Summoning Rain: Recap Of Jumaadi’s The Sound Of Shadows
By Michael Young
Portrait of JUMAADI at
There were eight of us in the audience for Indonesian-born, Australia-based artist Jumaadi’s shadow puppet play, The Sound of Shadows, that took place early February in a 100-year-old wooden building located on a remote and wild promontory that jutted into Sydney Harbour. Aside from the audience, the crowded, darkened room held four musicians, a dancer, Jumaadi himself and various musical instruments—stringed instruments, gongs, a xylophone and four bundengans, which are devices from Wonosobo in Central Java made from woven bamboo that are part hat, part shelter, and can be described as “musical capes” that produce a sound softer than the metallic cluck of gamelans. It was an intensely intimate gathering. Among the guests were Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the CEO of the Biennale of Sydney.
