Wayang
Wayang Wayang is a Javanese word for particular kinds of theatre. When the term is used to refer to kinds of puppet theatre, sometimes the puppet itself is referred to as wayang. Performances of shadow puppet theatre are accompanied by a gamelan orchestra in Java, and by gender wayang in Bali. The term 'wayang' is the Javanese word for shadow, or bayang in standard Indonesian. In modern daily Javanese and Indonesian vocabulary, wayang is most often associated with the puppet itself or the whole puppet theatre performance. Wayang is a generic term denoting traditional theatre in Indonesia. There is no evidence that wayang existed before the 1st century CE, after Hinduism and Buddhism were brought to Southeast Asia. This leads to the hypothesis that the art was imported from either India or China, both of which have a long tradition of shadow puppetry and theatre in general. However, there very well may have been indigenous storytelling traditions that had a profound impact o...