Indonesian performance

Sunarno Purwolelono

2011-12-27T10:27:00.003Z

I just learned via Facebook that Sunarno Purwolelono has passed away. A dancer and choreographer who was also a lecturer at ISI Solo, Mas Narno worked at the Indonesian Embassy in London for a number of years, and in 2003 we invited him up to Glasgow to do a small ketoprak performance in the Botanical Gardens, along with his son Aji, one of my students in Theatre Studies and Gamelan Naga Mas.

As a way of remembering him, I attach the programme for this performance below.

Sugeng tindak Mas Narno.

KETOPRAK:
COSTUME DRAMA AND GAMELAN MUSIC FROM JAVA, INDONESIA

Imagine a tropical island of regents, princes, princesses, evil genies and clowns that never existed… set to the music of the lively gongs, drums and percussion of gamelan…

Gamelan Naga Mas and Friends
With special guest
Sunarno Purwolelono

Friday, 20 June 2003, 8 pm
Kibble Palace, Botanic Gardens
730 Great Western Road
Donation at the door

About Ketoprak
Ketoprak (also spelled Kethoprak) is a form of popular theatre accompanied by Gamelan music, from Java, Indonesia. It is generally believed that it originated in south central Java as a rural folk form, involving singing and possibly dancing and clowning, during harvest time. The name is said to be onomatopoeic – from the rhythmic prak, prak pounding sounds of wood against wood as rice is pounded in wooden troughs by harvesters. The form underwent radical change around 1925, developing into a full-blown theatrical genre, in which a variety of story types (Javanese legend and history, Roman toga dramas, Biblical sagas and the like) were performed by costumed actors on stage, with improvised dialogue in Javanese. Ketoprak enjoyed enormous popularity from the start, so much so that the Dutch colonial authorities sent spies to observe performances, suspicious that it contained nationalist and Communist hidden political messages. Initially accompanied by European musical instruments, Gamelan became the customary musical accompaniment in the 1930’s, borrowing many musical items and conventions from the Wayang Kulit (shadow puppet) repertoire, but retaining the prak, prak wood-against-wood sound to introduce musical pieces and accentuate movement.

Over the years, Ketoprak has been known as the ‘drama of the little people’, with more accessible language and a greater accentuation on romantic themes than the more austere and classical Wayang Kulit of Central Java. Most plays are pseudo-historical, with little or no actual grounding in historical events, but with lavish attention to imagined customs and traditions of the historical imagination. In the 1990s, Ketoprak underwent a further evolution as it entered into the domain of television and Video Compact Disks. Ketoprak became Ketoprak Humor (Humourous Ketoprak), with much of the flowery Javanese replaced by lingua franca Indonesian, and a great emphasis on clowning and tomfoolery. Many Ketoprak actors (particularly clowns) are contemporary Indonesian cultural icons, appearing in television ads and imitated by Indonesians around the archipelago.

Tonight’s story: ‘The Tale of Suta Kesuma’
Tonight’s story follows a scenario by Matthew Isaac Cohen, with stage direction by Sunarno Purwolelono. The Bupati (regent) Wireng Kesuma has been forced to exile his son Suta Kesuma to the forest for his refusal to show proper respect to the East Indies Company. In this same forest there is a man-eating genie who holds captive the beautiful princess Sekar Kedaton, daughter of the sultan of Mataram. The evil genie attacks Suta Kesuma but is defeated in battle, and the princess and Suta Kesuma fall in love (of course) but before they can return to Sekar Kedaton’s kingdom, they hear the sound of voices. The regent and his party have been trapped by vampiric plants and only the boldness of Suta Kesuma can free them. Father and son make amends and the regent vows that he will do everything in his power to see that the happy couple is soon wedded.

About gamelan
Gamelan is the traditional gong-chime orchestra of Indonesia, usually made of bronze or iron. Many of the instruments are tuned gongs and metallophones, and there are various hand drums (kendhang), flutes (suling) and small string instruments (rebab, siter) as well. The gamelan can be played by as many as 25 musicians and singers and is often used to accompany dance, drama, puppet theatre and ceremonials. The music is highly polyphonic and stratified in structure, based on repeating gong cycles.

Gamelan Naga Mas profile
Gamelan Naga Mas (Golden Dragon Gamelan) is a community combined arts group, specializing in performance traditions of Indonesia. The group was founded in 1991 and plays on a gamelan pelog (heptatonic gong-chime ensemble) made by Pak Suhirjan in Yogyakarta (central Java), and owned by the Glasgow City Council. The instruments themselves are currently housed in the Tramway. Gamelan Naga Mas has performed music, dance, theatre and shadow puppet theatre throughout England and Scotland. Members of the group include community and professional musicians, composers and university lecturers in the performing arts. Experienced Gamelan players and interested novices are welcome. Contact M. Cohen at (0141) 330 6286. Prior guest artists who have performed with Gamelan Naga Mas include Dr Joko Susilo (artistic director 2001-2002), Pudji Astuti Jansen, Helen Evans, Aris Daryono and I Nyoman Wenten. For more information see our website, www.nagamas.co.uk

Actors
Wireng Kesuma and Evil Genie Sunarno Purwolelono
Suta Kesuma Srianggo Aji Nuhoro
Sekar Kedaton Aviva Kartiningsih Cohen
Woody, the Woodcutter Sam Rowe

Musicians
Kendhang and musical direction Signy Jakobsdottir
Saron Jon Keliehor
Saron Hooi Ling Eng
Demung Katherine Waumsley
Demung and slenthem J. Simon van der Welt
Saron peking Matthew Isaac Cohen
Bonang Mary Anne Carroll
Kenong Martin Sewel
Gong Margaret Smith

Acknowledgments
Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow; Glasgow City Council; Tramway; Ewen Donaldson; the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia.

Open House at Wisma Duta with the Abresso Band

2011-12-27T09:55:00.002Z

I attended the Open House at the Wisma Duta (the residence of the Indonesian Ambassador) on 26 December in Wassenaar. This was an annual celebration of Christmas for Christian Indonesians in the Netherlands, and featured short speeches by and recognition for a number of prominent members of the community; free food; and live music by the Abresso Band from Papua, as well as karaoke Christmas songs sung by locals. The event was held in a couple of tents set up in the Wisma Duta's back yard. A prayer service (which I did not attend) was held in the morning before the reception.

There were many Chinese Indonesians in attendance, some students, and a good number of Indonesian-Dutch couples and their children.

Searching around on line, the Abresso Band seems to be one of Indonesia's most celebrated reggae bands. It was flown in explicitly for this event at the Wisma Duta, though it will be doing one more public gig in Groningen later this week as well.

The band played well (I thought the bass player was particularly good) but was hardly 'hard core' reggae and happily played Christmas numbers (some accompanying local singers), poco-poco and the like.

Also announced was the name of the new ambassador to Den Haag, Retno Lestari Priansari Marsudi, best known as the investigator charged with looking into the death of human rights activist Munir in the Netherlands in 2004. In interviews, Retno Marsudi talks about herself as a true Javanese who listens to gamelan music to unwind. Let's hope she also supports Javanese arts when Ambassador.

Teeuw Prize Award Ceremony

2011-12-24T17:02:00.008Z

Elsje Plantema, the Amsterdam-based gamelan teacher and performer, received the Professor Teeuw Award 2011 for her contributions to Dutch-Indonesian musical exchange. Past recipients of this award include Indonesian writer Goenawan Mohamad and F.X. Suhardi Djojoprasetyo, a gamelan performer and teacher attached for many years to the Indonesian embassy in the Hague.

The prize ceremony for Elsje Plantema took place at Amsterdam's musical conservatory on 21 December. Two of the gamelan directed by Elsje played pieces by Nartosabdho and Lou Harrison (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0GNaHX2iz0&list=UUiBzyz9zXadZxAg_kyL1FRw&index=2&feature=plcp), Lutgard Mutsaers (author of a book on Indo-Rock, and also a forthcoming book on keroncong) delivered a laudatio, and I presented an illustrated lecture on gamelan in Europe (drawing on my book Performing Otherness, as well as a couple of other recent or forthcoming publications).

The highlight for me I think was saxophonist Yukari Uekawa and Gamelan Mugi Rahayu playing Harrison's A Cornish Lancaran)- pictured above. I spoke to Elsje after the event and she said that the soloist was a former gamelan student of hers at the Conservatorium. Much of the sax part is improvised, and Elsje attributed the success of Yukari's rendition to the player's understanding of gamelan structure (particularly the use of seleh notes).

'High tea' was served after the formal presentations were over - which meant cakes and tea.

It was very nice to meet up with gamelan folk from around the Netherlands, and the event had a very celebratory feel to it. My own talk was nicely received- good publicity for the book, and a way of giving something back to a community of interest which supported it.

Karo-begrafenismuziek, Louis Couperus Museum, Den Haag

2011-12-20T09:13:00.005Z

Juara Ginting's Karo Leiden-based Karo group of musicians and dancers, joined by guest artist Pulumun Ginting from Medan (part of a contingent of PhD students from Indonesia currently working on PhD proposals in Leiden, backed by the Kajian Tradisi Lisan and the KITLV) offered a suite of pieces from Karo death rituals at the Louis Couperus Museum in The Hague on 17 December 2011 in conjunction with an exhibition on death and funerals (http://www.couperusmuseum.org/press_d.html).

What started off as a piece of sandiwara, with very theatrical declamations from Juara backed by mannequins of Dutch mourners in the museum exhibition (on loan from the National Theatre), transformed over the course of the event into a heartfelt expression of grief. This was perhaps due to the utter conviction of Nelly, the principal female singer and dancer of the group, who runs the Sumatra House eatery in Leiden. Nelly's niece, Tari (who has taken time out of her studies in Medan to work at the eatery for a few months, returning at the end of the month), said she felt a bit 'grogi' in this unusual setting.

I spoke to Juara afterwards and he admitted to being very moved by the experience. He noticed that I did not really clap after each of the pieces - which involved surrogation (a piece of cloth for a dead child?), confession, crying, ecstasy, maybe even possession. Indeed I admitted it was hard to know how to react to this performance, I told him, but I felt very moved. This made it a 'sukses' as a piece of art (seni) he said.

The museum is very small, and the performance was full to capacity. A glass of wine was available afterwards.

Kajian Tradisi Lisan "Workshop"

2011-12-03T09:59:00.004Z

I attended a presentation on Friday (2 December 2011) of the Kajian Tradisi Lisan researchers who are spending 3 months in Leiden. Most of them are PhD students who are developing their proposals, and are working in many areas - from ruwatan, to death ceremonies, oral poetry etc. -- in cultures and societies around the Indonesian archipelago.

The group of 20-25 students and lecturers delivered what was billed as a 'workshop' at the dance studio of the LAKTheater of Leiden University to an audience of about 40 to 50 people. The event was facilitated by Clara Brakel, a researcher who also heads up a Javanese dance troupe, Kuwung-Kuwung. On offer was a short solo kentrung performance, jaipongan and Balinese dances (which I had seen previously in Den Haag),lagu Ambon and what was definitely the highlight of the event - a series of Karo Batak songs and dances that brought together two very talented musicians from Sumatra; the owner of Sumatra House, a local eatery, and her niece; supplemented by members of Kuwung-Kuwung who played a number of musical instruments.

After the performance, which lasted about 90 minutes, there was a nice social event upstairs with tea and vegetarian lumpia, a chance to meet and greet.

Iwan Gunawan Lecture-Demo

2011-11-24T08:29:00.006Z

I attended last night a lecture-demonstration by Iwan Gunawan, a Bandung-based composer and director of the contemporary gamelan ensemble Kyai Fatahillah. Iwan is in the Netherlands for two months working together with the Dutch dance company LeineRoebana on a piece titled Ghost Track which explores the Indonesian heritage of the company's co-director the Dutch-born Harijono Roebana. Ghost Track, which premiered in Breda on 18 November will tour the country until 23 December.

Iwan spoke at length about his compositional methods, and also played a number of videos of his work (which combines gamelan with electronic music) and a few sound recordings. He also played a few pieces together with his group's sinden Endang and a suling/ tarawangsa player. (There are 7 members of Iwan's group performing in Ghost Track, along with 3 dancers from Solo.)

Iwan is a traditionally-trained musician, with experience in wayang golek, Cianjuran and calung. He studied music in university with Dieter Mack, who introduced him to the word 'contemporary'. Iwan's university studies also introduced him to the use of musical notation for composition, but after graduating he found that there were no musicians who could play his work, so he write music for his students who make up the members of his group Kyai Fatahillah.

He says he does not write for Sundanese, Javanese or Balinese gamelan but rather for gamelan generally. He tends to use central Javanese instruments (often combining slendro and pelog in one piece) but derives techniques from all 3 of these gamelan traditions. He is interested in exploring the sounds of gamelan. Sometimes this involves using a bow on percussion instruments, sometimes placing a gong on the floor rather than hanging it from a stand, sometimes experimenting with damping techniques. He references traditional forms; for example the electro-acoustic piece Fonem (http://vodpod.com/watch/1301908-fonem)refers to wayang golek conventions in different ways. But he wishes to be able to have more control over intensity and dynamics than is traditional.

Over the last years, he has arranged and performed Steve Reich's Six Marimbas (1986) both with his own group and also Ensemble Gending, a Dutch gamelan group, for 7 and 13 players. He said what drew him to this piece was not Reich's minimalism - Iwan already knew about minimalism from gamelan - but rather Reich's techniques for musical development. This work has been performed here in Holland the international gamelan festival in Amsterdam, at Salihara in Jakarta, and also in Berlin.

The collaboration with LeineRoebana was sparked by a chance meeting with the company's co-director Harijono Roebana in Amsterdam in 2010. Roebana was interested in exploring his Indonesian heritage together with Iwan. Iwan approached the project with trepidation as he had not worked with a European choreographer before. He feels that the grounds for any collaboration is mutual respect, and wanted to make sure that their work together would be sensitive to cultural issues. Additionally Roebana wanted to 'use' traditional music in the work, and Iwan was not sure that he could do this in an ethically sensitive manner - one cannot just 'put' tradition into a contemporary frame.

Iwan and LeineRoebana sent materials (music, videos of past dance work) back and forth by email over some months, discussing their artistic philosophies as well. Then Roebana travelled to Indonesia where he worked intensely with Iwan over some weeks and auditioned dancers in Solo and did some initial exploratory workshops. Then Iwan and the Indonesia dancers and musicians spent 4 weeks in Holland for rehearsals. The piece was performed in Jakarta before its official premiere in Breda (where LeineRoebana is a company in residence).

Iwan said that some of the pieces in Ghost Track were already written, others especially composed for the work. Some parts are improvisational, others precisely notated. In rehearsal he found that sometimes he could create something with his musicians on the spur of the moment, but other times he needed to work out a score by himself in the privacy of his own room working on his computer. In Indonesia, Iwan said, music is like the weather, never completely predictable. In Europe he has observed everything needs to be fixed in advance.

This is not a bad thing, for Iwan at least, who creates music with notation (and has therefore sometimes been accused of being 'too Westerern' kebarat-baratan). For in Indonesia, when he has worked with dancers, they 'feel' the music but don't understand it intellectually. For example they are unable to identify shifts in meter.

As both Iwan and LeieneRoebana's dancers and choreographers understand metrical structures, there is a ground for communication.

In the lecture demo I enjoyed particularly hearing Iwan's sinden Endang (who trained with the late Euis Komarah) sing a solo, an improvisation by one of Iwan's musicians involving multiphonics and words spoken through a suling, and a lovely Cianjuran number (pictured above).

I look forward to seeing Ghost Track when it plays at Leiden's LAKtheater this coming weekend.

Pasar Kliling and Pasar Malam Rijswijk

2011-11-06T10:11:00.003Z

Yesterday (5 November 2011) I attended the Pasar Malam Kliling, an annual celebration organized by the Javanese-Surinamese cultural association Stiching Manggar Megar, followed by the Pasar Malam Rijswijk. The former took place in a community hall in Den Haag, the latter in an expo centre in the adjacent town of Rijswijk.

The Pasar Kliling was essentially a community event with a focus on cultural acts of members and friends of the Surinamese Javanese community - we saw a Surabaya-born singer named Melani perform karaoke covers of popular Indonesian and Western songs, a cross-dressed belly dancer who brought out two remarkably big snakes and invited audience members on stage, street dance by girls of Javanese descent, jaipongan and a Balinese dance (Tari Tenun) performed (to CD) by two students of tradisi lisan who are spending 3 months in Leiden developing their PhD proposals, a fashion show of old Surinamese creole costumes, and a warrior dance (wireng) and bedaya performed to live gamelan accompaniment under the direction of Bp Suhardi Djojoprasetyo (pictured above). Surinamese food (ginger beer, bara, nasi and bami goreng, sate etc), Javanese DVDs and CDs, Hindu religious paraphernalia etc were for sale. At the entrance was a box where people could offer an optional monetary donation. I bought a recent DVD of Mantjes House Band- one of Suriname's best known Javanese pop bands from a Surinamese-Javanese vendor after consulting with him in low Javanese. (He thanked me for the purchase with a friendly 'kesuwun'.)

The Pasar Malam was more commercial in orientation. Entry was 8 Euros at the door. There were two podiums for performance, and perhaps 100 stands selling various wares and services (Buddha statues, Thai massages, wayang golek puppets) and the normal sorts of food one buys at pasar malam in the Netherlands (I had reasonably good es tape, pisang goreng and kelapa muda). The pasar was fairly quiet when I arrived (at 6pm or so) but the podium where a karaoke singer named Dewi Mass did poco-poco songs and Whitney Huston covers and a band called Band Marabunta was thronged by dancing spectators. I enjoyed chatting with a book vendor (from whom I purchased, among other items, Wajang Foxtrot, a beautiful catalogue of a 2011 exhibition in Rotterdam of sheet music covers from the Indies with an accompanying CD).

All in all, a nice day out.

Indonesian arts in the Netherlands

2011-11-03T10:57:00.003Z

I'm a fellow this year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and spending the academic year living on campus in the village of Wassenaar (located between Den Haag and Leiden). It is an interesting time, as they say, to be back in Holland (I was a postdoc at the IIAS in Leiden in 1998-2000), with many of the main supporting institutions for Indonesian studies and theatre under attack by government funding cuts.

