theater essay

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Theatre Journal 65 (2013) 127–135 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Review essay

Matthew isaac Cohen is a professor of international theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a researcher of indonesian performing arts, world puppetry, and transnational performance, with books including The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006), Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952 (2010), and The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama, vol. 1: Plays for the Popular Stage (2010). He is currently complet- ing a book on colonial modernity and the performing arts in indonesia. He also performs shadow puppetry under the company banner Kanda Buwana.

Indonesian Theatre: New North American Scholarship on Modern and

Traditional Performance Practices

Matthew Isaac Cohen

ReSISTANCe oN The NATIoNAl STAge: TheATeR ANd PolITICS IN lATe New oRdeR INdoNeSIA. By Michael H. Bodden. Southeast Asia Series, no. 123. Athens: Ohio Uni- versity Press, 2010; pp. 352.

IndonesIan PostcolonIal theatre: sPectral GenealoGIes and absent Faces. By Evan Darwin Winet. Studies in International Performance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 280.

InsIde the PuPPet box: a PerFormance collectIon oF WayanG KulIt at the museum oF InternatIonal FolK art. By Felicia Katz-Harris. Santa Fe, NM: Museum of International Folk Art / Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010; pp. 200.

In the 1960s, the trailblazing work of James Peacock (on the transvestite comic theatre of ludruk) and Clifford Geertz (on Balinese cockfighting, the theatre states of Java and Bali, ritual, and so on) established Indonesian theatre and performance as essentially the scholarly turf of anthropology in North American academia. Studies focused analytically on symbols and their communal meanings, hierarchy and status and their subversion, and the transformative power of performance in local contexts. Also starting in the 1960s, a coterie of American theatre scholars, most notably perhaps John Emigh and Kathy Foley, learned how to perform comic mask plays and puppetry in situ from revered masters and returned from Indonesia to write academic articles, translate plays, offer workshops, and

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perform with university and community gamelan ensembles. Such practice-based scholar- ship likewise drew on anthropological paradigms, while contributing to the development of intercultural theatre practice and performance theory. Regardless of disciplinary affili- ation, scholarship through the 1990s emphasized traditional forms, which neatly fit the neo-traditionalism of the American-backed New Order dictatorship (1966–98) of President Soeharto. Innovative practitioners were not actively excluded and due recognition was given by more sensitive scholars to dialogical exchange between the researcher and her Indonesian interlocutors (subjects, informants, teachers). But emphasis was on virtuosic forms of expression by hereditary performers, typically possessing little formal schooling though much communal integrity, giving voice to the past in the present. American prac- titioners occasionally collaborated with avant-garde Indonesian artists. (Julie Taymor, for example, spent four years in the 1970s working with Rendra’s theatre collective and di- recting an Indonesian company called Teater Loh that toured Java and Bali and played La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City in 1981.) But the study of the resistive practices of modern and contemporary playwrights, theatre collectives, and performance poets was largely left to the Australians.1

North American awareness of more contemporary Indonesian performance was raised by the innovative performance programs of the Indonesian pavilion at the World Exposi- tion in Vancouver in 1986 and the Festival of Indonesia in cities around the United States in 1991. Long-term residencies of two Bali-born auteur director-playwrights, Putu Wijaya (who taught and directed his plays at the University of Wisconsin and Wesleyan University during 1985–88) and Ikranagara (a visiting artist at Ohio State University starting in 1990), brought American faculty and students into intimate communication and direct exchange with two of the most prominent proponents of avant-garde neo-traditionalism, a movement Wijaya dubbed Tradisi Baru (“New Tradition”). A small though steady stream of aspiring American scholars and practitioners journeyed to Indonesia in the wake of these seminal encounters to observe contemporary theatre rehearsals and performances in Jakarta and the provinces, join ensemble theatres, and take up residencies at art centers; additional Indone- sian contemporary practitioners, in turn, traveled to the United States for study, residencies, conferences, festivals, exhibitions, and the like. A recent crop of monographs, translations, and catalogs by scholars of Indonesian performance from Canada and the United States can be seen as fertilized by the two-way exchanges kicked off in the mid-1980s.

