Cirebon Arts: Ancient and Modern

The number of art forms in the small area of Cirebon is truly amazing. To quote Cirebon scholar Matthew Isaac Cohen’s 2005 article The Arts of Cirebon, “…the sheer amount of artistic activity in Cirebon is rivaled in Indonesia only by Bali – all the more remarkable as Cirebon (unlike Bali) has little tourist industry to speak of.”

Cirebon has its own unique classical architecture, batik textile, woodcarving, and reverse glass painting traditions. Cirebon music includes (among other genres) two kinds of gamelan: prawa and pelog; plus three archaic “proto gamelan” ensembles: gong renteng, denggung, and gong sekati. Cirebon is also known for its ancient topeng masked dance tradition, as well as two kinds of puppet theater: the wayang kulit shadow puppets, and the wayang golek rod puppets, sometimes called wayang cepak to differentiate it from the south central Javanese and Sundanese wayang golek traditions.

According to oral tradition, groups of traveling artists from East Java migrated westward along Java’s north coast some 700 years ago, ultimately settling in Cirebon. They organized themselves into artists’ guilds, forming the basis for artist families that have safeguarded these arts—which they regard as pusaka, or sacred heirlooms-- to the present day. Scholars feel the arts of Cirebon offer us a window into the past of Java’s venerable artistic history. While maintaining these old traditions, Cirebon artists today are also reinterpreting these ancient art forms, such as their dance, puppet theater, batik and painting, in new ways—a process that has probably been going on for centuries.

Mask of Kelana, one of the five main characters of Topeng Cirebon. (photo R. North)

But for all this unique culture and historical importance, the arts of Cirebon thus far have remained little more than a footnote to most studies of Javanese culture. Since the Dutch colonial era, foreign and Indonesian researchers have largely focused their attention on the arts of south Central Java and Bali, while the arts of Cirebon remained relatively unknown outside of their home area.