Nevertheless, there is still lots that I've been able to attend. A Pesta Rakyat dan Bazaar Makanan dan Produk Indonesia (pictured above) at the Sekolah Indonesia in Wassenaar - a replacement for the annual Hari Merdeka celebrations(10 Sep), an academic symposium Recording the Future sponsored by the KITLV (6 Oct), a touring production from Yogya-based choreographer Martinus Miroto 'Di Belakang' (6 Oct at the Korzo Theatre in Den Haag), a major exhibition on colonial Indonesia and culture at the KIT (23 October), a workshop on Colonial Nostalgia at the KITLV (27 October).

Now that I've settled in, and my camera is working properly, I hope to be able to offer more detailed impressions of some of the events I attend.

Arak-Arakan on the Cocos Islands

2011-08-22T07:41:00.004+01:00

I've been doing online newspaper searches the last weeks towards my next book (a history of theatre and performance in modern Indonesia). Yesterday I used an Australian site- http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/. One of my searches, on keroncong, revealed an article about a 1954 visit of the Queen to the Coocos Islands. This small island chain, today part of Australia, is inhabited by 500 "Malays" and 100 people of European descent. The Malays, it seems, originate from various parts of Nusantara, brought there starting in the early 19th century to work on the island's coconut groves. Their music in the 1950s was described as a mixture of kroncong and Scottish "foursome reels".

An online video (above) shows that today their music (and ceremonies) is much more Malaysian than Indonesian - the result it seems of Cocos Islanders working in Malaysia and marrying Malay women in recent decades.

What a fascinating ethnographic site this would make!

Leonard Retel Helmrich's Post-Reformasi Trilogy

2011-06-17T10:32:00.013+01:00

Yesterday, I attended the screening of a trilogy of films by Indo-Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich at Open City, a festival of documentary film currently on at UCL.

The trilogy follows the fortune of an extended family living in a small house in a Jakarta slum, roughly over the years 1998 to 2010 - a micro-history of change in politics, economics and religion.

These three films Eye of the Day (2001), Shape of the Moon (2004) and Position among the Stars (2010) are remarkable in the intimacy with their subjects. The grandmother Rumidjah, who owns the house, is a practicing Christian, long widowed, who comes originally from a small village in Central Java where Helmrich's own mother was born.

In the first film, set against the demonstrations that led to Soeharto's downfall and the first post-reformasi election, her son Bakti, who still lives with her mother, is a bit of a lay-about, addicted to gambling without career aspirations. We see in the trilogy Bakti drifting away from Christianity and converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim woman (who starts up a small warung in front of the house). Bakti takes to raising fighting fish (which are fried by his wife after a quarrel), and also is elected RT.

Also living in the house is Tari, Sudjinah's grand-daughter who was orphaned at age 6. Over the years, we see Tari transform from an imaginative and spunky kid to a somewhat jaded and diffident adolescent. In the third film, Sudjinah is forced to take out a mortgage against her house in order to pay for Tari's tertiary education in Komunikasi (Media and Communication Studies).

We also see Sudjinah herself in the second film make a go at returning to her natal village Kalimiru (in Purworejo, Jawa Tengah), renovating a house and trying to find day labour in rice fields. She returns to Jakarta in the third film though to help with Tari, who has been having trouble with her high school studies.

Helmrich in all this is both a documentarian and an instigator of scenes, observer and participant. Though never seen on camera, he is on intimate terms with the family. Camera work is extraordinary - never before has daily life in under-class Indonesia seen such exposure.

I first encountered Helmrich from his remarkable documentary about Dutch experimental puppetry, Moving Objects (1991) - which I saw at the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre, and reviewed his documentary about Indonesian puppeteer Agus Nur Amal, Promised Paradise (2006), for Asian Theatre Journal.

I had hoped to meet Helmrich at the opening of the festival last night, at which Position among the Stars was shown. Unfortunately he had to go to California, where his film is being promoted by HBO for an academy award nomination.

Ecological Body Open Day

2011-06-12T13:55:00.002+01:00

I attended the Ecological Body Open Day yesterday. This was the final day of a five-day workshop titled Ecological Body run by Suprapto Suryodarmo and Sandra Reeve at Sandra's house in West Dorset, on the south coast of England. The 16 people who attended the workshop were joined by about a dozen spectator-participants. It was billed as one of Prapto's last workshops in the UK and there was reportedly a lot of crying at a 2 hour long 'processing' session that ended the day. (I took a long walk along the beach with Hannah, looking for fossils, during this session, which was open only to workshop participants.)

Workshop participants were divided into three movement groups - daily life (identified by wearing a red thread), healing/therapy and performance. Each participant performed a solo piece set in different niches around Sandra's garden, and then a series of group pieces. After the group pieces, there was an opportunity for visitors to move together with the participants in the settings that groups had identified for showing daily life movement (a vegetable garden), healing/therapy (a group of trees) and performance (a little grassy hill backed by some bushes, which functioned as a kind of backstage area).

After lunch supplied by a local organic food vendor, there were a series of somewhat improvised performances by participants and visitors (some of them authorised teachers of Suprapto's method). This included a piece by Suprapto called Sea Song, in which he addressed a wire sculpture titled ManChild created by Greta Berlin through movement, chanting, incense and a flower offering; a piece called Settling by Sandra Reeve which combined pantomime gestures with dance; a piece by Alex Crowe called Time for Words, in which he danced with an ax (handled in the style of a pencak silat artist) as Simon Slidders improvised a text about time and the garden; and a series of English folk songs (somewhat improvised, again) sung with gusto by Keith Miller- all of which related to the local topography and the history of the house.

Suprapto was mostly quiet throughout the performances - as he was busy documenting the presentations with a handicam. But he spoke a couple of times, mentioning how the visit of a number of monks to the workshop reminded him of how shocked people in Indonesia were initially that he would involve monks in performances; how in the past workshop participants did not appreciate that male monks cannot be touched by women (miming a gesture of horror at being touched); the transformation from ecology to logos and back to ecology; the importance of connecting to mythos via storytelling.

After the processing session, and before Sandra drove me back to the local train station, I was able to have a short interview with Suprapto about art for ritual vs. art for arts sake; the post-1998 re-emergence of ritual art; and connections between his own practice and that of his daughter Melati. All themes I hope to take up in my new book on theatre and performance in modern Indonesia.

Gamelan Lila Cita on ZingZillas

2011-05-21T23:15:00.004+01:00

Surfing the web I came across an episode of the BBC children's show ZingZillas, featuring a pencak silat number accompanied by Gamelan Lila Cita. This can be viewed in the UK on BBC iPlayer at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00s61lc/ZingZillas_Series_1_Welcome_Beach_Byrds/ (starting at 6.54).

This sort of thing would have been reported upon in the past in Seleh Notes or the UK Gamelan Information website. Unfortunately since Sheila Cude stopped playing gamelan and managing the website and magazine, we aren't getting news!

Hope somebody else takes up this role.... The UK is not that large a country, but none of us surely is aware of everything going on in Indonesian arts....

Wayang Garing

2011-05-20T18:53:00.002+01:00

My recent show 'A Dalang in Search of Wayang' has been occupying a lot of my attention recently.

It is interesting for me to think about related efforts. The BBC has a short documentary about a Banten-based performer who has been doing what he calls Wayang Garing (Dry Wayang) for decades.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10848885

Then of course there is Jlitheng Suparman, who recently has been touring Wayang Climen, which features a reduced gamelan of 8 musicians plus 2 pesinden.

I did something similar to this at my British Library performances with the Southbank Gamelan Players back in 2008. It is of course normal practice in Cirebon to have a reduced gamelan for wayang awan and ruwatan, so perhaps nothing unusual. There is a lot to be said for performances with a reduced gamelan in smaller spaces to generate a more intimate relation with audiences.

Joanna Soh's tv feature on 'A Dalang in Search of Wayang'

2011-05-17T08:59:00.004+01:00

Joanna Soh, a Malaysian student who studied wayang kulit briefly at Sunway College (in a course co-taught by my friend Eddin Khoo), has recently produced a short tv feature on my new production, 'A Dalang in Search of Wayang'.

She shot the full show when I did an 'open rehearsal' of it at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London on 28 March 2011, and also conducted a short interview with me and people attending, including puppeteer Sean Myatt, Aya Nakamura, Matt Jackson, Caroline Astell-Burt and Mark Downs. (All were invited for the show, and also a workshop delivered earlier in the day by American puppet director and theorist Roman Paska.)

I think Joanna did a very good job - though no doubt some Indonesian viewers will not be happy that she included a clip of Kelantan-style wayang kulit by Malaysian puppetry students at the beginning of the video, and that she refers to wayang as originating in Malaysia and Indonesia - rather than the other way round! A salutary reminder that Malaysians see wayang as a bridge for cultural communication with Indonesia.

Have a look at the segment on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvZGP2lQ0d0).

Minister of Religion's Visit to Al-Zaytun

2011-05-11T09:15:00.004+01:00

One of the remarkable developments documented in Laurie Margot Ross's PhD thesis on topeng in Cirebon and Indramayu (Journeying, Adaptation, and Translation:
Topeng Cirebon at the Margins, UCal Berkeley, 2009) is the introduction of topeng and other other regional arts into pesantren around the region. Pesantren had formerly been indifferent and often hostile to such traditions as topeng, and the motivations behind this move were a bit mysterious.

Today Al-Zaytun, the largest pesantren in Indramayu and one of the largest in Indonesia, put this arts education to use, playing terbang and gamelan to greet the arrival of indonesian's Minister of Religion.

(See http://www.metrotvnews.com/read/newscatvideo/nusantara/2011/05/11/128002/Panji-Gumilang-Kerahkan-Santri-Sambut-Menag for a video)

Al-Zaytun is being formally investigated for its links with Negara Islam Indonesia (NII), a banned political movement. I take the showcasing of gamelan in particular, prominently highlighted in news reports, as an attempt to showcase the pesantren's tolerance.

Baby Arabia

2011-05-06T06:55:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I attended the only scheduled UK screening of a documentary titled Baby Arabia, about a Thai Muslim pop group based in Bangkok. After the screening at SOAS, one of the film's creators, a screenwriter who also writes for the Bangkok Post, conducted a q&a session.

The band started in 1976 as a nasjid group covering popular Arabic, Malay and Indonesian songs. (The Malay and Indonesian repertoire is referred to locally as 'Malay-Arabic'.) Baby Arabia added instruments over time - guitar, bass, drum kit, accordion - and also incorporated female vocalists and a backup chorus. On stage, the singers dress in Malay garb (though they wear normal Thai clothing off). They have little understanding of the meaning of the Arabic, Malay and Indonesian lyrics they sing, and even unable to articulate their sources, but these songs are enjoyed by local audiences The long-lived band performs some 150 concerts a year (lasting 2 to 6 hours), typically playing mosque fairs and private celebrations, sometimes earning only 300 baht. Band members have other jobs- one works as a motorcycle taxi driver.

The documentary is essentially a concert film which follows the band to gigs around the Bangkok area and also provides glimpses into band members' lives and religious practices. For example, we see the lead female vocalist teaching a class in Quranic recitation to boys. (She claims she is a better teacher than a man as her voice is closer in register to the boys'.) It is a portrait of a minority culture in a major Asian metropolis.

The film makers are all Thai Muslims and say they made the film to show the voice of moderate Islam. After 9/11 and the escalation of violence in the south of Thailand, Muslims in Thailand suffered from negative stereotypes, and the voices that dominated the media were extremists who espoused radicalism, counterposed by liberal Muslims who often offered anti-Islamic comments.

Listening now to the sound track as a type this post, I hear the music as Indonesian- a variant of orkes Melayu. But Thai experts in attendance said they perceived the backup rhythms as Thai country music, and the backup dancers in their cute costumes as typically Thai. So an interesting case of transnational hybridity.

A DVD of the documentary is planned.

Livestreaming of the Bandung Wayang Festival 2011

2011-04-29T15:45:00.004+01:00

Learned today via the gamelan list that the Bandung Wayang Festival 2011 was being streamed live. I caught the end of a Wayang Klithik performance and also Wayang Kartun from Yogyakarta. I found it quite odd taking notes on a wayang by typing at my desktop computer and taking screen shots. But how else to document the show? Though I requested via a live comment section on the webpage (http://itv.itenas.ac.id/) that the performance be posted on youtube, there is no guarantee that it will be. Such as the world of technology we inhabit.

Bagpipes and Gamelan

2011-04-15T19:15:00.002+01:00

Rehearsing now for a wayang with Gamelan Madu Sari, Vancouver's Javanese gamelan group, for Gong! Vancouver Gamelan Festival, which celebrates 25 years of gamelan in Vancouver (Canada). Madu Sari is also busy rehearsing for a concert of new music for the gamelan written by group members. One of the most interesting pieces on this programme is Beledrone, composed by Madu Sari member Michael O’Neill, who features as bagpipe soloist.

Bagpipes and gamelan have a strange affinity, and there have been a number of noteworthy cross-overs in recent years, including a composition by Wesleyan facutly member I.M. Harjito, and a collaboration between Scottish piper Barnaby Brown and Gamelan Naga Mas.

Would be interesting to investigate this phenomenon of gamelan/bagpipe fusion more, perhaps....

Wayan Sadra, RIP

2011-04-13T20:13:00.002+01:00

While checking email on board a ferry from Victoria to Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada), sitting next to Pak Sutrisno Hartana, I received an FB message from the ASTI/STSI/ISI Surakarta alumni mailing list that the great gamelan composer I Wayan Sadra passed away today at 12.05 am in the RS Muwardi Surakarta.

I actually stayed very briefly in Sadra's house during my first weeks in Indonesia in 1988 - at the time he was renting out a few rooms at the back, and AL Suwardi arranged for me stay in one of them. I had little notion at the time that I was staying in the house of one of Indonesia's most important experimental composers, responsible for developing whole new ways of conceiving gamelan.

The loss of this major figure in Indonesian arts will be felt by many.

Indonesian Arts in Victoria

2011-04-12T16:30:00.006+01:00

I am visiting Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, for a couple of days prior to a performance with Gamelan Madu Sari in Vancouver, and staying at the house of Sutrisno Hartana, a very talented gamelan musician and amateur dalang, who has lived in British Columbia on-and-off since the 1990s.

Sutrisno worked at the consultate in Vancouver for a couple of years in the mid-1990s and in 2004 returned to BC to do a Masters in Ethnomusicology with Michael Tenzer (on gamelan in the Pakualaman court) and then continued on to do a PhD at the University of Victoria dealing with wayang kulit and gamelan outside of Indonesia (working with Michael Bodden and Astri Wright, among others).

Sutrisno's wife Anis is a pesinden and holds a D3 from ASTI Yogya in Karawitan. She worked in the bagian teknis pertunjukan at Taman Budaya Yogyakarta until the family's move to Canada in 2004. Pak Tris, Ibu Anis and their two daughters (Lulu aged 12 and Ayun aged 16) often perform small gamelan concerts on instruments borrowed from the consulate. To make ends meet, Sutrisno also teaches a number of gamelan groups in Victoria and Vancouver, and Anis has a small catering business that provides meals to Indonesian cruise ship workers when they dock in Victoria. This, it was explained to me, was seasonal work - about 3-5 cruise ships dock weekly in Victoria circa May-September on their way from Seattle to Alaska, many of them manned by Indonesians who 'rindu' their native cuisine.

It has been an interesting visit here so far. Not only is Pak Tris is a VERY talented musician and rehearsing for the wayang with him has been good and productive, he is as interested in my practice as a 'dalang mancanegara' as I am in his own situation. He is pumping me with questions relevant to his PhD thesis even as I am observing his own work and family life. Needless to say, the food is good too.

R.I.P. H. Abdul Adjib

2011-02-26T23:53:00.004Z

Inna lillahi wa inna lilahi rojiiun. The world of Cirebonese performing art has lost another of its great figures, the dalang tarling H. Abdul Adjib who died today (26 February 2011).

Adjib (also known as Adjid) was the director of the tarling company Putra Sangkala, founded in the 1960s. He was one of a cohort of actor-director-musicians who defined this music theatre genre, which combines singing, melodramatic acting and drum, gongs, suling (bamboo flute) and guitars. Others of this cohort include Jayana, Uci Sanusi and Sunarto MA. Only Sunarto is still alive. Since the 1990s, Adjib also had a career doing Islamic solo performances combining sermons and singing. Adjib is best remembered for his tarling musical version of the folk tale Baridin, and the song Warung Pojok (Corner Food Stall).

Anoman Duta in Vancouver

2011-02-22T20:34:00.002Z

I've recently been invited to do a wayang with Gamelan Madu Sari of Vancouver, Canada. This will be for Gong! The Vancouver Gamelan Festival, celebrating 25 years of gamelan in Vancouver.

Also on the programme festival will be my friend Nyoman Wenten, who teaches at CalArts.

The lakon will be Anoman Duta (Anoman the Envoy), in a 90-minute telling of this iconic tale of the Ramayana. I'll be basing the story mostly on Cirebonese sources, though the gamelan will be playing mostly Solo style pieces (perhaps with some new compositions thrown in), and most of the wayang (borowed from resident artist Sutrisno) are in Yogya style. A real mix.

My telling will play up some of the grotesque elements of the story - including Anoman's meeting with his god-brother Gunung Parasu, the various demons of Ngalengka, and the like. I also hope to interweave the rather more serious story of Wibiksana, who changes sides to ally himself with Rama, even though it means fighting against his homeland.

Should be fun.

Spiderman Wayang ad

2011-02-20T15:42:00.004Z

Just ran into a fun TV ad for the Spiderman movie franchise on Indonesian television featuring wayang versions of Spiderman and various Spidey villains - 'our play is not here [in the world of wayang], but on Trans TV'. The sabetan skills aren't great, but worth a look - and listen too to the pesinden's melody, based on the old cartoon show.

Limbukan from Anom Suloyo

2011-02-10T08:57:00.004Z

From time to time I surf youtube looking for unusual wayang videos. Here's a rather random one, a very 'kampungan' Limbukan from dalang Anom Suloyo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je2d5iIxZaA

The dancing at the screen by Limbuk seems rather gratuitous juxtaposed with the bump and grind routines of the two penyanyi dangdut left of the kotak.

Ki Dalang Udaya R.I.P.

2011-02-04T20:19:00.003Z

Inna lillahi wa inna lilahi rojiiun. I received a text message today from my friend Purjadi that Ki Dalang Abihudaya from Palimanan, Cirebon, passed away on 5 February 2011.