The books by Michael Bodden, Evan Darwin Winet, and Felicia Katz-Harris under review make hay of the privileged access to Indonesian practitioners that North American scholars enjoy, extending and complicating our understanding of performance in late Indonesian modernity. Bodden and Winet celebrate counter-hegemonic and resistive theatre, joining a choir of Indonesian and international voices emboldened by the New Order’s fall, while Katz-Harris chooses to focus her attention on a classical puppeteer who came to artistic maturity under the inward-looking New Order regime, but has increasingly developed an international profile through active collaboration with an American expatriate. Drawing deeply on the insights and methods of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and the new museology, these studies mark an about-face from ahistorical ethnological approaches to the field. The books are timely reflections on theatrical culture in transition woven into transnational social fabrics.

1 See, for example, Willibordus S. Rendra, The Struggle of the Naga Tribe: A Play, trans. and ed. Max Lane (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979).

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Bodden’s Resistance on the National Stage chronicles a decade of radical theatre in Jakarta and other cities of Java from the late 1980s through the fall of Soeharto in 1998. While Bod- den’s practical introduction to Indonesian theatre was as the translator of Wijaya’s play Geez! as a graduate student at Wisconsin, his book looks beyond Wijaya and other Grand Old Men of Indonesian Theatre to the exciting synergies forged among young theatre workers, NGO officers, poets, and community and union activists. The jaringan, or networks, that were created over a decade contributed in small but significant ways to the pro-democracy movement that toppled Soeharto. Productions challenged audiences with new languages of performance that poet Afrizal Malna termed “unpleasurable to read” (my translation), in studied contrast to the easy reading of the popular press. The fractured narratives, political screeds, and brutal physicality of these performances befuddled critics accustomed to extracting allegorical and symbolic meanings and universal messages from New Tradi- tion’s formalism. Performances also stumped the government censors who inconsistently banned plays on suspicions of political subversion. Such censorship made theatre into a cause célèbre for proponents of freedom of speech. The names of the groups and artists at the center of Bodden’s narrative—Arena Teater, Emha Ainun Nadjib, Teater Sae, Teater Kubur, Teater Payung Hitam, Teater Buruh Indonesia, Margesti S. Otong—will have little resonance for readers outside of Indonesia. Many of the companies are now defunct, and “the culture of documentation” being what it is in tropical Asia, performance archives are inevitably incomplete. But the diverse sources that Bodden has fastidiously compiled— namely, published and unpublished playscripts; newspaper reports and reviews; perfor- mances witnessed onstage, in rehearsal, and on video; reams of interviews—reveal that the contemporary theatre scene in Indonesia in the 1990s was one of the most vibrant and politically charged in Asia, if not the world.

Bodden was lecturing in Madison, Manila, and Victoria for most of the period under discussion, with only occasional visits to Indonesia. His approach is consequently not an- thropological: readers will need to look elsewhere for accounts of the everyday lives of contemporary performers. (Barbara Hatley’s superb Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage would be as good a place as any to begin2.) Rather, the study’s strengths reside in Bod- den’s sharp skills in linking theatrical themes to Indonesian politics and cultural polemics and explicating how emergent Indonesian theatrical forms derive or are distinguished from currents in Indonesian and world theatre practices. Bodden “unpacks” performances and companies that draw on techniques from the grassroots theatre of Augusto Boal (61ff. and passim), reference the politically engaged El Teatro Campesino (227), and compare to the poor theatre of Jerzy Grotowski (345). But he does not analyze Indonesian productions as simple derivatives of foreign theatres; rather, he emphasizes their strategic appropriation of European theatre plays and techniques, as for example in his adept description and analy- sis of Teater Payung Hitam’s 1994 staging of Austrian playwright Peter Handke’s Kaspar. This production was occasioned by the banning of a number of magazines and portrays the title character’s indoctrination into militarized society, interpolating into Handke’s text key words associated with the regime and quotes from state propaganda. A cacophony of pounding and banging coupled with loud electronic music assaulted the audience, en- forcing an awareness of how language was painfully disciplined by the Soeharto regime. A loudspeaker-prompter representing the government warned: “Don’t move too much.

