Stories The stories enacted by the puppets and dancers stem from India. The two names typically evoked are Ramayana and Mahabharata. But it is always excerpts or summaries that are performed. And details may vary, a story has no official fixed telling. A large corpus of stories are inspired by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and are of Javanese creation. They keep the same stereotyped characters, settings and situations and follow similar patterns. In fact, all former and latter stories make up the main part of the Javano-Balinese literary corpus, which is of a same kind, rooted in Hindu and Buddhist literature. The arts of dance, puppets and other plays are linked to these stories but also to their flavors, symbols and artistic patterns.
Westernized theatrical forms, such as ketoprak, or from the Islamized areas, like bangsawan, have developed in the Malay and Javanese regions. We see at once that these new forms do not belong to the original Indic theater tradition. For instance, the repertoire of stories is foreign, coming from the Middle East or of Western historical inspiration. But of course, once in Java for a while, it is natural that some Javanese stories did eventually enter their repertoire, losing much of the color and charisma they have in their original setting of wayang and gamelan.
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