Udaya, as he was better known,was one of the most respected puppeteers in the Cirebon area. After the death of his father, Abyor, and his two uncles, Wari Priyadi and Akirna Hadiwekasan, Udaya took charge of the running of the Sanggar Wening Galih, a small arts centre located in the shadow of Palimanan's factories. This sanggar was best known to puppeteers for its annual 'tutup panggung,' a collective end-of-season ritual where puppeteers performed for puppeteers for free. I contributed to the tutup panggung on a number of occasions. The sanggar also trained many musicians.

Udaya prided himself on being the people's puppeteer. He spoke primarily through the straight-thinking Cungkring in performance, and used wayang as a vehicle for the expression of lower class aspirations. He was not liked by many wayang patrons. He disrupted song requests with battles, as he believed wayang was a verbal art form that should not be compromised by songs. He was a great storyteller and the source of many, many stories. He was known to challenge his assistants to pull out any wayang in the puppet chest, which he would instantly deploy as the main character in the first scene of a newly created story.

I devoted a chapter to his work in my PhD thesis, An Inheritance from the Friends of God (Yale, 1997).

Udaya was one of my 'sesepuh' or elders in Cirebon, somebody I regularly turned to for artistic inspiration, advice and philosophical engagement. Too many of these are now deceased - Saal, Darmabakti, Wartaka, Sujana (Gegesik Kidul), Basari. Yet they live on still in the region's arts.

Wayang Kulit in Thessaloniki

2011-02-03T12:38:00.006Z

Off tomorrow to give a talk about and solo performance of wayang kulit in Thessaloniki, Greece, for a festival of Asian theatre organised by my PhD student Athina Dragkou. I've always resisted giving wayang kulit performances without live gamelan accompaniment, but for this occasion I am experimenting with a contemporary wayang style developed by Ki Slamet Gundono (pictured above) that combines wayang puppetry with storytelling. I had the opportunity last month of seeing Ki Slamet rehearse and perform one of his contemporary wayang in Cirebon, and am excited to try this new style out. We'll see how it goes.

The Indonesian news service Antara has a short article about the festival - which also features mask expert Margaret Coldiron, who got her PhD at Royal Holloway. Have a look here.

Agus Nur Amal

2011-01-03T14:28:00.003Z

Coming to the end of my first day of a two-week trip to Indonesia. I am spending the first two days of this trip in Jakarta, where I am conducting a few consultations and interviews in relation to a planned book on theatre and performance in modern Indonesia.

Today I met Agus Nur Amal at TIM and went to visit his sanggar. Mas Agus is described in Indonesia sometimes as a monologue artist, but his work more closely approximates what is known as object theatre outside of Indonesia.

I had the opportunity to do a long interview with him, and got to see and photograph some of the 150 or so objects he uses in performances, as well as one of his television booths.

I also got a VCD and a comic to take home with me - which I am looking forward to watching and reading.

Mas Agus is just starting to become known outside of Indonesia- in part because of a documentary film made about him after the Bali bombing titled Promised Paradise. He's performed and conducted workshops in New York, Boston, Zurich and Japan and will be giving a workshop in Prague in June.

I hope to write about him in my book, and might also want to write a stand-alone article about him, or possibly include him in a more general discussion of post-traditional puppet and object theatre in Indonesia.

Jakarta's Performing Monkeys Fall on Hard Times

2011-01-02T12:03:00.004Z

I have just arrived in Jakarta for a couple of weeks of catching up with friends, consulting with a few colleagues and senior figures in the world of Indonesian performance about future research, and attending a conference at UGM.

I was interviewed by a reporter from AOL News last month about Indonesia's monkey show - a long-term interest of mine, which I have written about on a number of occasions.

The article appeared last month under the title 'Jakarta's Performing Monkeys Fall on Hard Times' (http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/22/jakartas-performing-monkeys-fall-on-hard-times/). Much of it is based on the interview with me - and while there are one or two points that I think are not quite accurate, it is a pretty good reflection of the dialogue.

Not sure if I will see more topeng monyet on this trip -- but certainly hoping I will catch the act described in the article where the monkey gets into a motorcycle accident!

Pesta Pulau Pinang

2010-12-31T11:06:00.004Z

Went last night (30 December) to Pesta Pulau Pinang, an annual month-long carnival and night market on the outskirts of Georgetown. This event is particularly popular among Penang's Malays - and is similar in many ways to the Jakarta Fair, Sekatanen in Yogya and Solo and the like, with cheap clothes, household items and trinkets for sale, carnival rides and such.

There are regularly artistic performances scheduled at Pesta - a boria competition, Chinese acrobatics, and such - but we were not in luck last night. We caught a bit of a boxing match, and we also saw a reptile show from Thailand (with a young woman handling snakes inside a glass cage), but though a 'rumah seni' was advertised, we could not find this.

We did manage to get to 3 Indonesian pavilions - from Aceh, Sumatra Barat and Sumatra Utara - with vendors selling handicrafts. The longest-running of these pavilions (which are permanent structures, left vacant 11 months of the year) has been in business for 13 years, and is staffed by 20 people who ship over their goods 2 weeks before the fair, and stay in the pavilion for the duration of the event. The pavilions are organised by the propinsi governments, but the vendors are private Indonesian entrepreneurs selling wares that are designed to appeal to locals (e.g., Muslim clothing). No cultural shows were being fielded by any of the pavilions this year, though there have been such in the past.

Mentioning the snake show and Indonesian pavilions to my colleague Tan Sooi Beng over lunch, she read this as a sign of Penang's cosmopolitanism, and how the island has always been a meeting place of different cultures - Thai, Malay, Chinese, Sumatran and places further afield.

Amin Sweeney

2010-12-27T17:10:00.002Z

I have just learned that Amin Sweeney, the great scholar of Malay literary and oral culture, passed away in Jakarta on 13 November 2010. An obituary was published in a Brunei website (http://brudirect.com/index.php/Columnist-Column/the-detective-of-malay-manuscripts.html) and reprinted in H-Asia.

I first met Amin when I was applying for graduate schools back in 1990 - and remember vividly visiting his office at Berkeley, where he showed me the full set of wayang Siam puppets he kept there and impressed me with the way he combined his scholarship with practice as a tok dalang.

He was an important influence on my work in years thereafter - and while we met in person only a few times, he was a significant interlocutor for me. His passing merits further notice.

Kecak at Padang Tegal

2010-12-21T23:29:00.002Z

I attended the nightly Kecak performance at the Pura Tamansari at Padang Tegal in Ubud last night.

This had the feel of a community eventm even if it is staged exclusively for tourists (without even a programme in Indonesian). The floor of the covered open-air hall where it was staged was marked for badminton. A little warung next to the hall sold cold Bintang beer, krupuk, packs of kacang bawang etc. The massive chorus of kecak dancers was in very close proximity to spectators seated in a U shape around the performance area (with the back of the U being a Balinese gate and stairs decorated with janur).

The half-clothed kecak chorus performed with great precision, and was of diverse ages, and if lacking in some of the enthusiasm of a chorus of young men had a great deal of intimacy. There were also quite a range of highly competent dancers (including one penasar each for Rama and Rahwana) in very fine costumes. The lighting - provided by live flame in the middle of the hall - was absolutely stunning. This kecak is associated with Walter Spies, but has obviously been regularly renewed and revamped. It was lovely to hear the Kawi of the Ramayana being chanted throughout, and also to hear the panasar interpret the noble characters into Balinese (even if nobody in the audience could understand Balinese!). A priest officiated - sprinkling performers with holy water before the show.

The Kecak was followed by a staged performance of Sanghyang Dedadi. The music (a chorus of men and another chorus of women) was quite moving-- and I was reminded again of how much the female choral singing resembles the female chorus of brai Bayalangu, clearly one of the most ancient forms of music in the archipelago. But the dancing was not inspired - with no clear differentiation between the dancing before and after the dancers went into 'trance.'

More exciting was the final item on the programme, the so-called fire dance, or sangyang jaran, in which a man on a hobbyhorse is possessed by a horse spirit and walks around in burning coconut husks, kicking them as he goes, making a tremendous effect with jumping sparks etc. It was quite thrilling to be so close to the intense heat of the pire of coconut husks (lit with kerosene) at the beginnnig of this number -- and while the dancing was not very interesting, the horse was nicely constructed and the movement well coordinated with the male chorus.

A fine evening performance - even if not quite long enough for my taste (only an hour in all).

Legong programme at Puri Ubud

2010-12-21T03:36:00.002Z

Last night (20 December) I attended the Legong programme of dances at Puri Ubud. Ubud's palace has been running nightly dance performances for tourists for decades. The group has toured abroad a number of times, and performances are always well attended due to the central location (opposite the market), prestige venue and the beauty of the setting. Last night was the full moon and was particularly nice to see the beautifully lit palace gate used as an entrance with the moon rising behind it.

While the programme was advertised as Legong, it was quite a smorgasbord of dance and music on offer, with Legong Kraton as being only one item. Other items included baris, a very short topeng tua, a panyembrana (welcome dance) of course, and so on. The highlights of the programme for me was an energetic Taruna Jaya, and the Legong Kraton, which had a superb Condong.

I think the pura would benefit from staging fewer items of a higher quality, and with more 'cultural' explanation. I can understand the appeal of lots of items (more photo opportunities etc) but the special environment of the palace would be better served by a more focused performance event.

Kuningan at Bona, Gianyar

2010-12-21T03:09:00.003Z

I am spending a few days in Ubud, on way to a family event in Australia. A door prize I won at an Indonesia promotional event at Harrod's means that I can stay at Uma Ubud, a beautiful and very friendly spa hotel on the outskirts of town.

Made Sidia, a puppeteer and dancer who teaches at ISI Denpasar and has performed in many international collaborative projects (including Theft of Sita) invited me out to Bona, Gianyar yesterday for the local pura's big Kuningan festival.

The temple celebrates a large-scale Kuningan karya every 5 years, involving a donation of Rp150,000 for each villager from the 6 banjar served by the temple. This allows 3 weeks of performances staged inside and directly outside the temple.

Yesterday was the climax of this festival - with afternoon performances (starting at 3.30pm) of gambuh, a children's baris group (with boys aged 6 to 12 wielding spears), topeng (dance and comedy, but not a story), kebyar played by ibu-ibu, and a variety of other dance and music. Inside the pura there was also wayang lemah and other performances - but unfortunately we weren't admitted.

Before all these performances started (in close proximity to each other - leading to a lot of noise!) an excerpt of the Old Javanese Ramayana was chanted (with intepretation into Balinese). This chanting went on in fact as all the dance and music was staged.

The main stage event was the gambuh performance by a professional troupe - who performed in front of an Indian-style image of a dancing Ganesha lit by a swirling gobo.

Made Sidia was in charge of 'seksi kesenian' of the event so very busy and as a result we did not have much of a chance to talk. But I was introduced to a number of his friends and collaborators in a pre-performance social get-together in a neighbouring house (with tea, pisang goreng, poci etc) -- I Wayan Suweca (one of the founders of Sekar Jaya) and I Made Subandi (a composer who toured with Theft of Sita and also plays gender wayang for Wayan Wija and teaches at SMKI and has a group called 'Kelompok Musik Tradisi Radikal').

A remarkable event over all - a true testament to the vitality of Bali's traditional arts today, as well as the sense of community in this village.

Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905-1952

2010-12-03T10:39:00.002Z

I was supposed to deliver a talk today to the University of Surrey on Java and Bali in interwar American dance. But the snow blanketing London (well maybe not a blanket, more like a thin sheet) resulted in cancellation. So I find myself with a few extra hours in the week. Enough time to post the book cover for my newest book- Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan. It has been available in the UK for the last month or so, and will be released in the US on 7 December.

Launching of the Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama

2010-12-02T14:40:00.003Z

The English edition of the Lontar Anthology of Indonesia (with volume 1 edited by yours truly) was released earlier this year - but is still awaiting international distribution. That has not prevented Lontar from arranging a series of launch events - one in July at the Luce Foundation in New York, and a number in Indonesia. The picture above shows a reader of the first volume of the Indonesian edition.

Independence Day and Lebaran Celebration at the Ambassador's Residence

2010-09-12T19:40:00.004+01:00

I have just returned from the Indonesian ambassador's residence. No, I was not attending a formal dinner (which actually was the case the last time I visited), but the annual celebration of Indonesian independence, which this year was combined with Lebaran, celebrating the end of the month of the fast.

This was a community event, open to everyone- Indonesian expats and their families, domestic servants, students, Indonesia experts etc.

Food and drink was served buffet style on the tennis courts. Food vendors set up shop in tents, selling nasi uduk, sate, pempek-pempek, dodol and other delights. A shop vendor came from Birmingham to sell Indonesian canned and dry products (like kripik tempe). Children played in the woods, bashed each other with sticks and climbed over a high wall separating the ambassador from his neighbour.

A stage was erected on the lawn next to the house, where the London-based degung ensemble Sekar Enggal played (I arrived just as everyone was packing up), a Batak band performed pop Batak songs, and a number of lively tari lepas were staged by brightly-costumed dancers flown in from Holland and also a UK-based Indonesian dancer. A small group made up of Indonesians and non-Indonesians also did a pencak silat demo on the lawn in front of the stage, with hand-to-hand combat and weapons.

The highlight of the cultural programme was a 'singing competition' between a 20-year-old contestant in the 2008 edition of Indonesian Idol from Palembang and a contestant from Indonesia in the Swedish edition of the show. The prize, the MC joked, was a ticket - not to Indonesia, but from Tegal to Pekalongan in Java, third class. The Indonesian singer did a mix of Indonesian pop songs with some dangdut (including Goyang Dombret). The Swedish singer did mostly Western pop. Both were accompanied by the house band of the Indonesian Embassy. At the end they came together for a few numbers, including Poco-Poco. A number of Indonesian women came up from the audience to joget (dance free style) on stage during the dangdut numbers, to the joy of the audience.

Such was the joy that permeated the whole event that the MC's remark that we Indonesians are all 'saudara' (relatives) seemed not TOO forced.

This was not the kind of event which I would want to attend regularly. But as a once in a blue moon thing, pretty enjoyable. And of course the food was good, and the weather thankfully cooperative.

IFTR Congress , Munich, Germany (25-30 August 2010)

2010-07-31T10:15:00.005+01:00

Just returned from Munich, Germany, where I attended the Congress of the International Federation of Theatre Research, presenting on the first Indies Art Evening (The Hague, 1916)as a watershed event in the history of cultural internationalism. The basic argument I outlined will be in my book Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905-1952 (Palgrave, Nov 2010).

There were only a handful of other papers addressing Southeast Asian theatre and performance.

Barbara Hatley spoke about Yogyakarta's lively contemporary performance activities, including the Pasar Kangen (saying that his both sells and celebrates nostalgia) and the many locally based groups that construct community in a relaxed and happy atmosphere and and connect to a global audience via the www, facebook and so on. She focused particularly on Teater Garasi, and its resistance to essentialism (in Waktu Batu) and presentation of alternatives to Islamic modernism (in Je.ja.l.an). Its third major piece, titled Tubuh Ketiga (referencing Homi Bhabha's idea of the third space), is based on Tarling Dangdut in Indramayu. Barbara asked that while the piece nomimally deal with conflicted bodies, will it be received in 'party mode'? Tubuh Ketiga is still in rehearsal so it is difficult to say. It is due to tour Java in the autumn of 2010.

In addition to Barbara's presentation, Monica van der Haagen (formerly Monica Wulff) returned to the subject of her PhD research in the New Scholars Forum to show her performance installation addressing Losari-style topeng, Mata Hari and a deconstruction of colonial film of the Dutch Indies.

In the Asian Theatre working group, Kirstin Pauka discussed the reasons behind the decline of cross-gender performance in randai while Kaori Okado, an ISI Solo trained dancer, discussed her MA thesis topic of langendriyan.

There were also presentations in the conference from Catherine Diamond (on the popular theatres of bangsawan and cai luong), Lim How Ngean (on Malaysian tradition-based choreographer Azanin Ahmad) and meLe Yamomo (on opera in SE Asia).

The big issues of the conference revolved around the large-scale research projects of Erika Fischer-Lichte (on interweaving theatrical cultures) and Chris Balme (on global theatre history). There was much discussion about the use of 'intercultural theatre' and whether this was still a useful rubric for thinking about theatrical productions that combine different styles or forms associated with different cultures. Opinions varied, naturally.

Straits Times

2010-07-06T13:50:00.004+01:00

I spent a day in September of last year looking at digitised back issues of the Straits Times at Singapore's national library. Now I've learned that the library has provided - free of charge - this same service on the world wide web. Content is even showing up on google. Above is an image from the paper of Raden Mas Utomo's dance group, which performed in Singapore in 1949, a year before it played London. Note that it has water marks on it - preventing it from commerical use, but still making it very valuable to researchers and the curious.

Rahayu Supanggah and the Kronos Quartet

2010-07-04T20:01:00.003+01:00

Ran into this nice, short video about last summer's workshop of Indonesian composer Rahayu Supanggah and the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet.

The site of the workshop was the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts, and perhaps not surprisingly the resultant piece is titled Purnati.

Doesn't seem like Kronos will be recording the piece. Reports have not been very positive from friends who have heard the result. For a first public play-through see also:

Teater Tetas

2010-07-01T08:12:00.011+01:00

Learned recently from a PhD student of mine working on Indonesian theatre that Teater Tetas, a theatre group from Jakarta, is appearing in the Contacting the World festival in Manchester.

As it turns out, another Indonesian group, CuciOtak from Pasuruan, also is appearing. Perhaps a first - at least here in the UK. I can't recall two Indonesian teater groups appearing side-by-side in an international festival. (With the exception of course of specifically Indonesian-themed festivals.) Has Indonesian teater come of age? Or is this just a fluke?

Komedie Stamboel reviewed in c2o-library.net

2010-06-30T15:23:00.002+01:00

A very fine Indonesian-language review of my book The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903, was just published on the website of C2O, a progressive library, cinametheque and cafe in Surabaya.

http://c2o-library.net/2010/06/komedie-stamboel/#_ftn2

The reviewer, who is anonymous, also cites my article on Yap Gwan Thay which appeared in an edited collection titled Sadur: Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia (KPG, 2010). This piece has yet to see print in English, as far as I am aware.

The Indonesian-language translation of The Komedie Stamboel has been delayed by factors beyond my direct control, but it is good to see that the book is being read and discussed in Indonesia.

Asian Performing Arts Forum

2010-06-02T09:51:00.002+01:00

I am in the process of setting up a new forum called the Asian Performing Arts Forum (http://asianperformingartsforum.wordpress.com/). This is envisaged as a site for researchers of Asian theatre, dance and music to discuss recent research and dialogue with representatives of commuities of interest. The plan is to have monthly meetings in an academic year on a specific theme, leading to a June symposium.