2 Barbara Hatley, Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change (Ho- nolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press and Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2008).

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Don’t speak through symbolic movements. You must speak with words. With sentences. . . . You must speak verbally. Verbally so that everyone will know what you want” (204). These instructions ironically articulate precisely what this theatre was not and point to its communicative limits. Although intellectually challenging and experientially engag- ing, Payung Hitam’s aesthetic decision to renounce the folkloric appeal of New Tradition and its pleasurable “verbal” speech meant that the group—like other politically engaged theatres of the time—risked erecting a barrier to popular audiences and thus diminishing its political impact. Radical politics and radical artistic practice are sometimes unhappy bedfellows, as Bodden ably shows.

Winet’s historiographical jaunt Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre provides a larger context for Bodden’s fine-grained analysis. Winet recounts in his study’s preface how he first journeyed to Indonesia in 1996 for a “clown exchange” in Bali organized by California’s Dell’Arte Players, which left him disillusioned with interculturalism’s ascription of apoliti- cism to Indonesian traditional artists. Subsequently he embarked on research into modern theatre in the national language of Indonesia (referred to in the past as tonil or sandiwara, and today as teater) and the various ways its practitioners have imagined the nation while engaging with or distancing themselves from local traditions and cosmopolitan culture. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Winet aims to establish a “critical genealogy” for Indo- nesian theatre of the present.

While providing painstaking historical information for the general reader on Indonesia and its capital city (known as Batavia under the Dutch and Jakarta today), Winet eschews chronological organization throughout the rest of the book, favoring instead a thematic grouping of materials to demonstrate how texts, dramaturgies, theatrical spaces, acting styles, and cultural polemics introduced under colonialism continue to haunt today’s the- atre. Such an approach yields interesting continuities between contemporary theatre art- ists and their forebears, even if it also exaggerates somewhat anxieties of influence and worries about inauthenticity. By Winet’s reading, for example, the core themes of Hamlet, “burdens of inheritance, duty to kin and nation, search for identity in a time ‘out of joint’” (23) make the play a touchstone for theatre-makers across generations. The politics of mes- tizo identity in Victor Ido’s potboiler Karina Adinda (1913) disappeared, however, when revived in 1993 at the proscenium theatre space Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (built by the Dutch in 1821), where it could only be read nostalgically as a purely Dutch colonial play. Surprisingly, psychologically based acting, which dominated Indonesian art theatre after the formation of amateur theatre company Maya in 1944, is shown to allow the actor to interpolate “the colonial ideology inherent in Western characterization as a means to dis- cover his own soul” (137). And perhaps without sufficient complexity, Winet claims that liberal Muslims, searching for a syncretic theatrical form by which to express their personal piety, remain subject to public politics. In sum, Winet finds that theatre-makers in today’s democratic Indonesia remain enchained to “a parental apparition” (217), aspiring still to humanistic universalism while yearning for folk art’s authenticity. Such a charge seems to me valid for the now-fading generation of avant-garde neo-traditionalists, but has less traction when applied to the current scene, where local activism trumps universalism and artists trained in both traditional and nontraditional forms and techniques collaborate in producing multifaceted events (fig. 1).

