The setting is a fourth-floor walkup just off Main Street’s hipster strip, and outside sirens are blaring; there are no resonant gongs here, no chiming bonangs or mellow slenthems. Yet the feeling inside is convivial, as three gamelan-trained musicians share clove-spiked cigarettes and talk of their plans to bring the ancient gods of Java to the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre on Wednesday and Thursday (July 9 and 10).

Gamelan Madu Sari’s founder Mark Parlett and artistic director Sutrisno Hartana are animated and helpful, trying their best to explain Java’s complex society to this interviewer. But the undisputed centre of attention is visiting artist Ki Seno Nugroho, whose calm charisma has made him one of the top entertainers in central Java.

Nugroho is a dalang, which combines the roles of master puppeteer, playwright, bandleader, standup comedian, and moral exemplar. And his art form, wayang kulit, remains immensely popular in his homeland, despite such 21st-century distractions as video games and wide-screen TVs. Often described as shadow plays, wayang performances place fables from the Ramayana and other mystical sources in a contemporary context; voicing a dozen or more characters, the dalang also manipulates giant shadows on a screen, using intricate paper or leather puppets that range from scary demons to majestic kings.

Hartana joins Parlett in translating, and his description of Nugroho makes the 36-year-old performer sound like a cross between Laurie Anderson and the Grateful Dead. He’s a state-of-the-art master of multimedia storytelling, but his appearances also generate a lively parking-lot scene catering to the fans and vendors who follow him around—sometimes to more than 100 shows a year.

“He’s not glorifying his popularity, but he has the best audience right now in central Java,” Hartana explains. “Fifty-five percent of the people would like to know the story and would like to learn something related to Javanese tradition, and another 10 percent would like to take advantage of his audience by providing food or parking spots.”

He adds that Nugroho owes much of his appeal to his quick wit. “I have performed with him many times—a thousand times, maybe,” he says. “And I can always laugh my loudest laugh when I perform with him.”

But there’s a serious side to Nugroho’s popularity, too. A dalang is not unlike a kind of secular priest: there are certain rituals to observe, and certain penances to make. Nugroho, for instance, abstains from eating rice—the staple food of Indonesia’s 222 million–plus inhabitants. There’s also his heritage to consider: he comes from a long line of dalangs, and his father was blacklisted in the 1970s for performing wayangs critical of President Suharto’s dictatorial regime.

Nugroho is a less explicitly political artist, but should he wish to comment on our culture, he’ll have ample opportunity. His show with Gamelan Madu Sari, Semar in Lila Maya, tracks the god Semar as he explores the Pacific Northwest, a zone of “ready illusion” that the divine comic finds equally promising and problematic.

Will Semar, often seen as the saviour of humanity, lead us to enlightenment, or will he simply cast thunderbolts from on high? Nugroho, Hartana, and Parlett aren’t saying, but in Javanese tradition this god’s on our side.