I will be working together with my colleagues Avanthi Meduri at Roehampton (a researcher of bharatanatyam) and Ashley Thorpe at Reading (who researchers Chinese opera).

The hope is to raise awareness in London and around the UK of important issues in the field of Asian performing arts, as well as generate new research collaborations and synergies between 'the industry' and academia.

Have a look at http://asianperformingartsforum.wordpress.com/ for further info.

Gamelan Mendunia

2010-05-28T23:57:00.002+01:00

While in Holland last week I was interviewed by the Joss Wibisono (dalbera@Flickr.com) of Radio Netherlands' world service. Others interviewed were Indonesian composer Franki Raden and Dutch composer Sinta Wullur. The programme is available in both transcript form and also as a podcast at

http://www.rnw.nl/bahasa-indonesia/article/gamelan-mendunia-antara-pangling-dan-rela

Tong-Tong Festival

2010-05-23T15:00:00.007+01:00

I attended the Tong-Tong Festival again on 22 May in the company of my friend the anthropologist Robert Wessing.

I have been visiting the Tong-Tong Festival, formerly known as the Pasar Malam Besar, with some regularly since 1998. It is a major site for transnational Indonesian performance, a research interest of mine, a contact zone which involves cultural experts; performers from Indonesia and Europe; vendors of crafts, food, service; and the general public. 'The pasar' underwent a name change in 2008 which signals an attempt to move away from the nostalgic mode of 'tempo doeloe' towards a celebration of multi-culturalism and Asia in the world.

Some of the familiar parts of the pasar have been disbanded - there is no dedicated wayang theatre any more. There is definitely less of an emphasis on academic talks on indonesian subjects. There has not been an auction of art and antiques from Indonesia for a decade. The Nusantara Museum (Holland's museum of Indonesia) this year did not have a stand. (It had a stand at every other pasar I have attended.)

I attended two full performances on 22 May - 'Call Me Nyai Ontosoroh' a play from the Jakarta-based theatre company Pentas Teater based on Pramoedya's Bumi Manusia, and a fusion concert of Cianjuran meets tabla and jazz piano.

The former was a fairly straight 'read' of Pramudya. A small cast (4 performers) enacted the narrative of Minke's marriage to a Eurasian woman again a backdrop of seppia-tinted moving images. The actors were amplified and generally melodramatic in delivery, in the style of pre-1990s Indonesian film or sandiwara. English supertitles were projected in very small letters above the stage. Audience members came and went during the performance, which lasted about 80 minutes.

The Cianjuran (kecapi/suling/vocal) concert was also a mixed success. The playing was polished, but balance was an issue. The piano overwhelmed the other instrumentalists on many occasions and seemed unable to accompany the singer. As a result is was less fusion than a Charles Ives like juxtaposition of different musical forms.

I also attended a delightful 'straat' performance of kroncong group Jawara - which was hawking its CDs to 'pay for the cost of transport back to Jakarta' in the words of one of their singers, and saw briefly a 'modern kroncong' group on the main stage.

Robert and other friends reported that the Tong-Tong Festival has been experiencing some tension with the Indonesian Embassy. The Embassy organised a Pasar Malam Indonesia in the same space (the Malieveld fields next to the Central Train Station) in April (http://www.indonesia.nl/pasarmalam/) over the protests of Tong-Tong, which has been using this same space for decades. The Tong-Tong people felt that this was a conscious attempt to draw their own audiences away.

The Dutch public seems to have been indifferent to the Pasar Malam Indonesia - they felt it was overpriced, over-full with government propaganda, with not enough vendors and uninteresting performances (despite things on the schedule like 'Miss Indonesische Performance'!).

Because of the Tong-Tong's protests and other tensions, the Embassy refused its personnel permission to participate in the Tong-Tong Festival this year. This meant that oddly the Indonesian embassy's performance group will be presenting a wayang wong fragment at Tong-Tong without any of the regular members who are employed by the embassy.

Tong-Tong has recently published a book celebrating the history of the pasar (Florine Koning, De Pasar Malam van Tong Tong: Een Indische Onderneming, 2009). I have long had the ambition to conduct more academic research on this fascinating, always changing yet always the same event...

Dutch Indonesian Encounters Day 3

2010-05-22T05:55:00.012+01:00

I'm writing the morning after the third (and final) day of the Dutch Indonesian Musical Encounters symposium in Leiden - a long day in which I chaired two sessions and was a discussant for Sumarsam - the well-known gamelan teacher and ethnomusicologist, author of the book Gamelan (1995). 7 hours of non-stop talk was capped by a trip to the Tong-Tong Festival (formerly known as the Pasar Malam Besar) in Den Haag in the company of Sumarsam, composer Franki Raden, Triyono Bramantyo (dean of the faculty of performing arts at ISI Yogyakarta) and symposium organiser Els Bogaerts.

In the morning session Pak Bramantyo spoke about how the Netherlands has played only a very minor role in Indonesian musicology since Jaap Kunst's time. He hoped that the symposium would revive interest in ethnomusicology and interest in Indonesia in general (!). Pak Bram then showed a video of his 2009 research in Sulawesi Tengah - a small ensemble composed of 3 instrumentalists playing plucked string instruments and an end-blown flute and a singer in a jilbab sung plaintive songs without great enthusiasm while sitting in a row of blue plastic chairs. Pak Bramantyo later said that he was in search of 'genuine' music untainted by the modern world.

His discussant Ben Arps responded that the reason why no Indonesian PhD students had come to the Netherlands to study ethnomusicology wasthat ethnomusicology is 'very poorly institutionalised' in the Dutch academy in general. Kunst himself held an 'extraordinary' position at Amsterdam university, outside of the regular departmental structure, and no strong centres of academic ethnomusicology research had emerged since. In contrast, the Netherlands 'had not fared badly' in the practice of Indonesian music. Music and the performing arts in general have played important roles in keeping public interest in Indonesia alive in the Netherlands. Here Indonesians have been involved - as teachers, visiting artists and so on.

Wim van Zanten, my old colleague from the PAATI project, then spoke about theory and practice in Sundanese music. He argued that models proposed by Sundanese theorist Kusumadinata (stimulated by Jaap Kunst) were overly elaborate and hard for musicians to understand. Kusumadinata's notation system cannot be understood without first knowing modal theory. Sundanese musicians refer to notes by strings (which are either tuned up or down depending on the tuning mode). Musicians don't actually need notation, though it is useful for analysis. He then argued for the benefits of an artist in residence system (as he said is common in the US) whereby an Indonesian musician might teach an ethnic music while studying for a PhD. He gave the example of Uking Sukri who used money gained from teaching in the Netherlands to repair his house, and Yus Wiradiredja, who used his pay check to bankroll 3 cassette tapes of Islamic music. He played one of these tapes Pancering Hidup (2003) which was actually quite nice. He also played some other hybrid Cianjuran musical examples -- a collaboration of jazz pianist Bubi Chen with Uking Sukri and rehearsal footage from Dangiang Perhiangan's work with Dutch jazz pianist Rob Agerbeek (described as 'Soendanese crossover' in the Tong-Tong Festival's schedule).

Wim's discussant Lutgard Mutsaers (author of Rockin' Ramona) picked up Wim's comment that Sundanese musicians don't require theory. She wanted to know whether any Indonesian scholars have contested Wim's work. Wim argued that Indonesians have been hampered from intellectual exchange (including participation in international conferences etc) due to poor knowledge of English. This he admitted is changing - but graduallly. Some pointed to Soeharto as a culprit.

Franki Raden jumped in to say that Soeharto actually neglected arts and culture - which was sometimes a benign neglect. Soeharto should therefore not be blamed for the state of the arts. Much depended on who was the Dikjen for the arts. During Edi Setwayati's term there were many positive changes - she shook up the system for the better. Other ministers and director generals were corrupt and allowed research money to be corrupted. Much research remains of very poor quality. Franki added that the main reason that the government has shown an interest in his own national orchestra project is to prop up tourism. He admitted he didn't care about the government's motives, as long as they provided support.

Wim came back that his own work was not entirely ignored by Indonesians. Uking Sukri adopted Wim's system of notation for teaching, for example. Pak Bramantyo later reported that Kusumadinata's influence in the academies had faded. While he once occupied an important place (and was well known due to his music textbooks taught in pre-university levels), few were familiar with his theories today.

This session on 'Academia, Musicologists and Institutes' wass followed by two artist talks by composers Klaus Kuiper and Sinta Wullur. Klaus argued that his identity was not predicated on his citizenship in a nation-state but rather as a music-maker. He had us look at his piece Golden Rain (1991) score for piano trio plus clarinet. This was inspired by Hujan Mas recorded in the classic album Morning of the World (1967). Another piece titled Sonata da Camera (1997/9), written for the contemporary gamelan ensemble Gending and performed at the Yogya gamelan festival to a constantly laughing and applauding audience, made many gestures to pop music. These were not intentional - they just happened. 'I steal everywhere', Kalus admitted, referencing Stravinsky's famous quote that poor artists borrow while great artists steal.

Henk Mak van Dijk pointed to how Kupiers' music contrasted with his own stereotyped impressions of Indonesia. Henk viewed Indonesia through a nostalgic tempo doeloe lens as without conflict, while Klaus' music emphasises clash. He also referred to Linda Bandara's piece for gamelan written in 1937. Klaus noted that Gending plays on a gamelan slendro as this provides a challenge for the composers in the group. Usually in Holland gamelan provides an inspiration, a starting point. But Kuipers has a deeper engagement - at the level of structure and technique (for example kotekan, which suffuses his music). Sumarsam pointed out that some of the enjoyment of Kuipers' music in Java might be his integration of Balinese techniques - this provides a pleasant surprise. Kuipers said that he had actually been criticised in Java for not being Javanese enough. Kuipers also reported that he has written for Indonesian gamelan ensembles. An ideal pattern for him is for musicians to learn their parts individually and then come together for 2 weeks of rfehearsl. It is important for parts to be first internalised - so that scores are not referenced in rehearsal or performance. He also prefers to work without a conductor.

Sinta Wullur played examples of her music and spoke about her compositional processes. She likened her work to experimentation in a lab. Her harmonic elements are derived from McPhee's transcriptions - she took his 7 scales and used rotation to make chords. She has used these same chords consistently since 1993. She thinks about climax and tension through Bach. Sinta also played a bit of her opera - Sinta's Liberation for chromatic gamelan, orchestra, Western-trained voices and wayang kulit (performed by Joko Susilo) and spoke about her attempts to integrate Indonesian, Indian and European music in Indi Go.

Reporter Joss Wibisono spoke about how he was 'pangling' - in between recognising and not recognising - when confronted with Sinta's music. He had difficulty recognising gamelan due to chromaticism of sounds, and European structures. Sinta described herself as 'a child of two cultures' in her presentation title and said she saw herself as a new race, a new entitty. She said her music appealed particularly to percussionists. The vibraphone or marimba is a very poor cousin to the bronze instruments of gamelan, with their rich sonic qualities. She said she would like to bring her chromatic gamelan to Indonesia and see how Indonesians might use it. She is looking for partners.

Discussion returned again to Linda Bandara, whose own specially made gamelan (apparently diatonic) was constructed in 1925 and is now housed in the ethnological museum in Vienna.

Franki Raden said that much of the interest of gamelan was lost by tuning it to a Western scale. Sinta said that ehe wanted to experiment with Steve Reich/Phillip Glass like figurations in combination with gamelan patterns - the chromatic gamelan was ideal for this, she argued.

Jos Jansen applauded Sinta's opera - saying that in it she no longer felt she had to prove herself, she just makes the music shet wants to.

Sumarsam offered the finding that Raffles' gamelan in Claydon House is probably the first diatonic gamelan.

Renadi said that retuned gamelan is not unique to the West. Krakatau uses a 10 toned slendro-based gamelan with tuned synthesizer to make chromatic effect. Reference was also made to the Gamelan Supra.

After lunch, Lutgard Mutsaers offered her thoughts about parallels between choro, a popular music of Brazil, and keroncong, and showed a documentary about choro off youtube.

She argued that choro remained a music of the streets - the origin point of keroncong, which was gentrified in the 1930s. A music video Choro Novo was like a keroncong street performance. In contrast the 'krontjong baru' at Tong-Tong was very tame and domesticated.

This was, she said, kroncong as 'high art'.

Discussant Peter Keppy, himself also a kroncong researcher, criticised Lutgard for emphasising connections with very distant musics of Portuguese origin (choro, Hawaiian music etc). He urged her to look at closer connections - gambang kromong and Chinese music particularly. He told an enecdote about how he was talking once with a Chinese friend over a kroncong tape. The conservation stopped and his friend shouted out 'wow, this is a chinese song!' The song was Gambang Semarang, well known as based on a Chinese melody.

Peter said that to him choro music was very different than kroncong. Lutgard was unclear whether she saw a direct genetic relation between choro and kroncong, or whether she just was inspired by the analytical approach taken to choro in Choro: A Social History of a Brazilian Popular Music (Indiana UP, 2005).

The final paper of the symposium was presented by Sumarsam. Sumarsam commented on gendhing mares - a gamelan form that includes trumpet and drum. Sumarsam asked that if gamelan was a sign of Javanese power, why incorporate European instruments? Was this a domestification of exotic sounds or intercultural dialogue? He pointed to the contrasting example of tanjidor, wherein European instruments are fully domesticated (playing an excerpt from Yampolsky's album, http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=25875). In contrast, trumpet and drum play very simple role in gendhing mares. Sumarsam saw this (in line with John Pemberton) as a symbolic means to resituate the Dutch as tolerated guests.

The revival of gendhing mares in a restoration of Bedhaya Semang was at the instigation of a high-ranking prince, who over-ruled the authenticity drive of the scholars and dancers of the court to insist on a more 'sigrak' accompaniment for the entrance and exit of dancers. Sumarsam linked this to the Yogyakarta gamelan festival, which places a stress on hybridity, to demonstrate that gamelan is in-step with the world.

I acted as Sumarsam's discussant. I pointed out that gendhing mares were probably intended not just for Javanese ears but also to impress European visitors to the court with Yogyakarta's martial power. Sumarsam's Javanese ears heard the trumpet and drum as simple embellishments of a complex Javanese musical structure. In contrast, my own ears heard ONLY the trumpet and drum. I alos pointed out how drum-and-trumpet was linked to military bands (oempa) which were omni-present in urban Indonesia in the late colonial period.

The last session, led by symposium organisers Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts, focused on future plans for a volume. We were told that contributors should pay more attentio nnto musical materials - not just context. An attempt will be made to balance Indonesian and Dutch perspectives. Peter Nas urged a theoretical integration of the book - with a focus on themes such as hybridity and mediation.

In the evening, as already mentioned, I went off with the Indonesian ocnference participants to the Tong-Tong Festival, where we saw Tohpati Etnomission (jazz fusion uit Indonesie) and a Balinese dance workshop delivered by I Gusti Raka Rasmi and friends.

The concert was fun - the combination of jazz drumming with Sundanese kendang was particularly interesting for me. But Sumarsam and Els found it overly loud.

It was lovely to see Raka in action. I had only seen her previously in old footage and photos from 1952 - when she toured the US and Europe in the Dancers of Bali tour produced by John Coast. Her dancing remained energetic and sprightly, and she interacted with grace and charm with the participants (mostly women and girls of Indonesian descent).

I spoke afterwards briefly with Raka - she spoke about her 'mother' Laura Rosenberg. Els presented Raka with a series of articles written by tour producer Soeprapto about the 1952-3 tour that were published in Mimbar Indonesia.

A tour of the festival's 'Indonesian pavilion' and a meeting with the dalang wayang golek (who remembered me from the 2008 festival) brought the evening to a close.

Dutch-Indonesia Encounters Day 2

2010-05-21T05:27:00.010+01:00

The symposium on Dutch-Indonesian Musical Encounters continued for a second day on Thursday 20 May. Today was quite a mix of papers - from obscure performance forms in Indonesia's outer islands to a postcolonial critique by Indonesian composer Franki Raden to theatre in Suriname and pop music in the Netherlands.

Anthropologist Gerard Persoon spoke about versions of the Wilhelma as sung in Mentawai. The national anthem was learned in colonial schools and sung annually at the Queen's Birthday (a major celebration in the Indies, often involving 'folk games' like climbing greased poles and the like). The song was still proudly remembered in the repertoire of one of Gersoon's chief musical informants and recorded in a CD. A number of Mentawai language versions exist, with different lyrics etc.

Miriam Brenner, a young ethnomusicologist who works for a music festival in Nijmegen and a world music venue in Utrecht, spoke about research she did in Buton for a Bandung NGO on a drum and dance military style band known as galangi.

This band - which features a small ensemble of drummers (3), spear holders and flag bearers form a military kompaniya that appear in processions. Formerly a war dance, it is now typically used as a welcoming dance.Dutch sources going back to 1640 describe the use of drums to intimidate the Butonese. In an inversion of this, Butonese dress in the trappings of the VOC. Up until the late colonial period, galangi's flags displayed the VOC emblem.Drawing on Homi Bhabha, she described galangi as a sphere of activity where colonial power exerted its influence.

Franki Raden went back to materials in his PhD dissertation (2001) and linked the work of Ki Hadjar Dewantara to his own work as a composer (specifically his recent concert with the Indonesian National Orchestra). He argued that by having a national anthem in a Western diatonic mode, a European element was embedded in Indonesian national identity from the start. Ki Hadjar Dewantara's hybrid Kinanthie Sandoong (which has a piano part based on gender figurations and a vocal line that calls upon the singer to improvise cengkok wilet) was a sign of resistance against the hegemonic culture of Europe. He described and showed a DVD of the recently-launched Indonesian National Orchestra - working with 'masters' from around Indonesia and developing a few new instruments (incluindg a bass rebab redolent of Suryoputro's late colonial work) he continues Ki Hadjar's tradition of notating and allowing for self-expression. This is a big ensemble - 45 instrumentalists plus a choir of 15 - and Franki is still looking for funding to support the work. It is a nationalist projecgt - Franki rejects European instruments (he says he will only use them as soloists), wants to return to indigenous tradition and explore resources and develop tradition as a composer.

