and sometimes more important than what he sees.
And probably the most important conclusion made by the creators of modern music is that it is born in the listener's head. The main thing now is not the musician, not the composer, not the conductor. But the one who hears this music. Only we assemble inside ourselves what the composer came up with. Only we become the lens that collects all the rays; inside which new music is born. Of course, this also applies to new theater.

EPISODE FOUR. LOTTE REINIGER
At the beginning of the 20th century, shadow theater, the art of silhouettes, an obsession with the "magic lantern" and early photography led to the birth of a new medium - animation and cinematography. It is known, for example, that the "father of cinema" Georges Méliès was inspired not only by the discoveries of illusionists, but also by Chinese shadow theater. Today we will talk about one of the most striking, talented and underappreciated heroines of that time, the German artist Lotte Reiniger. She came up with a way to animate the ancient art of paper silhouettes - and turned it into experimental theater on the screen.
She made the first full-length color animated film in history - it was the film "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" in 1926, and she was the first to build the first multi-perspective camera capable of working with multiple planes and creating the illusion of depth in the frame. It was precisely such a camera that Walt Disney carefully studied, improved and patented as his own. It was Disney who made animation accessible to everyone.
But Lotte, despite having made over 60 films and having lived quite a long life, remained in the shadows. This is largely due to the fact that she was a woman, and the medium she chose was associated not so much with art, let alone new art, as with handicrafts. It is no coincidence that in film critic Siegfried Kracauer's famous work "From Caligari to Hitler," which was about the world of German expressionism, Lotte Reiniger is given one line: "among all this a quiet woman cut silhouettes out of paper, creating her own worlds".
She really did create her own worlds. She cut out 250,000 silhouettes to create her feature film. But she was in the circle of the same visionaries who made German and world art so amazing. Her partner and collaborator Walter Ruttmann, the director we know for his outstanding film work "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City," worked side by side with Reiniger, their editing desks were next to each other, and they borrowed ideas from each other.
Now, as we peer into these old films, we can learn a lot from them. Reiniger worked with music in a very special way. In her early works you can hear the rhythm, she was a master of visual rhythm, working with ornamentation, sound poetry. Her shots always have an inner music. And when she was finally able to use sound, she made a short film to the music of her beloved Mozart, where the music defines everything in the action.
And it is precisely in order to understand how to work with music on stage and screen that one can still study Reiniger's works today. Her sense of music was really something special. This is what can still be learned from Reiniger today.

EPISODE FIVE. MUSIC IN CONTEMPORARY THEATER
In the last episode of the course we will try to observe how the complex of ideas that we discussed in previous episodes finds its embodiment in contemporary theater. Figurative theater, object theater, puppet theater, shadow theater, and theater as such. Let me remind you of some of these ideas that directors can use.

1. Understanding a performance as a musical piece, where actors play the role of instruments or rather individual notes or colors in a score. They are no more or less important than the light score, sets, and objects on stage.
2. Interest in timbres, common to all new 20th-century music. What sounds on stage, how does it sound? What music is created by the actors' movements, the movement of objects?
3. Interest in music as the engine of action, where the musical fabric creates the framework. Or conversely, the stage action creates a musical play for the eyes and ears.
4. Interest in non-narrative forms. Composers abandoned attempts to tell stories through their music and moved on to depicting emotional states, and theatrical directors began to do the same.
5. And finally, the emancipation of individual timbres, the emancipation of the object. Schoenberg liberated sound in general and dissonance in particular from its bad credit history, saying that any sound and dissonant interval is important. And contemporary artists have stated that any object is important. Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a museum hall, saying that it is no less important than a great masterpiece. The emancipation of the object led to the emergence of a separate theater - object theater. Which is made either from very simple, poor materials, or there may be a piece of very complex machinery, but the focus is suddenly not on the actor, as it used to be, but on a single object, or complex of objects.

If I had to name one theater director in whose work it is easy to find all these trends at once, I would name Heiner Goebbels. A German director, although he is actually a professional composer. He has recordings, compositions, musicians perform his music, but we are primarily interested in and focus on him as the creator of various theatrical productions. But it becomes quite problematic to call them "theatrical performances", because much of what he did is something between a play and a concert. It is a production involving professional musicians, they play pre-written music, but it is all staged by the director and their movements and invented scenography are included in the fabric of the production. Or he has, for example, a play Eraritjaritjaka, defined as a "museum of phrases", where everything is tied to the sound of speech. He has several such plays, he is very interested in the sound and rhythm of human speech, and this is what brings him closer to the Indian konnakol system we discussed. And in some plays there are literal quotes, you can be sure that an Indian konnakol master would understand him well.
And perhaps in its most extreme expression, the idea that sounding objects on stage can be of some interest is reflected in the play "Stifters Dinge". There are no actors on stage at all. This is a play where all the action is created by resonant objects. You could say it's an animated installation. It has action, reference points that bring it closer to a conventional theatrical play, but it has no actors. None at all. Just moving objects. A sounding piano, some steam, pipes, a projection... All this together becomes a vivid expression of a new theater. While at the same time, of course, it is just a sound piece.
Or for example, there is the play "Max Black, or 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with the Hand." There is an actor there, it is a monologue, but he is surrounded by an incredible number of objects, complex machinery, and the sounds he constantly emits, along with the text he utters, are surrounded by echoes, processed live electronically, repeated, turning into a sound score. All of this together can be listened to. In general, many of his plays can be listened to as separate pieces.
On the other hand, there is the French tradition of new theater, in which objects on stage only form a sound score, but of a slightly different kind. For example, there is the wonderful theater director Jean Pierre Larroche, he has a play "A Distance" which is entirely built on the fact that he controls objects remotely. And this is not high-tech new age machinery, but on the contrary, low budget. There are many ropes that he pulls - objects collapse, plates fall, stools lose legs. And it makes a complex sound canvas.
Or, for example, there is the French duo Zimmerman & De Perrot with the play "Gaff Aff". A play for two, one of the characters is a DJ, he scratches records, and the sounds he makes become the basis for the action. Because the second character endlessly uses these sounds, they become the structure of the play, not to mention that the whole stage is one big vinyl record. A mixture of clowning, eccentricity, and onomatopoeia, but without the sound, it is impossible to imagine this play - it is the basis of everything they do.
All this would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago, and at the same time in these plays one can discern a clear connection with theatrical traditions of different eras that we talked about in previous episodes.