The wide historical scope of Winet’s study means that inevitably historiographical er- rors are made or recycled. The colonial archive notes a performance of a play about kings of Denmark and Sweden in Batavia’s fortress when it was under siege in 1619, but, pace

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Winet, this was almost certainly not Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but a Dutch-language play by J. J. van Wassenburgh published in Rotterdam circa 1612. Sukarno’s play Koetkoetbi was not influenced by the film The Bride of Frankenstein, but rather inspired by The Mummy (1932). Maya did not disband in 1945, but remained active in Dutch-occupied Jakarta until the end of the revolution in 1949. Such inaccuracies notwithstanding, the book is provocative and illuminating and will certainly interest scholars of the global dispersion of European- style theatre and processes of cultural hybridization. It goes some way toward restoring the place of Chinese and mestizo theatre artists to Indonesian theatre history and also un-

Figure 1. The Jakarta-based modern-theatre group Teater Koma’s Kunjungan Cinta (Rendezvous), adapted from Friedrich Durrenmatt’s play The Visit, showing presidential impersonator Butet Kartaredjasa lying in state. (Source: Cover image of Evan Darwin Winet’s Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre: Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], reproduced with permission of Palgrave

Macmillan. Photo by Teater Koma, reproduced with permission.)

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covers much material that will surprise even veteran Indonesianists. (How many know, for example, that Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, worked as a playwright in the 1930s?)

A less scholarly and reflexive though nonetheless highly valuable publication from the same year is Inside the Puppet Box, museum curator Katz-Harris’s catalog of the shadow puppets displayed in a major wayang kulit exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during 2009–10 and an introduction to the art form for the general reader. The bulk of the puppets in the full-color catalog and exhibition are from a single set (or “puppet box”) built up over two decades by Pacitan-born puppeteer Ki Purbo Asmoro and used by him in performance until the museum purchased it in 2007. There are also representative puppets designed by wildly popular and innovative Tegal- born puppeteer Ki Enthus Susmono, the subject of a parallel exhibition in Amsterdam’s Tropical Museum in 2009. The unusual circumstances by which a working puppeteer’s equipment, or “performance collection” as Katz-Harris calls it, wound up in an American museum merit some discussion (figs. 2–3).

Puppet sets, until the advent in the 1970s of media-hyped “superstar” puppeteers, were considered precious heirlooms to be conserved and passed on to descendants. Starting with Semarang puppeteer Ki Nartosabdho, Java’s top echelon of puppeteers regularly sold

Family members Tri Suwarno, Sukardi, and Riyadi Susanto work together to create wayang kulit. (Photo: Felicia Katz-Harris, from her book Inside the Puppet Box: A Performance Collection of Wayang Kulit at the

Museum of International Folk Art [Santa Fe, NM: Museum of International Folk Art / Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010], p. 15. Copyright © Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico,

reproduced with permission.)

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Dhalang Ki Purbo Asmoro conducts a demonstration performance at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Note how the green banana log that is the puppet stage has been

replaced here by a piece of green foam. (Photo: Blair Clark, reproduced in Felicia Katz-Harris, Inside the Puppet Box: A Performance Collection of Wayang Kulit at the Museum of International Folk Art [Santa Fe, NM:

Museum of International Folk Art / Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010], p. 45. Copyright © Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, reproduced with permission.)

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off old and commissioned new sets. Newly commissioned sets delighted fans with fresh designs; castoffs found their way to aspiring puppeteers, who hoped to benefit from the mediated aura of the rich and famous. Ki Purbo’s decision to decommission his working equipment to an American museum is related to his career’s international contours. This internationalism is due less to temperament (he is reticent in person and a classicist at heart) than to the promotion of his work by the influential government arts conservatoire Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta, where he is a professor of puppetry. Another contributing factor is his close association with American school teacher and amateur wayang scholar and gamelan musician Kitsie Emerson, who is married to Ki Purbo’s drummer and offers simultaneous English translations of many of Ki Purbo’s performances in Indonesia and abroad, and who also functions as his publicist and international tour manager. When I studied with Ki Purbo at the institute in the late 1980s, foreign touring was considered an ancillary source of income for conservatory faculty and sometimes demeaned as nga- men, or “busking.” Today, as Ki Purbo commented while performing at New York’s Asia Society in 2012, it is considered a core task for him as a puppetry professor “to introduce wayang all over the world” (Emerson’s simultaneous translation). Such internationalism is in line with Indonesian cultural policy to promote wayang puppet theatre, which has been designated an item of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (proclaimed by UNESCO in 2003 and inscribed in 2008). Within the tradition he represents, Ki Purbo is an innova- tor known for his sensitive character portrayals and thoughtful plot variants, yet there are no obvious signs of artistic influence from his extensive overseas touring. Wayang thus is preserved in Santa Fe as a purely Javanese art, in line with what Richard Schechner has called the “normative expectation” of Indonesian cultural officials and foreign aficionados. It is noteworthy that Emerson is generously thanked in the book’s introduction for making “things happen” (7) though absent from the book’s index, and the full story of Ki Purbo’s puppets’ acquisition is not disclosed.