Discussion focused on the role of notation and what it means to be a composer in Indonesia. Wim van Zanten said that notation was only an aide memoire - in contrast to Judith Becker who argues (with Walter Ong) that notation fundamentally changes the way we think. Henk Mak van Dijk said he knew of only 3 compositions by Ki Hadjar (Franki knew only one) and questioned whether Ki Hadjar could then be called a composer. Ben Arps countered that Ki Hadjar wrote many other pieces - but used a cypher notation of his own devising. Dutch composer Jos Jansen questioned how innovative Franki's work is - he says he has heard much similar music in Yogya and Solo over the years. He urged a more radical approach to gamelan.

This lively discussion was followed by a paper by Fridus Steijlen on the Maluku band H-Gang, the Merantau choir and a theatre of liberation play titled Degnan Harapan. All were part of a radical moment in Maluku cultural politics in the Netherlands in the 1980s in the wake of the violent highjacking of trains, as the community moved from being exiles to reconciling themselves to the position of migrant. The community in their arts made strategic alliances with other communities of struggle - the gay rights community, South African anti-apartheid activists, East Timorese activists, ex-PKI. This is legible in their arts - through singing South African songs, singing song such as N Bomb (a nuclear protest in reggae style) and Indonesian-language songs such as Buka Mata Sama-Sama (1981) - in which Indonesians are called upon to vote against the Soeharto regime. Interesting ironies emerge. A South African song turns out to have lyrics urging people to kill the Boers - this was sung without knowledge at the time. The speaker presented as a musician participant in this early 1980s scene - speaking from direct knowledge. This inclusivity has been a characteristic of Maluccan bands in the Netherlands for years. Discussang Wim Manuhutu (himself also a musician) said that the Maluku community generally found H-Gang and affiliated organisations 'weird' both musically and in terms of their political alliances.

After lunch, we heard a paper by Annika Ockhorsst on Javanese elements in the Surinamese multicultural theatre companiy Doe Theatre (1974-1983). Annika wrote her MA in history on this company, basing herself on historical documents as well as interviews with suriving ompany members, some of whom live in the Netherlands. Doe (from a word meaning song-and-dance performance as well as 'do' - a sense of political action) was a postcolonial theatre that aimed to define a national Surinamese identity by drawing on elements of all the major ethnic groups and enacting stories addressing real issues confronting Surinamese society. Gamelan instruments were used, costume and set elements (including a gapura) were incorporated, mythological figures (including a wayang wong Hanoman) could be found. Dancers returned from dharmasiswa in central Java taught the company dance. The company played for middle class audiences in the capital. Few Javanese attended, despite the fact that 2 out of the 10 core members were of Javanese descent. While touring in the provinces, it played sometimes for Javanese audiences. It was noteworthy also for introducing gamelan instruments (played in a non-idiomatic way) to indigenous people in the interior. The company resisted the European style of theatremmaking by drawing on indigneous elements, inspired by the black theatre movement in the US (the director had studied in the US before founding Doe) and a variety of other cultural influences. It also worked strategically with a number of other organisations - including at least 2 Javanese NGOs. Other performances (to date) have people present their own cultures. But Doe showed people from different ethnic groups enacting each other's rituals and dances and expressive arts. Franki Raden wondered in the discussion about the influence of Amir Pasaribu, who lived in Suriname for 30 years.

We also heard two papers on pop music in the Netherlands by people of Indonesian extraction. A and R manager Harry Knipschild showed clips from youtube of a number of bands famous in the 1950s and early 1960s - speaking about them from the perspective of the music business.

Lutgard Mutsaers, author of the book Rockin' Ramona (1989), described the bands in a discussion afterwards as 'unDutch' (meaning excellent). They made their fortune playing in Germany to soldiers in American army bases desparate to hear rock 'n roll and returned to Holland in cadillacs and gold chains. Knipschild was not only nostalgic for the past - he also promoted the Sarawak singer Zee Avi, showing a clip of her 'Just You and Me' (2009), and spoke about singers of Indonesian extraction who are still making music today. Rein Spporman argued that Maluccan musicians are not defined by musical style (though they share a core repertoire of 150-200 folk songs). Rather they are 'the gypsies of the Netherlands' playing whatever music is in vogue.

A festive dinner at the Prentenkabinet followed in the evening.

Dutch-Indonesian Musical Encounters

2010-05-19T22:21:00.006+01:00

I am writing from Leiden, at the end of the first day of a symposium on Dutch-Indonesian Musical Encounters sponsored by the KITLV and the Professor Teeuw Foundation. The Teeuw Foundation is planning to award a prize to a musician or scholar of music who has contributed to the mutual cultural understanding of the 2 nations, and is holding this event to generate a context for the award. It is planned that a volume of conference papers will be launched at the prize ceremony - and there might be another conference on the same theme in Indonesia in the future.

Today, I gave a paper (actually less a paper than a display of audiovisual examples as papers were distributed in advance of the symposium) titled 'Indonesian Performing Arts in the Netherlands, 1913-1944'.

I presented a clip from the only film made of an Indische drama, The Sugar Lady (first staged in 1917 and filmed in 1935), some kroncong by a Dutch student group recorded in London, a short slice of Jodjana's film God Shiva, a short clip of a 1949 Dutch-Indonesian conference on West Papua featuring Javanese dance.

The paper was well received - participants seemed most interested in Jodjana particularly.

Henk Mak van Dijk spoke on Constant van de Wall, showing some images that did not make it into his book, as well as a clip from a DVD of the 2008 production of Attima and some tracks from his recording of van de Wall's music.

He was concerned in particular with van de Wall finding a place in Indonesian music history and for Attima to achieve its place in the cannon of exotica. He thought about van de Wall's compositions as a way to make history come closer to Indonesians- they could appreciate them as they are familiar.

Renadi Santoso, a Cologne-born composer and dancer of Indonesian descent who lives in Holland, and Dutch composer and sound technician Jos Jansen spoke about their relation to gamelan. Renadi spoke about art as a way to discover aspects of his self. Gamelan provides him with a way to understand his roots. He is also interested in the kendang's relation to dance and puppetry - providing him with a model for how to have an extra layer in his music, a friction that is not resolved. Jos Jansen described his intimate familiarity with gamelan - a music that is not strange to him as he has been playing it for decade3s. He spoke about his use of chance compositional procedures (modelled after John Cage) and his experience of working with Miroto - seeing his dancers repeat a movement for the duration of a 52 minute pre-composed score until they found a moment when it was cocok with the music. They built up the dance score in this way.

The afternoon was a public session in the Tropen Museum. We heard three talks. The first was by Liesbeth Ouwehand (photo curator at the KITLV) on performance photographs in the KITLV archive (with a concentration on photos from the court of Yogya in Groneman's book on dance and ceremony, and photos of the large 1906 exhibition in Surabaya). Madelon Djajadiningrat and Clara Brinkgreve did a double-act presenting on the correspondence of Jaap Kunst and Mangkunegara VII. Wim Manuhutu spoke on songs from Maluku and concluded his presentation with a charming trio presentation of an Ambonese song. The talks were punctuated with compositions by Sinta Wullur for piano, flute and voice. Many in the audinece were elderly ex-Indies hands, and there was a great sense of nostalgia for the colonial period that permeated the whole afternoon.

In addition to the talks, like at many conferences, I've been hanging out and catching up with old friends - Ben Arps, Sumarsam, Pim Westerkamp, Freek Columbijn, Rob van Albada and others. I've also had the opportunity to spend some time with Franki Raden - who is staying in the same suite of room at the Ethnological Museum. This is a rare treat as this famous Indonesian composer has only just returned to Indonesia after a decade living abroad and has recently founded a self-proclaimed national orchestra composed entirely of indigenous instruments. Franki divides his time now between Jakarta and Ubud and I hope to see him in one place or the other when I visit Indonesia in December-January.

Nike 'Wayang'

2010-05-10T14:30:00.002+01:00

An unusual piece of shadow animation has popped up in my weekly google alert.

Simon Cassels and Justin Blampied, the creators of this 'Spec piece' - a proposed ad for Nike - discuss being inspired by wayang kulit's clean and straightforward storytelling capacities (see http://www.creativereview.co.uk/feed/march-2010/05/nike-wayang).

Remarkable Indonesia

2010-04-30T09:22:00.002+01:00

I attended last night (29 April) a tourism and trade promotional event at Harrod's, London's most 'iconic' shopping emporium located in the fashionable Knightsbridge area. Called 'Remarkable Indonesia', it marked an effort that began in 2009 to 'rebrand' Indonesia to make the international public (including potential tourists and investors) aware of the economic and political strides Indonesia has made over the last 12 years, since the fall of the New Order.

Throughout the month of April, Indonesia occupied several display windows at Harrod's, there were black cabs parked outside the store bearing the 'Remarkable Indonesia' logo, a range of Indonesian food (ayam panggang, rendang, tahu isi) was avaialble for sale at the Harrod's food court and the Remarkable Indonesia campaign was also featured in a two-page spread in the Harrod's magazine. The Remarkable Indonesia gala dinner was a kind of conclusion to this month-long celebration. The overall budget for the initiative was 5 billion rupiah(http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/03/27/indonesia-aims-lure-more-tourists-uk.html).

The gala dinner was originally scheduled for 22 April, but because of flight disruptions to the eruption of the Iceland volcano, had to be postponed until 29 April. That was backup plan A, joked Indonesia's ambassador to London at the gala affair. Plan B would have been to have had embassy and Harrod's staff join together to dance and sing for the public.

As it happened, the Minister of Trade and Minister of Culture and Tourism were unable to attend the rescheduled event due to clashes with previous committment. They were represented by director generals from both ministries. Also in attendance were an assortment of ambassadors from London (as well as Indonesia's ambassador to The Hague), various VIPs in the British Indonesian community, people based in London with Indonesia interests (including government and business people) and many, many Indonesians flown out especially for the event. (I sat with Professor Wiendu Nuryanti from Gadjah Mada's MA programme in Tourism, who advises the government on tourism affais.)

The event began at 6pm in the Georgia Restaurant, decked out with a fashion show stage, starry walls and ceiling, and Indonesian motis (including wayang golek from Sarinah on each table). Tickets were priced at 300 pounds a plate (though of course I was there as an invitee).

The MC was a Dutch woman of Indonesian descent Lindsay Pronk, Miss Netherlands 2004, who presented a programme including a slide show of the Harrods campaign to a pop version of a Javanese lagu dolanan, Cendrawasih performed by 4 dancers from the London-based Balinese dance group Lila Bhawa directed by Made Pujawati (to recorded gamelan music), a fashion show by some of Indonesia's famous contemporary designers (Oscar Lawalata, Ghea Panggabean, Andi Lim), a music group combining a Batak vocal-instrumental group with a musician playing a stringed instrument from Nusa Tenggara Timur and Didik Nini Thowok, who did an 8 minute selection of some of his comical dances. Two members of the London-based Balinese gamelan group Lila Cita played as guests arrived.

There was also of course food - soto ayam, a small rijstafel assortment with nasi kuning and desert.

The event ended with a door prize - free tickets on a sponsoring airline and hotel vouchers. (I won one of the vouchers - and will now be staying in a very nice hotel in Ubud in December.)

It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of events of this sort. The director generals and representative from Harrods who gave opening talks emphasised the number of visitors to Harrods, the prestige of the Harrods brand and the like. Director general Siregar from the Trade Ministry described this as a sort of 'cultural diplomacy'. He also described Indonesia as testatment to the fact that democracy, Islam and 'Asian values' can go hand in hand. It was a way to 'tell the world' of the 'progress' Indonesia has made over the last 12 years.

The use of the arts and fashion, Siregar reported, was a way to mark Indonesia's strengths in 'creative industries'.

The event was, I think, a mixed success. It was a bit rushed (Harrods insisted that everyone had to leave by 8pm) and suffered somewhat from under-preparation.

An example of this was a 7am phone call I received on the day before the event from Didik Nini Thowok, acting on behalf of the panitia (organisers). Lila Cita was originally due to provide live accompaniment for the Lila Bhawa dance group but had been told at the last minute that they had to arrive by 4pm, and the group (with day jobs all) could only be there by 5pm at the earliest. So the panitia tried to scrounge for alternatives - other Balinese gamelan groups that might be able to accompany Cendrawasih or other music-dance groups (jaipongan was mooted). In the end, after many phone calls, the panitia decided to 'allow' Lila Bhawa to perform to recorded music.

Mas Didik's dance left an impression on the audience - through the reversal of the Dwimuka opening, the onstage costume change that revealed 'he's a bloke!' (as one person at my table audibly remarked) and the ending in which Didik in a Mr Bean mask dragged a suitcase decorated with a Union Jack. But it felt rushed and the use of recorded music limited the possibility of interactions with the audiece.

The overall effect struck a careful balance between modernity (one of the designers reminded a person at my table of Issey Miyaki) and tradition (delivered largely via the performing arts groups), local colour and global appeal.

I also made a connection with Sapta Nirwandar, Director General of Marketing for the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and had the great pleasure of spending an evening with Didik Nini Thowok (on 27 April), who remains one of Indonesia's most talented and vivacious performers. 'P2P connections' (to use the language of diplomacy) make official promotionals worthwhile.

Ruth St. Denis: Javanese Court Dancer

2010-04-30T08:25:00.000+01:00

A posting on the SCUDD list revealed that some generous blogger has at last uploaded most of Phillip Baribault's short film 'Moments from Famous Dances' (Paramount, 1932-3) to youtube. This dance features several short solos by American dancer-choreographer Ruth St Denis, including 'Javanese Court Dancer’ (1926) with music by Clifford Vaughan. St Denis created this work in Singapore after a tour of Java sponsored by the Kunstkring. It is an American impression of serimpi.

Approximations to the traditional dance vocabulary, such as sembah, ukel and dolanan sondher, can be seen in the film, but as dancer and dance scholar Deena Burton notes the dance ends ‘with a pose most uncharacteristic of Java—Miss Ruth gracefully reclining and languidly tossing her sampur (the ubiquitous Javanese dance scarf) over her shoulder on the final gong.’ The court dancer’s obsequious final pose, with her gaze directed on the floor in utter humility and deference, is an act of obeisance to Orientalist stereotypes of the prone and vulnerable Asian dancing girl.

President Obama on Wayang

2010-03-25T08:28:00.001Z

Barack Obama has had to delay his long-planned trip to Indonesia this month due to ongoing debates around his health legislation. He now plans on going in June with his family - with stops in Jakarta as well as Yogyakarta or Bali.

As a sort of consolation, and by way of apology to the Indonesian people, Indonesian journalist Putra Nababan was offered a one-to-one interview, which Obama suggested was the first ever interview of an American president by an Indonesian journalist in the White House.

Part of this interview concerned the standard issues (economic cooperation, Islam etc) but Obama also reflected nostalgically on his years in Indonesia. He pointed out that he has few opportunities to practice his Indonesian due to the small population of Indonesians in America (which also, he said, meant that there are not enough good Indonesian restaurants in the US).

He also was asked specifically about wayang and Indonesian comics.

OBAMA: I used to love the Mahabharata, I used to love Ramayana, I used to love wayang. And I still do. I am inspired by the stories of Hanoman.

We ask again: any chance for wayang being performed in the White House, Mr President?

'Dalang bule' in the news... again

2010-01-22T10:29:00.000Z

An article about me appeared titled 'Dalang Bule Ki Matthew Cohen' (Albino Puppeteer Ki Matthew Cohen) appeared in Kabari, an Indonesian-language monthly that describes itself as an 'information bridge between Indonesia and Amerika' See www.KabariNews.com/?34269.

The information was collected by the reporter, Yayat Suratmo, via the www and email, and as I didn't see it before it went to press there are a number of factual inaccuracies.

The 'dalang bule' label which was bandied about in the Yogyakarta press seems to persist. It's not one that I like, for obvious reasons. A legend has it that the designaton of 'bule' for Caucasians was started by Ben Anderson when he was living in Jakarta in the 1960s. It was meant humorously at the time, but since has been used in a racist or racialist manner.

A google search reveals that the following puppeteers have been described as 'dalang bule':

- Gaura Mancacaritadipura (an Australian who became an Indonesian citizen some years ago, who lives in Jakarta and is active in Senawangi and a number of heritage organisations (see http://dwieky01.multiply.com/video/item/24)

- Larry Reed (a San Francisco-based puppeteer, puppet director and film maker with long experience performing as a Balinese dalang and best known for his massive wayang spectacles)

- Tamara Fielding (a New York-based puppeteer, born in West Java of Eurasian descent, who performs her own idiosyncratic version of wayang in community settings, cruise ships and the like)

There are also, of course, references to the various 'dalang bule' who control Indonesian politics - in various articles by conspiracy theorists.

British Gamelan Trail

2009-12-12T10:39:00.000Z

Yesterday I examined a SOAS PhD thesis on Balinese gamelan theory by Kate Wakeling - who plays with the London gamelan Lila Cita, and has also studied Balinese dance for a number of years. A really well written piece of work, with much of substance, particularly in relation to new compositions and their theorization.

Kate's supervisor is Mark Hobart, a SOAS professor of media studies and a close colleague of mine. After the examination, I sat in on a meeting Mark held with my co-examiner Neil Sorrell, arts producer Hi Ching and Balinese dancer Ni Made Pujawati (Mark's wife). Hi Ching, Ni Made and Aris Daryono (a Javanese musician who plays with the Southbank Gamelan Players) are developing a project for heritage funding called the British Gamelan Trail. If the bid is successful, this will take Aris and Puja around the country (with a particular focus on the London area) talking to people about how gamelan has been embedded in communities. The idea is to develop a general history of gamelan in Britain, with a focus on 6 groups in particular. Documentation will be included in an exhbit on Balinese dance and storytelling planned for the Horniman Museum in 2011-2012.

At this meeting, Neil offered a synoptic overview of gamelan. Neil's own studies go back to 1971 - when he attended one of Bob Brown's summer sessions in Bali. He believes the first gamelan ensemble in residence was at Dartington in 1974- a set of instruments borrowed from Europe. The Durham Oriental Music Festival sparked the interest of the Indonesian embassy to purchase a set of instruments, which was played by the group to become known as the English Gamelan Orchestra (which later morphed into the Southbank Gamelan Plyaers). Neil was able to use the EGO's existence to convince York to purchase a set of instruments for £6000 in 1980. This was the first set of instruments purchased by a university. The Cambridge University gamelan, a gift from an Indonesian cabinet minister who had a child studying at Cambridge, followed a year or two later.

We also spoke about other ensembles - Cragg Vale, the Bow Gamelan and the like - which will likely fall outside the remit of the British Gamelan Trail project.