Katz-Harris’s forty-nine-page introduction, preceding the annotated photographs of some 230 individual puppets, is strongest in its profusely illustrated description of puppet-mak- ing. In it, she provides precise details of preparing rawhide, fashioning control rods from buffalo horn, and punching and painting leather. She also offers an analysis of how the various “moods,” or wanda, of puppets are understood by performers, and the way pup- pets are arranged in rows on banana logs or in the puppet box during performances. The introduction is animated by comments by authoritative Javanese experts, including lead- ing puppeteers interviewed by the author. Less detail is provided on wayang stories and the history section is very cursory, reproducing uncritically some of the hoary myths about fifteenth-century legendary saints using puppetry to spread Islam. There is little discussion about regional variations, beyond noting that the Solo style Ki Purbo espouses has become increasingly dominant in recent decades. Nonetheless, her puppet descriptions are highly praiseworthy in providing information on carvers and colorists, the number of years in Ki Purbo’s collection, and the provenance of previous puppeteer-owners. We get a sense of Ki Purbo’s set as an organically growing collection, the classicist aesthetics that informed the puppeteer’s selections, and the social networks fostering his collection. Similarly detailed information is almost completely lacking for all other puppet sets in public collections. In- novatively, Katz-Harris arranges entries in the order that puppets would be arrayed by Ki Purbo during performances. Puppets are divided into sections corresponding to the left and right simpingan (rows), overlapping arrays that frame the puppet screen in performance, and the auxiliary dhudhahan puppets placed inside the puppet box to the puppeteer’s left and on the puppet lid to the puppeteer’s right. That is to say, puppet images in the book

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unfold in sequences corresponding to their spatial proximity to the puppeteer. This is a more emic and sensible approach to presenting Javanese puppets than other classificatory schemes imposed by non-Indonesian museum scholars and collectors in the past.

The diverse approaches taken in these three books stand in the way of facile comparisons, assessment of the current state of the field, or prognostication of future scholarly directions. But a number of trends emerge. One is that research is becoming increasingly engaged and participatory. A key goal of Winet’s book in particular is to fashion an inclusive discursive field in which non-Indonesian commentators can make meaningful contributions to theatre artists working now in Indonesia. Bodden’s book likewise intends to offer models and ad- umbrate challenges for theatre-workers desiring to “bridge the gap” (315), separating them from the general Indonesian public. The careful documentation offered by Katz-Harris on Ki Purbo’s puppets will be of some interest to art historians of the future, but, will be of even more interest perhaps for Indonesian puppet-makers who wish to recover his classi- cist aesthetics. A second trend is clearly an emphasis on particularity and historicity: while past generations of Western scholars confidently pronounced upon the essentially timeless characteristics of artistic genres and relations of theatrical symbols to an Indonesian ethos and worldview, there is an increasing consciousness today of the dialectical relationship between theatre’s ephemerality and its continual renewal in practice, as well as the fragile tissue of social relations that connect artists with audiences, patrons, scholars, and cura- tors. Indonesian theatre is no longer Western theatre’s exotic double, as it was for Antonin Artaud and his intercultural followers; it is part of our world, just as we are part of its.

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