The project is a clever and fascinating one - hope it gets funded...

RNCM Gamelan Weekend

2009-11-30T23:27:00.000Z

I spent last weekend (28-29 November) in Manchester, attending a wonderful weekend of gamelan-related events at the Royal Northern College of Music. The event launched the RNCNM's beautiful new gamelan, purchased along with a brand-new set of shadow puppets and a very fancy-looking puppet screen.

I caught an early gamelan-inspired work by Lou Harrison, Suite for violin, piano and small orchestra played by the RNCM chamber orchestra; the second half of Birth, Death and Marriage: A Journey through life in Javanese Music and Poetry - a concert by the Southbank Gamelan Players featuring Ni Made Pujawati in two dances; the end piece of a degung concert by the University of Manchester/Hallé Gamelan Degung; a wonderful and inventive concert of new music for gamelan by Gamelan Sekar Petak from the University of York mc-ed by Neil Sorrell; and performances of youth groups of a shadow puppet Ramayana and a gamelan-accompanied dance drama.

What a treat!

I also performed a 2 hour 15 minute version of Kresna Denawa, with the full forces of the Southbank Gamelan Players accompanying.

My friend and former Naga Mas colleague Simon van der Walt (one of three Naga Mas-ers who came down from Glasgow for the event) wrote in his blog that:

'the wayang performance in English by Matthew Isaac Cohen [...] was more than anything else what I had come to Manchester to see. I've seen wayang in Indonesia, but the language barrier is really quite steep, and it's a big part of what's going on; from high-flown court Javanese to crude street slang, its a form which traverses a great range of linguistic and performative registers. Matthew and the South Bank Players have done a number of wayang recently, and this is the first chance I've been able to see them. It seems to me they are doing a fantastic job of translating waying into a shorter form in a different language, making it understandable and enjoyable to UK audiences while retaining a great deal of honesty to the original. Matthew has a great sense of humour, which was on this occasion slighly lost on a noisy audience in a reverberant space. I look forward to seeing him perform again' (http://theplugboard.blogspot.com/2009/11/gamelan-weekend-at-rncm-saturday.html).

Didn't manage to get any pictures of the event though...

WWW stuff

2009-11-07T14:34:00.000Z

I am missing the stimulation of being in Malaysia and Indonesia, with the range of traditional performance on offer, but have been enjoying attending a London puppet festival over the last week. I am reviewing some of the shows for Animations Online, an online puppet magazine I edit, and also attending a number of seminars.

I have also been checking out various web materials. For example, I read a fine New York Times article published in 2002 on Jlitheng Suparman and Slament Gundhono's experimental wayang work, titled Political turmoil gives new life to Indonesian shadow play : Out of the shadows, a new art. I also saw some nice material from Jlitheng on youtube, including a clip of a sexy dangdut singer puppet and another one showing the same dangdut singer plus a Rhoma Irama type singer-guitar player from the puppet side of the screen (HEBOH DANGDUT GLOBAL WARMING WAYANG KAMPUNG).

A colleague from Australia pointed me to a really fine clip of Wayang Ceng Blok - a popular Balinese wayang company - with a long non-verbal sequence showing various animals at play. Check it out here.

Another friend from New York also told me about a robotic Balinese gamelan in New York,called Gamelatron, which has an interesting website featuring some performance vids and a brief television segment on them. Check out their website at http://gamelatron.com/

Blog review of Kresna Denawa in Cambridge

2009-10-25T09:43:00.000Z

Blogger Oli O'Shea reviewed my performance of Kresna Denawa with the Cambridge gamelan at http://olioshea.wordpress.com/category/music.

'I enjoyed the shadows much more now I understood the conventions and was more patient. It made me think about perspective and how knowing how something works changes how we feel about it. .... Patience was required to get into this performance but it was rewarding upon giving it a chance ....'

Kresna Denawa at Cambridge University

2009-10-24T11:49:00.001+01:00

On 23 October, I gave a a 2 hour 45 minute rendition of Kresna Denawa, a traditional lakon (play episode) with the Cambridge Gamelan and a few guest artists from London's Southbank Gamelan Players at Cambridge University's West Road Concert Hall. Hannah, my daughter, made a cameo, performing a little wayang kancil number (Kancil dan Buaya) that she had learned in Yogyakarta earlier in the year, using puppets made by Ledjar Subroto. The performance was part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas, and I performed at the invitation of the gamelan's director, Rob Campion.

I used a basically Solo style for the show, including sulukan, sabetan, and Solo's punakawan (Semar, Gareng, Petruk, Bagong) although the version of the lakon I used is from the Gegesik dalang Bahani (the Solo version is known as Bedahipun Dwarawati, or The Conquest of Dwarawati), and my voices, narrations, patterns of dialogue, tanceban etc remain at the core gaya Gegesik. My interpretation of Narayana, in particular, was done in emulation of the late Basari.

The performance was well attended, and while I chose an intentionally 'light' lakon (with an emphasis on battle scenes, rather than philosophical content; a small number of characters; simple story structure), a couple who had seen me perform in the past said it was far better than past shows - and that they loved the battle scenes in particular.

My drum player John Pawson was unfortunately mugged 6 days before the show, suffering a serious head injury, resulting in Simon Steptoe coming as a last minute substitute. I did not get a chance to run the full lakon with him, and this meant we experienced some problems in communication.

But I was happy overall with the performance, and look forward to getting another opportunity to perform the lakon with the SBGP in Manchester next month. And I was happy to receive a bottle of wine at the show's end!

Wayang in Malaysia, again

2009-09-06T10:45:00.001+01:00

Another week for this Indonesian performance-goer in Malaysia. This week, in addition to watching a workshop production of a new dance piece by the English contemporary dance group Evolving Motion (at the Kuala Lumpur Performaing Arts Centre in Sentul Park), I looked at three very different sorts of wayang.

After making a post on facebook that I was looking to see a Chinese opera (known as wayang Cina here in Malaysia) during this Hungry Ghost Festival, I got a call from my colleague Aris that a friend of a friend had told him that there was a wayang going on in Melaka and do I want to go. The next day (1 September) a group of us met up and went down to Melaka in two cars. After driving around the city a bit, trying to find a stage, we called a reporter friend and found out that the wayang was in a temple next to a graveyard on the outskirs of a town.

We arrived at said temple after 10 at night, travelling down a dark, unpaved road. The temple was crowded with thousands of pilgrims. This was the fifth day of a five day celebration- each night with an opera performance by a small Hokien language troupe from Johor (keyboard on one side of the stage, all-purpose Chinese percussion kit onthe other). This was a ritual performance. In front of the stage were empty stools for the ghosts, and behind this a long line of 'believers' who were being blessed by a priest and symbolically whipped. Huge piles of offerings were at the sides of the temple. The opera was supposed to go on until 1am in the morning, but we weren't able to stay to the conclusion of the ceremony - when the believers marched barefoot around the temple.

Next time I'm in Malaysia I'd like to plan a visit to Melaka around this 5-day event, which happens annually during the 7th lunar month.

On Thursday (3 September) I met up at last with Fahmi Fadzil, a Malaysian puppeteer who has been creating wayang variants (wayang cardboard, wayang buku, wayang rakyat, wayang lampu etc) over the last 9 years. Fahmi is a marketing person for a graphic design firm, with a BA in chemical engineering for Purdue. He is also a member of 5 Arts, and is very articulate about his experimental work, using the language of performance studies (picked up from Krishen and attendance at the PSi conference in Singapore). He presented a number of interesting leads for me to follow up on. More research to do....

Finally, today (6 September), I went to The Curve, one of KL's many shopping malls, to see a young Kelantanese puppeteer named Baisah do a short wayang Siam performance. This was actually advertised as a 'wayang rakyat' (a term invented by Fahmi for his shopping plaza shows). But it was a very orthodox (if short) Kelantanese wayang I saw. Basiah studied wayang at Aswara with Nasir, and the musicians were all Aswara folk as well.

The play was a branch story called Bagong Kelimunan that the puppeteer learned from Nasir. Baisah has only been performing for a year, so his puppet movement was just fair and his stock of verbal formulae was limited. The MC for the event said he couldn't follow the story - this was not just because of the language (Kelantanese Malay) but also because he couldn't understand the symbolic meanings, such as the perang scene.

I was surprised to see a wayang in a mall during bulan puasa. But there is in fact a whole series of traditional performances going on in the Curve and elsewhere around KL. Right after the wayang, the same group did a short gamelan concert. This, the MC could appreciate - the music he said was very relaxing. A way to draw the shoppers in during Ramadhan, I suppose.

Rimbun Daha

2009-08-29T14:40:00.000+01:00

Just returned from Rimbun Daha (www.rimbundahan.org), a private arts centre located about an hour outside of KL, which is also the home of Hijjas Kasturi, one of Malaysia's most successful and respected architects. Rimbun Daha has a residency programme for visual artists, writers and dancers, and has hosted a fair number of Indonesian painters in recent years for residencies of a few weeks to a few months, including Eko Nugroho. They organise a KL exhibit or performance for their artists at the end of the residency and have purchased work from many of their artists as well.

In the 1990s Rimbun Daha also hosted Balinese gamelan musician I Wayan Rajeg and his dancer wife, who taught a community gamelan group on the premises and Balinese dance. The gamelan, a gong kebyar set, and Rajeg and his wife subsequently taught at USM, with salaries paid for by Rimbun Dahan. Rajeg left USM around 2005 and the gong kebyar was returned to Rimbun Dahan. It is currently sitting unused in the property. Angela Hijjas says she is keen for it to find a new home in Malaysia, where it can be used for teaching. Any takers?

Fatwa banning kuda kepang in Johor

2009-08-23T08:58:00.000+01:00

Kuda Kepang, the horse trance dance, is today the most significant performing art associated with Javanese and people of Javanese descent living in Malaysia. There is no official count of Javanese in Malaysia, but most scholars agree that it is the largest population outside Indonesia, numbering several million perhaps. Most of the majority Javanese kampung (rural communities, hamlets) are to be found in the state of Johor, where there are also many migrant Indonesians working kelapa sawit plantations.

I learned earlier this month from a colleague teaching in Johor that the state of Johor has issued a fatwa banning all Muslims from 'being involved' with the performance of Kuda Kepang. A google search confirms this.

The fatwa (http://www.e-fatwa.gov.my/mufti/fatwa_search_result.asp?keyID=2140) state that kuda kepang is haram (forbidden) as it runs against Islam. The fatwa's 'explanation' or keterangan (http://www.e-fatwa.gov.my/mufti/fatwa_warta_hujah_view.asp?KeyIDv=2140) indicates that this is due to performers using non-Islamic magical formulae (jampi), being possessed by jin, going into trance (mabuk, the same word used for being drunk) and also cites as well audience behaviour, including not wearing red clothing.

Similar fatwa issued in the past in the northern state of Kelantan banned Muslims from performing or watching wayang kulit, mak yong and other traditional arts. These bans seem now no longer to be in place. A series of wayang kulit performances I attended at the Gelanggang Seni cultural centre in Kota Bharu attracted a mostly local audience.

So far, there has been very little attention paid to the kuda kepang fatwa. One blogger points to a TV9 television show broadcasting a local carnival with kuda kepang post-fatwa (http://pemudabukitkatil.blogspot.com/2009/07/tarian-kuda-kepang-haram-tetapi.html).

A kuda kepang troupe leader I spoke to said that the fatwa doesn't concern him - he believes that what he is doing is consistent with Islam, performing an art form introduced by the wali sanga that led to the conversion of millions of Javanese.

However, the fatwa has meant that all instruction of and about kuda kepang has ceased in Johor schools and universities. The future of the art form here in Malaysia is uncertain.

Gema Merdeka: Muzikal Tun Abdul Razak

2009-08-21T02:53:00.000+01:00

Another slightly off topic post. This time on Gema Merdeka: Muzikal Tun Abdul Razak, which I saw at Istana Budaya, Malaysia's national theatre, on the last night of a 5 day run (20 August).

This was an ASWARA musical production, featuring mostly students from this ministry-run arts academy, but buttressed by some Malaysian pop stars, with professional direction and choreography and a pop score by Ruslan Mohd Imam. With funding from the 1Malaysia government initiative, this was as much a bio of politician Tun Abdul Razak (1922-1976) as a piece of government propaganda about the necessary rise of Barisan Nasional in the wake of the 1969 race riots.

Indonesia features in two scenes. One scene represents Konfrontasi: paratroupers are seen descending from the sky in a video backdrop as soldiers do dance manouvers in front. In a second, Tun mediates a post-konfrontasi treaty between Indonesia and Malaysia. All the Indonesians are dressed in batik-- batik skirts, pants, shirts, head coverings-- and the women take on stereotypical Javanese dance postures.

More interesting perhaps is the use of the gamelan. The orchestra features a full Terengganu style gamelan (kendang, gong, saron, peking, penerus, gambang, and 2 kromong) which plays at the opening. Thereafter the gamelan comes in occasionally as ethnic 'colour' in conjunction with other instruments. Orchestration of the gamelan is very simple - mostly all the instruments play in unison. Repeated gong strokes also features in one moment of the musical to illustrate a sense of urgency. Gamelan is of course part of the ASWARA curriculum and was elevated to a national Malaysian art form in the 1970s. But it has no real connection with Tun's life and times. I wonder what dramatic function gamelan take on in this musical. Clearly it is NOT to signal Indonesia....

Wayang in Kelantan

2009-08-20T05:06:00.000+01:00

Just returned today from a trip up to Kelantan, where I saw three performances of wayang kulit at the cultural centre Gelanggang Seni by the Chinese puppeteer Eyo Hock Seng (Sri Campuran, Pasir Parit, P. Mas, Kelantan, tel. 0199984187, 0148256066). I also met with a number of other cultural experts, including Eddin Khoo's informant/collaborator Rahman, who heads a wayang troupe in the area of Machang.

According to Rahman, there are currently about 20 wayang kulit troupes operating in the area of Kelantan, and at least one dedicated puppet maker. A number of the dalang (including, it seems, Eyo Hock Seng) are essentially self-taught, having learned wayang by watching and imitating past masters like Hamzah and Abdullah (aka Dollah Baju Merah). All use jampi but one can get jampi from various sources including from makyong and bomoh, not only dalang.

Wayang was banned in Kelantan for some years by the ruling Islamic party, but now is officially permitted, and ritual dramas including Berjamu, Semah Angin and Main Puteri are practiced - though often covertly.

But interest in wayang has shrunk. One of our taxi drivers said this was not due to Islam but changing habits of work. In the past, most people in Kelantan were farmers and had long periods with little work. Now everyone is working full days all year round. Pejabat will work after hours on projects, coming home, tired, late at night. Rather than going off to a wayang that might end at 1 in the morning, better to stay at home and watch a DVD in the comfort of one's own home, while sipping a cup of Kofi O.

The Kelantan government has a mixed attitude to wayang kulit. They recognise it as a cultural asset, and programme now 8 performances (two series of 4 shows) a month at Gelanggang Seni. Troupes are not well paid- only about 300 to 500 ringgit a night according to one source. And while the Dalang Muda introduction (including various jampi) is allowed, there are no offerings and Ramayana stories seem not to be permitted either due to association with Hindusim.

The performances at Gelanggang Seni were attended nightly by an audience of about 100 locals and perhaps 10-20 foreigner tourists. In the 70s, according to my taxi cab informant Abdullah, there were some 3 or 4 panggung wayang on a Saturday night in Kota Bharu alone.

Wayang is very much a folk art in Kelantan. The palace never seems to have been a big patron of the art, and there is not a strong literary tradition attached to the form. Rahman prided himself as being the only dalang in Kelantan who has read Amin Sweeney's dissertation on the Rama story (via Eddin Khoo's translation). Puppet sets are a match-and-mix affair. While a small number of Rahman's puppets are quite old and elaborately carved (using goat hide for alus characters and buffalo hide for the larger kasar characters like jin), there are many more new ones of quite rough manufacture. Some of these are made of translucent plastic - these take less than a day to make. While looking at the set, one of Rahman's sons took out a faded buffalo-hide puppet and coloured it with magic marker.

Performances are also straight-forward affairs. Puppet movement is simple, and while there is some use of formulaic language (particularly in the Dalang Muda opening), much of the action is dominated by clowns.

Wayang remains a democratic art, open to all. Training is an informal affair. One starts by watching performances while sitting on the panggung and taking over playing when an instrument becomes vacant. Mastering the simple instruments- at least gong and canang- is essential to performing. I was asked to play drum on two occasions (and politely declined). And on my third night of watching Eyo Hock Seng, he asked me before the Dalang Muda section, 'Tidak boleh main?' - indicating that he'd like me to perform the Dalang Muda opening. (To which I responded, 'belum!').

The dialect of Kelantan Malay is hard (for me) to understand, and much of Hock Seng's performance (about a clown who disguises himself as a prince and goes to Java to win the hand of a princess) was impossible for me to follow. But who knows... maybe I will come back to Kelantan again... to study as a dalang muda?

Rhythm in Bronze

2009-08-11T05:31:00.000+01:00

Before going to see the bangsawan show on Sunday (9 August) I attended the first half of a rehearsal by Rhythm in Bronze at the invitation of one of my MA students, who is a new member of the group and is writing her MA thesis on the company.

Rhythm in Bronze was founded in 1997 and is Malaysia's most prominent contemporary gamelan groups. In addition to playing traditional Indonesian and Malaysian pieces, members of the group write music for the ensemble and they have also worked with a number of composers to create new music. All current members are women - with the exception of a drummer (who is also a Kelantanese dalang) and a guitar player (a jobbing musician who also plays in jazz, pop and rock groups). Like most Malaysian gamelans, their instruments are tuned to a diatonic Western scale (b flat) but were made in Java.

I found their music quite charming, and at times very dramatic. Some of the musicians playing the more difficult instruments (gambang, bonang) didn't seem to exploit the full range of ornamentation and melodic development. But the enemble playing was strong, and transitions were dynamic. And the integration of the guitar was full - it was not a novelty but a core part of the group.

Despite its international reputation, the group doesn't receive core funding from the Malaysian government and depends largely on corporate gigs to underwrite concerts and commissions of new work and guest artists. In the rehearsal I was attending they were preparing to do a dinner-time engagement for a business conference or symposium of some sort. They had originally been promised a 20 minute slot but had been relegated to background music during dinner. The group's leader had said this time was suitable for 3 songs but the conference organisers insisted on the group playing 4 - 'to get their money's worth.'

Like many gamelan groups, space also is an issue. Rhythm in Bronze owns its own instruments but not its own space. It is currently 'camping out' in a large storage room in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Malaya - thanks to the good grace of the head of the department. It rehearses there regularly on Tuesday nights, with the occasional Sunday. During the rehearsal, a woman wandered by and asked if this was 'Singaporean music.' Don't know what she meant by that....

KL, Johor, KL

2009-08-11T00:36:00.000+01:00

Another busy weekend for this Indonesian performance goer.

On Friday 7 August I went to the Valentine Willie Fine Art, a chique gallery in Bangsar Baru, Kuala Lumpur for the opening of Yogyakarta artist Iwan Effendi's solo exhibit 'Two Shoes for Dancing'. Iwan runs the puppet company Papermoon with his wife Ria, and for the exhibit she created a short solo puppet monologue (with a puppet designed by Iwan) that she performed in the gallery. A blue-faced puppet with a video monitor for a body named Oui articulated English-language texts painted on the wall of the gallery that linked Iwan's paintings and drawings into a narrative. Oui spoke (in English) about being an ordinary hard-working guy trying to make a living and meeting a girl and having 'hot' sex. The monitor inside him flashed images of shoes but without feet these can only cause disconent. A pair of baby shoes descends from overhead, suggesting hope.

The following day I took students from the Cultural Centre of the University of Malaya down to Kampung Permatang Duku in Johor to see a UM-sponsored Javanese wayang kulit performance by Sukarjo bin Supoyo and the Tunas Warisan gamelan ensemble. We arranged for the students to be 'anak angkat' (adopted children) of members of the kampung. We also saw a bit of a katam (a ceremony in which a girl read the Koran for the first time), were introduced to the kampung by the kampung headman and various kampung officials at the Balai Raya (village hall) and visited a tempe factory.

The performance started around 9.30pm with a short talu played by the gamelan and a 'tari Jawa' created by a young local dancer with campursari accompaniment. Sukarjo then offered a short speech. He presented wayang as a 'warisan' from Java. He made it clear as well that he does not use offerings at performances, with the exception of Ruwatan ritual drama.

Sukarjo then began the lakon - titled Wahyu Eko Buwana - which went on until around 4 in the morning to the student's absolute amazement.

The story began with Pathet Nem in Dwarawati. Bomo, Kresna's son, arrives to ask about the wahyu, which will bring victory in war. He gets into an altercation with Setyaki though, who knows that Bomo will use the wahyu for ill purposes, and a battle breaks out.

Pathet sanga begins with a goro-goro with many standard gending dolonan (such as Lumbung Desa and Prau), a penditaan scene in which Arjuna is advised by an old priest to seek the wahyu in Kendali Sabda (Hanoman's heritage) and a prang kembang.

Pathet manyura features the revelation of the wahyu in Kendali Sabda. Hanoman first tells representatives of the Kurawa (Dorna, Sengkuni, Karna) that the wahyu can only be received by someone who makes himself pure (suci) first. Dorna is incensed. How dare an animal talk to him, a priest, about purity? A battle breaks out. None of the Kurawa are able to even lift the cupu (receptacle) which contains the wahyu, let alone take it with them. Arjuna arrives, talks with Hanoman, and then receives the wahyu, defeats the Kurawa and returns to Amarta. Tanceb kayon.

The show is permeated by an informal atmosphere. Gamelan musicians arrive and leave. A number of my students 'have a go' at playing some of the simpler gamelan instruments. Some of them have never played gamelan before. I perform a bit of the prang gagal in pathet nem. Annas, a student with aspirations to become a dalang himself, sits next to the dalang for much of the show. Sukarjo also wants Annas to perform part of the lakon, but he demurs as he has had only a few classes with me so far. Hermantoro, a gamelan teacher visiting from UTM in Johor Baru, plays gender in pathet nem and teaches bonang parts to some of the musicians. Few members of the audience understand Sukarjo's 'basa Jawa alus' and are capable of following the story. But the kampung people appreciate the atmosphere that wayang creates, a perfect backdrop for socialising, eating, drinking and so on. So do my students.

The next day (9 August) I go to the bangsawan show Tot Mamat dan Mimpi Tuanku by the Istana Budaya troupe Nilam Sari at Panggung Bandaraya in the Dataran Merdeka at the centre of Kuala Lumpur. The play is a staple of the bangsawan repertoire, recently made into a musical, and the troupe is first-rate. A number of the actors are also movie and tv stars and the hall is packed. This is not a 'Javanese' play but the character of Puteri Gunang Ledang is portrayed as ethnically Javanese (and performs in both a 'Javanese' dance as an extra turn and a jaipong-inspired number in the play itself). The interpretation of Java is very loose and highly exoticised. But the audience laps it up. Escapism rules.

Field Trip to Johor

2009-08-03T01:10:00.000+01:00

Just returned to the flat in Petaling Jaya from a brief field trip to Johor, in anticipation of a 'study tour' I will be making with students and staff from Univeristy of Malaya on 8-9 August.

We travelled first by bus to Melaka and spent some time there (as tourists) before taking a bus to Batu Pahat, a small town near Johor's west coast. We were picked up there by car by our host in Johor, Hairul Hisyamudin bin Mokri. Hairul is a USM engineeing graduate who runs a small computer shop cum internet cafe. Since returning to Johor after a decade in Penang, he also has become involved in local politics and is the 'ketua pemuda' for Kampung Permatang Duku.

Hairul lives now with his young wife in his mother's house in Permatang Duku. Across the road is his brother's house (the former ketua kampung) and nearby is the balai raya - the village hall, with a net in front of it where teenage boys play footbag net. There are about 800 people living in the kampung, and perhaps 80 percent of are of Javanese descent (http://www.ktaktelecentre.my/PermatangDuku/eng/populasi.html). Houses are all situated around a U shaped road off of Jalan Pontian.

Most of the people living in Permatang Duku are kelapa sawit (palm oil) farmers, farming land adjacent to their houses. (Hairul's late father owned 3 acres of land, or about 1000 trees, which is typical.) The work is light (two days a month for tapping - mostly employing imported labour from Indonesia) and a small number of households are participate in home industries such as cake or tempe making. A number of houses (including Hairul's) also open up to visitors as homestays on occasion. There are a couple of warung in the kampung (one which sells very nice roti canai) and there is a small market on the kampung's western fringe.

I took a brief motorcycle trip around the kampung with daughter Hannah and saw among other things a model of the KL Menara and KLCC constructed from recycled plastic bottles (the remnant of an illuminate-the-kampung programme from 2007), two schools (one Islamic, one Chinese), a pond for cat fishing (locals fish between 9 and 12 midnight, and collect a pool that goes to the person who catches the largest catfish), and a whole lot of palm trees. The kampung is electrified and roads are well paved - and it has won a number of contests for its 'kecantikan' (beautiful appearance).

What brought me to Permatang Duku was not a taste of rural life in general, however, but the existence of Tunas Warisan, a community gamelan association made up of people of Javanese descent and Javanese. This group plays on a set of instruments owned by Wak Isa (also known as Amar), a second or third generation Javanese man. The instruments - a small set, mostly iron, mostly made in Johor by a member of the Tunas Warisan group back in the 1980s - are housed in his living room. He also owns a set of wayang kulit puppets, again mostly made in Johor and collected from near and far. The group practiced twice a week for some years, though recently such practices have not been so regular, and is made up of men ranging in age from about 40 to 95 (!). Isa's 12-year-old daughter and a neighbouring young woman of about 20 also play with the group.

They play in central Javanese style; a number of members spoke to me in admiration of Anom Suroto, Manteb Soedharsono, Timbul Hadiprayitno. Instruments include kendang (no ciblon), a couple of saron, peking, demung, kenong, kempul (no gong gede or gong suwuk), ketuk. Their repertoire of pieces is small - no large gending - but their enthusiasm is high. One kelapa sawit tapper who is a day labourer (at 40 ringgit a day) says he happily will not work for a day to play with the group, even without pay.

Since 2004, the group has been performing with Sukarjo bin Supoyo, a dalang born in Kulonprogo (Central Java) who moved to Malaysia in 1973 and lives in a neighbouring kelapa sawit estate. I went with Isa on Saturday night by car to Sukarjo's house to speak with Sukarjo. I learned that Sukarjo owns his own gamelan (half of which is on loan to a jaran kepang group) which he imported from Indonesia in 1981, but doesn't own a set of puppets- with the exception of a poor quality Betawi/Cirebon style set (again made in Malaysia) that he is slowly restoring. Sukarjo doesn't have formal training aside from his years of accompanying his father (also a dalang) and mother (a pesinden) to performances, and doesn't own any books on wayang, with the exception of a hand-written book in which he records plots. Sukarjo is approaching 60 years old now. He tried unsuccessefully to train one dalang to replace him.

Sukarjo and Tunas Warisan perform wayang regularly for hajatan (weddings, circumcissions) as well as at village ritual ceremonies (known variously as sedekah bumi or bersih desa). Ruwatan performances, once common, are becoming rarer due to Islamic prohibitions, and as the village ceremonies now are done without offerings Sukarjo says that these are properly 'Sedekah Bumi' or 'Bersih Desa' with an associated wayang, rather than wayang for the sake of sedekah bumi or bersih desa.

Sukarjo recognises a decline in wayang quality, as well as quantity. He could name 3 pesinden in Johor, but 2 have died and one returned to Java some years ago. Almost all of Johor's well-known dalang have died - with the exception of Sogimin (Kelapa Sawit, Kulai), a dalang in his late 50s originally from Pacitan. Another dalang, Haji Misran (Kampung Parit Bingan), is now in his 70s and refuses to perform any more.

On the morning of 2 August we went with Hairul by car to Isa's house, where the Tunas Warisan members gathered before going off to peform together. When we arrived, Isa was just finishing loading his van with the gamelan and kotak wayang. The group members arrived one by one, mostly by motorcycle. They then got into cars and vans and went off to Parit Bachok, a nearby kampung, to perform at a wedding.

An elevated panggung (perhaps a meter off the ground) belonging to Isa had been sent up underneath a rented tenda. There was a buffet under another tenda and tables where guests could eat. A caterer (Mas Chicken Rice) was roasting chickens - the rest of the food was made in the kampung. The dalang was already there - he arrived on his own steam and was talking to the host. The gamelan group members quickly set up the puppet screen and the gamelan instruments, and then the wayang were unpacked under Sukarjo's supervision- a small simpingan on both sides of the screen and most of the wayang in a big pile on the dalang's right.

As this is a wayang awan (daytime performance) no light is used. There are two microphones - one for the dalang, and one for the gamelan (hanging over the kendang) - and a pair of low-quality speakers. One is perched on a chair, another positioned on panggung. Both die during the performance, with no visible effort being made to replace them.

The Tunas Warisan members have a quick meal and then mount the panggung to begin the performance. Most are dressed in a simple seragam (red embroidered shirts, black pants). The dalang opens with a speech in Indonesian about the importance of wayang as a warisan from Java. Then one of the group members (the 95-year-old gong maker) leads in a recitation of al-Fatehah. They then play a few srepegan - with different musicians, including the dalang, taking turns at the kendang.

Then Ladrang Wilujeng as the dalang dances two kayon and positioned the puppets for the first scene (Jejer Dwarawati) - with Kresna, Samba, Setyaki and Udawa. (No parekan apparently as the set of puppets doesn't have them.) The ladrang ends and the dalang then launches into an opening narration of perhaps 10 minutes in classical Javanese. It is apparent that few in the audience, or among the Tunas Warisan members, can understand him. Little attempt is made to accompany him in sirepan style. Some chat, a few even practice their instruments. He then sings a fragment of a pathetan (out of tune and without accompaniment), and launches into the scene.

The dalang performs a lakon sempelan, apparently of his own invention. He had been asked to perform the lakon in which the meaning of Kalimasada is revealed to Puntadewa, but refused as he said this was a lakon of the ruwatan genre and would require offerings. (He does perform ruwatan but requires at least a month's notice for preparing himself spiritually, as well as a full assortment of offerings.) Instead, at the host's consent, he performed a lakon in which the meaning of Kalimasada would be discussed.

In the first scene, Kresna reveals that Puntadewa is trying to find out the meaning of his jimat layang kalimasada - though this is not in fact the time. This will only take place during the time of Jayabaya. A guest arrives (represented by a Cirebonese dewa puppet- Dewa Basuki) and tries to force Kresna to come to Amarta to reveal the jimat's meaning. A fight breaks out, which ends in the retreat of the guest. There is a brief pause (perhaps 15 or 20 minutes) in the battle for the mid-day prayers.

Then a goro-goro scene with Gareng, Petruk and Bagong. The dalang interviews me in Javanese (as a sort of bintang tamu) and the punakawan joke around in a mix of Javanese and Indonesian and Malay. The group also plays the lagu dolanan Caping Gunung. Unfortunately it is at this moment that the second of the two speakers goes and the goro-goro ends abruptly. (A musician later tells me that they had been playing to do Prau Layar and other gending dolanan classics.) Then follows a perang kembang. Arjuna fights with Cakil but in the middle Gatotkaca intervenes and kills him along with a group of assorted buta.

The action continues into pathet manyura when Semar discovers that it is Bathara Guru and Bathara Narada who are behind the plot to prematurely reveal Kalimasada's meaning. There is no amplification, and few can hear the dialogue. In the middle of this pathet, a bridal procession arrives - the bride and groom dressed in white underneath umbrellas with a group of parents with babies in arms and a kompang (frame drum) ensemble. The dalang at first tries to continue the performance but then tancebs the kayon as martial arts are performed in front of the couple and babies presented before them (apparently trying to bring fertility to them).

The whole atmosphere, on stage and off, is very informal. Musicians come and go during the show, and switch around instruments. There are lots and lots of srepegan, an attempt is made a sampak, and also the beginning of an Amsarandana is played. I am encouraged to play along with the group and briefly play peking during pathet nem and then play saron for most of pathet sanga and manyuro. I am hardly a great gamelan player - but am complimented for my skills. Trays of snacks, coffee, tea etc arrive sporadically. A single vendor sells ice cream at the end of the driveway - I buy popsickles a couple of times.

The show wraps up at around 4.30pm (about 30 minutes over time), the puppets are put away and the van loaded and then more food for the group before departing in a convoy.

I do not see money changing hands and am not sure how much (if anything) the group is paid. The best information I have been able to find is that the group typically gets about 400 to 500 ringgit (under 100 pounds) for gigs. This is real community art - art of Malaysia's Javanese diaspora, done for love. The gamelan might not have much of a repertoire. The dalang's sabetan (puppet movement) might be simple. The gamelan group might not be able to start and end srepegan in an orderly fashion. The puppets and gamelan might be simple but they are functional. And everyone enjoys playing together.

It was a pleasure to participate in this scene for a day - and I think people in Kampung Permatang Duku and Parit Bachok also got some pleasure in speaking to a 'wong putih' in Javanese and seeing that their own traditions are present not only in the Java of memory, but also loved by people around the world today.

Wayang and Gamelan in Malaysia

2009-07-21T01:42:00.000+01:00

I spent much of yesterday investigating the vicissitudes of wayang and gamelan in Malaysia.

Wayang comes in two major variants, the so-called wayang Siam (based on the Thai shadow puppet theatre) and wayang Jawa (based on Javanese wayang kulit). The former, according to Kathy Rowland (whom I met for coffee), was recognised in the 1970s by the national cultural policy, and was embraced as an authentic form of Melayu culture. It is now known as 'wayang Kelantan' or 'wayang kulit'. A number of famous dalang from Kelantan, such as Nasir (who teaches at ASWARA), survive almost entirely on state patronage.

The Javanese wayang variant largely escapes notice. Javanese are invisible to the state - they are part of the Melayu ethnic group, though many are recent migrants and a large percentage speak Javanese at home. Javanese arts in Malaysia fall largely outside of the direct purview of the state.

After much searching and enquiry, I located a Javanese dalang who lives in Kampung Permatang Duku in the state of Johor named Sukarjo bin Supoyo. Wa Karjo, as he is known, was born near Parangtritis in Yogyakarta in 1952. He had no formal training in wayang, but learned from hiis father Supoyo, a dalang (long deceased) and his mother was a pesinden. He migrated to Malaysia in 1973. Karjo performs regularly in Javanese villages around the west coast of Johor with his 10-piece gamelan group (all slendro instruments, no pesinden). Both the gamelan and the wayang puppets were made in Permatang Duku; all the musicians in his group Tunas Warisan are also from Permatang Duku. He performs both siang (daytime) and bengi (night-time) shows. A brief clip of the group performing a talu (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qe6HN65y4k&feature=related) suggest that this is wayang as folk art. I hope to travel down to Johor to see Wa Karjo perform on 2 and 8 August. Watch this space for more information.

Gamelan has a related history. Gamelan was imported from Java into the Malay courts, prominently the court of Trengganu, in the pre-colonial era. During the 20th century, the Trengganu-style court gamelan began to be taught widely outside the court context, and there are a number of sets around the country used for instruction in Malay music for university students and others.

The Trengganu gamelan at the University of Malaya was made in Solo. It is a small slendro set tuned to a diatonic pentatonic scale (do re mi so la) with kendang, a couple of saron, a couple of peking, a demung, one bonang (called kromong, like in Betawi), kenong, gambang kayu and two gong (gong ageng and gong suwuk). The instructor Othman has recently retired from the Istana Budaya troupe. He studied briefly at ASTI Bandung around 1990. According to Othman, there are no gamelan being made today in Malaysia. Even the gambang beaters, now broken, will need to be replaced by ordering them from Indonesia. Othman explained that the pieces are easy to learn and while the UM students have only 14 weeks of instruction (once a week, 2 hour sessions) and won't be able to practice outside of class, they will be able to pick up the basics quickly. I sat in on the start of yesterday's class, and hope to see more. The UM gamelan is also used for a class in contemporary music - hope to find out more about that too....

Nostalgia X'travaganza: Semalam di Malaysia

2009-07-11T09:04:00.000+01:00

Writing now from Malaysia, where I am based until the end of September. I attended last night a musical concert called Nostalgia X'travaganza: Semalam di Malaysia at the Life Centre on Jalan Sultan Ismail in Kuala Lumpur, a featured event in the KL Music Festival.

Though titled 'a night in Malaysia' it featured a backup band from Singapore (Singapore Explosion) and a lineup of 10 pop and dangdut singers popular in Malaysia during the 1970s - 6 of whom were in fact Indonesian. My wife, who grew up on this music, was ecstatic to see in the (sagging) flesh pop icons of her youth and dragged along me and my daughter (who slept through practically the whole concert). We sat in the cheap seats all the way in back of the hall (48 ringgits a seat).

The concert lasted about 2.5 hours, including an intermission. Each singer sung two of their hit songs from the 1970s and 80s, one in the first half an one in the second. A VCD of these songs (also for sale outside the hall) was played before the show and during the intermission.

It was an intimate affair, despite the large audience numbers (at least 1000, by my count). A number of singers entered from the audience and some danced with audience members or presented the mike to individual audience members and had them sing lines from their songs. One (male) audience member was invited on stage to dance and sing with a singer. One of the singers, aged late 50s, dressed in tight-fitting outfits and made comments on her own sexy appearance. Another (male) singer repeatedly requested that the audience applaud him. Singers spoke about their past appearances in Malaysia (one Indonesian singer first sang in Malaysia in 1967) and offered personal anecdotes.

The audience mostly consisted of people in their 40s and 50s. Some brought their children along. There were many jilbab among them - and few Chinese or Indians or DLLs visible.

On the way back to our hotel we took a cab driven by a driver who turned out to be from Serang, Banten. In a Malaysian accent, he explained that he had lived in Malaysia sinc 1980. Most everyone working in KL, he told us, were migrants from elsewhere - many of them from Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

June Round-Up

2009-07-03T04:07:00.000+01:00

My last 3 weeks in Indonesia were a whirl of activity and sadly I found it impossible to keep up with this blog. So much to do! So little time!

I attended the Pasar Kangen at Taman Budaya Yogyakarta - a wonderful new initiative to revitalise traditional and folk arts in a pasar environment, complete with traditional foods, craft vendors, used book vendors etc. It was a lovely environment for seeing such kuntulan and ketoprak lesung (pictured above) and the like. Emha and Kyai Kanjeng made an appearance as well - endorsing the event and commenting on its merits.

I was in Cirebon between 13 and 20 June - attending and speaking at a national arts festival (15-20 June), sponsoring a macapat event at Kraton Keprabonan (17 June) and performing Arjuna Sasrabau at Kraton Kacirebonan (20-21 June). At the last of these, I received the gelar of Ki Ngabehi from the sultan, a tremendous honour. I managed to get in three rehearsals in Krandon, and also performed Pendhawa Nyawah once again in Suranenggala Lor as a wayang awan (13 June) prior to an all-night show by Nono Suryono. My talk at the national arts festival - on the connections between Sundanese and Cirebonese performing arts - was well received, and generated much debate related to Cirebonese aspirations for province-hood.

I returned thereafter to Yogya and attended a number of the wayang performances in a small wayang festival that was part of the Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta. This included a wayang gethuk, a lovely wayang wong presentation of Jitapsara which was performed by a gabungan of 5 Yogya-style groups under the direction of RM Kristiadi, wayang thengul from Bojonegoro, wayang kancil and wayang sasak. Unfortunately I missed out on a Japanese wayang group and wayang ukur.

In between, I attended part of a ketoprak festival, a teater kontemporer performance about the upcoming presidential election, and a sarasehan budaya on Hegemoni Budaya: Represi Politik di Dunia Seni that was part of the monthly dance seminar (every 22nd of the month, in different locations around Yogya).

After five months in Indonesia, I still am astounded by the variety and vitality of artistic activity in Yogya. What a pleasure it has been to be an observer, and occasional participant, in this.

World Environment Day

2009-06-09T03:20:00.001+01:00

I attended a simple commemoration of World Environment Day at Lemah Putih, the retreat and arts centre of Suprapto Suryodharmo on the outskirts of Solo, Central Java on 5 June.

This featured a series of performances -- an improvised anti-smoking dance piece without music by 4 dancers from ISI Solo, a short contemporary wayang beber performance, a community percussion ensemble and a new mask dance piece based on three regional styles by Fajar Satriyadi (Surakarta), Wangi Indriya (Tambi, Indramayu) and Sitras Panjalin (Tutup Ngisor, Magelang). This last piece, which was developed at Lemah Putih in consultation with Suprapto, will be touring the UK in June and July 2009. There were also a few moments for ritual and reflection on the environment. (Wangi Indriya, pictured above, offers a prayer at the mandala that the earth will be healed and people will become conscious of the need to dispose rubbish properly.)

There was an intentionally small, invited audience - no real publicity was undertaken for the event - and a great feeling of intimacy among participants, with a shared meal and time for discussion.

Indonesia Performing Arts Mart

2009-06-09T01:40:00.000+01:00

I attended the fifth Indonesia Performing Arts Mart in Solo from 3 to 6 June 2009 as a 'presenter' and was charged with giving some closing remarks on behalf of the group of presenters. Below is the speech I delivered. Pictured above is IPAM presenter Keiko Murakami, director of the Japan Gamelan Music Association of Tokyo, singing with the Hotel Sahid Jaya's lobby gamelan gadhon.

I would like to thank the organisers of IPAM for inviting me to give some closing remarks. We have seen a remarkable range of new work over the last days. More importantly, perhaps, we have had the chance to meet the artists who made this work, and others around them. In the Seminar Global Creative-Industry Opportunities in honor of Indonesia Performing Arts Mart we heard from Marie Pangestu and Professor Sri Hastanto about issues confronting the creative industries today. Presenters have also gone on trips to see the Hindu-Buddhist remains and the living traditional cultures, in order to better contextualise the world of Indonesian performing arts.

We have seen 21 performances, including both fringe shows and showcases, from Java, Sumatra, Maluku and Sulawesi. Speaking to curator Ratna Riantiarno, I learned that there were some 75 groups that applied to this year’s IPAM. The curatorial team did their best to insure that a variety of work would be seen. Curator berusaha supaya representative. Many of these shows have been folklorico – very loose glosses on traditional art forms that have lived in communities for hundreds of years. Courtship dances and sacred rituals have been packaged for mass consumption. Some of these shows are very slick and will appeal, no doubt, to certain international audiences. We have also seen a few examples of lively folk performance that retain authenticity, charm and energy – I think here especially of Calung Kaulan by Calung Banyumasan Mudha Utama. More interesting, to me, have been the many shows we have viewed that draw their techniques and forms from tradition, but have reinterpreted them for the contemporary world. Many of the presenters were greatly impressed, for example, by Rantau Berbisik by Nan Jombang Padang, which brought an entirely new understanding of the traditional plate dance; and the juxtaposition of spinning tops and bedhaya like grace in Eno’s “Samparan: Moving Space” held a unique fascination. The dynamic rhythms funky harmonies of Sonoseni demonstrated that this ensemble is one of Indonesia’s best neo-ethnic groups going. And while the verbal play and physical comedy of Sahita is hard to follow for those not strongly versed in Javanese culture and language, the intimate communication they created with the Teater Kecil ISI audience could be missed by nobody.

One of the points that came through in the seminar and conversations is that creative industries is not about product but about process. One presenter told me that she was looking for shows to bring to her country, but with the hope that she will be later able to engage their creators in long-term bi- and multi-national projects. The shows offered for her in IPAM are thus not the end of a search, but rather an introduction or a calling card to future collaboration.

We can only hope that this presenter’s desires will be thought about in relation to future IPAM. There has been a worrying tendency for the nation of Indonesia to claim exclusive rights to so-called intellectual property, resulting in strife between Malaysia and Indonesia. Speaking as an historian of Indonesian performing arts I can say that the traditions here are not exclusively Indonesian property, but rather instantiations of long-term processes of exchange and influence. Suandi from the Black Arts Alliance, who spoke at the IPAM seminar, put this beautifully when she said ‘your drum is my drum.’ And few of us present will forget the wonderful moment when Keiko Murakami, director of the Japan Gamelan Music Association of Tokyo, sang along with the gamelan gadhon in the Hotel Sahid Jaya lobby. We hope that future IPAM will present opportunities for further exchange and growth in an open, non-competitive spirit of cooperation. Congratulations to IPAM and thank you.

Barikan at Astana Gunung Jati by Suganda

2009-06-01T12:08:00.000+01:00

During my last trip to Cirebon (29-31 May) I had the pleasure of seeing a performance of Barikan at Astana Gunung Jati by Dl. Suganda from Gegesik. I was in fact originally scheduled to perform this sacred drama, which I have studied since 1994, myself but for complicated reasons not worth going into in the blog Suganda substituted for me at the last minute and I ended up playing saron II and taking pictures.

While in Gegesik and surrounding hamlets and villages Barikan is performed during the night, in Astana the custom is to perform it during the day with a wayang before and after at night. The ritual drama is proceeded by prayers and distribution of food in the pendopo where the wayang is performed.

Suganda's performance was very solid and followed the same basic story structure and dialogue I have transcribed and translated in my book Demon Abduction (Lontar, 1998). The people of Amarta are threatened by siluman (spirits) who kidnap them and spirit them off to Tunjung Karoban to work as pengobeng (labourers) in a wedding celebration. The mysterious Begawan Jojohan intervenes and recites a kidung (pictured above) and bonds the siluman kings into a promise that they will not disturb Amarta or the people of the sponsoring village (in this case Astana) ever again.

There were a few attempts at updating and making the lakon timely - as when the forces of Tunjung Karoban offer to bribe Arjuna (how many triliyar do you want?) to get the people of Amarta as workers for the siluman's wedding celebration.

After the show, Suganda asked me (why I don't know exactly) whether there was anything that needed to be marked in red (ie wrong) about his performance. I said no, but was curious why he had Begawan Jojohan's petapan (hermitage) as Sekar Gading. He said that this was his father's (Dl Warsinta) version and that other dalang Gegesik had other placenames. There remains a huge awareness of even minor variations among Gegesik puppeteers.

Revitalising Topeng

2009-06-01T10:49:00.000+01:00

The topeng troupe of Mulya Bhakti (Tambi, Sliyeg, Indramayu) performed at Astana Gunung Jati on Friday 29 May 2009 before a set of wayang performances by two dalang from Gegesik for the annual Barikan ritual.

The topeng performance, under the direction of Wangi Indriya, differed from 'normal' topeng on two counts. One is that it was part of a suite of performances by Mulya Bhakti funded by Kelola and Hivas (the anti-AIDS organisation) to revitalise topeng as part of acara desa (mapag sri, unjungan etc), village rituals in the Indramayu, Cirebon and Majalengka area (see http://finance.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/media-jakarta/message/6744). Astana does not normally sponsor topeng for Barikan - and it was perceived as a 'hiburan' (light entertainment) by Suganda.

The second was that Wangi brought with her a few dozen topeng students of various ages from a number of different kecamatan in Indramayu who performed rampak-style the various mask dances. Wangi concluded the show herself. This inclusion of students of different abilities, Wangi told me, allowed her topeng students to experience the ambience of village rituals, AND also gave local audiences the chance to see that topeng could be learned by young people. Wangi encouraged accompanying parents to sawer - offer money in the former a shower of coins or bank notes stuck into costumes.

The dancing was of a surprisingly high quality, and Wangi was the attentive teacher, fixing costumes during performances, cueing musicians as necessary, mirroring dance movements, and making minor corrections.

The pendopo outside the royal graveyard of Astana Gunung Jati was packed.

Karang Tumaritis

2009-05-28T02:58:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday of this week (26 May) at the invitation of Mas Kristiadi I attended the live broadcast of the weekly talk show Karang Tumaritis. I knew both Mas Kris and the main host Mas Altianto from Mas Alti's Wirobrajan arts lab sessions. Mas Alti invited to appear as a guest on the show, and Mas Kris thought it would be a good idea if I came once to observe the format.

There are 3 regulars on the show - the famous kethoprak actress Yati Pesek, Mas Alti and a siter player who also plays a kind of servant named Robet. They led off with some comical dialogue (written by Mas Kris) and then two guests from the kraton appeared and spoke about the status of the kraton lands in relation to certificates. One of the guests was the sultan's younger brother.

Mas Kris shared a copy of the script with me before the show and I noted the appearance of Semar. I asked him what actor would play Semar and he said it was someone very famous. As it turned out it was Mas Kris himself, who did two brief monologues with a wayang kulit puppet (shot in shadow). Mas Kris kept closely to the written script, but the other actors diverged wildly, with much improv.

All dialogue in the show, and costumes, are Javanese. After the show, Mas Kris spoke about this as a 'not for profit' part of the station's profile. Guests are not charged for appearing - though they commonly use the show to promote their own interests and businesses.

Mata Hari, the opera

2009-05-28T02:21:00.000+01:00

Last night I attended a vocal rehearsal of Vincent McDermott's opera, Mata Hari, at ISI's pascasarjana campus. Originally performed in English in the US, the opera has been translated into Indonesian and will receive two performances in Taman Budaya Yogyakarta in July. The opera features a cast of 5 principals and a chorus of 16, along with an orchestra of 10 gamelan players and 5 Western musicians. The music is complex, with frequent changes of metres and much use of dissonance. There are 8 scenes and the running time will be about 90 minutes. The conductor is Ed van Ness and the director is Joned Suryatmoko.

I met Vincent before the rehearsal and had a chance to talk to him about his work and life. Vincent has been living in Yogya for the last 5 years, and has a Batak wife and a two-year-old child. An academically trained composer, Vincent was introduced to gamelan around 1965 while he was living in Amsterdam for a year by Ernest Heins. Heins brought him to the Kunst sound archive and Vincent promptly fell in love with the rich sonorities of Javanese gamelan. Trained at Penn, he taught for many years at Lewis and Clark in Portland, Oregon, and founded the gamelan programme there. He also established the William and Mary gamelan. Vincent originally came to Yogya as a Fulbright professor of musical composition at ISI after his retirement from Lewis and Clark. He had previously visited Solo on a number of occasions, with stays ranging between 1 and 3 months. He realised quickly though that Yogya was a better destination for long-term living, due to its mixture of modern/Western and classical/Javanese musical scenes, and has stayed on.

Mata Hari is one of two operas that Vincent has written featuring gamelan. (The other has a libretto by Kathy Foley and is about Panji.) Mata Hari puts forward the conceit that the dancer Zelle received a boon of dance from Nyai Roro Kidul, goddess of the south seas. When she becomes too arrogant, the goddess abandons her and she is executed.

I found the singers to be very strong, the rehearsal pianist quite sharp, and van Ness very sensitive musically. There was a real sense of purpose in the rehearsal - no fooling around. At van Ness' request I spoke to the singers for a few minutes about the historical Mata Hari and answered a few questions. A shame I won't be able to see the performances....

Diskuski with Pardiman at Wirobrajan

2009-05-19T01:10:00.000+01:00

Last night (18 May 2009) I attended a Monday night performance/discussion event at Jl Gatotkaca 7, Wirobrajan, the house of Alianto. This was another intimate, small-scale exploratory event attended by leading Yogya figures in dance, music, theatre, art and tv/film. The night was rainy and not everyone who had intended to come arrived. We started late as well. Pardiman, leader of the vocal group Akapela Mataraman offered a beginning for an interactive performance. Actually, two beginnings - the performance had to restart when Alianto left to get a video camera to record the event.

In the first event he introduced himself (in a mix of Javanese and Indonesian) as a servant of the master of a royal house. Restarting, he said he was a seeker of mystical knowledge, who had just completed studies of the esoteric art of prasasti under a respected guru figure. He asked us first to clap. Then he showed how a birth day can be turned into sound. For example '3 March' was two repeated sung 3 figures (3/3). We each presented our own interpretation of our dates of birth, then sang these together and Pardiman improvised a melody over this. He then said that objects also have a sound. He made a number of sounds that mirrored architectural forms. He then approached a pillar, with both hands outstretched in front of him, and an Islamic melody emerged. He explained that the saka was bekas mejid (once part of a mosque). We were instructed to applaud agin. This ended the event.

A discussion slowly got under way. Alianto said that this was a good way for Pardiman to travel as a solo performer - while his full group required at least 7 performers, in this way he could draw sounds out of an audience. A number of people spoke about the need to develop this dramatically in order to make an audience engage with the concept, and also to think further about the structure of the event. Pardiman said that he thought clapping itself could be played with - and conducted us in clapping.

A rather more free discussion followed - in which I spoke briefly about my book-in-progress for Palgrave, and others present (some of whom had heard me speak at Garasi, others at Sanata Dharma) chimed in their thoughts and impressions and provided valuable research leads. Alianto then suggested that I lead a discussion at Wirobrajan on the theme of performing Java in Europe. I left Wirobrajan well after midnight but the discussion was still going on, facilitated by the introduction of Korean alcohol. One event leads to another, leads to another....

Cirebon: 12-17 May

2009-05-18T04:45:00.000+01:00

I spent 12-17 May in Cirebon, during which time I managed to see two wayang kulit shows by senior Indramayu puppeteers (one by Ki Dalang Haji Anom Rusdi in Losari, the other by Ki Taham in Tugu, Sliyeg), met with friends and colleagues including Opan, Santoso, Purjadi, Kartani and played tourist in visits to Kraton Kasepuhan, Grage Mall, Sangkan Urip and Linggajati. I visited the house/sanggar of Sujanapriya (currently living in the pusat informasi right next to the kelurahan in Astana Gunung Jati). Sujana leads a wayang wong troupe and makes very nice wayang wong masks- I purchased two of these. We also visited the workshop/house of Abdul Bari, who lives in Gang Mesjid at Astana. Abdul Bari is best known for making small and life size replicas of various pusaka kereta (such as Singa Barong) but when we visited was busy making tasbe. I also delivered an Indonesian-language talk at STAIN -- based on an old-ish paper of mine on culture in Cirebon during the late colonial period.

Rusdi's performance showed many signs of influence of Central Javanese wayang - gamelan 2 prangkat, a large specially-designed panggung, impressive sound system, flashy lights, two comedians (one a little person) who performed very crude comic interludes, Central Javanese dalang outfit complete with keris, a prologue featuring a jin, kayon bolong, use of Central Javanese terms of address (eg koko prabu), flashy sabetan, Central Javanese musical pieces and a number of new instruments (including a drum kit and a beri special ordered from Jakarta). Rusdi spoke about how he devised this new style of performance with the assistance of Ki Enthus. He performs to 'melayani konsumen' -- an openly populist attitude - and, he says, his consumers 'doyan' this style, showing it is effective. This is lowest common denomintator wayang. There are bound to be people who find offense in a dalang slipping a rope over the neck of a little person and slamming him against the kotak in rhythm to the gamelan music.

Taham's performance in contrast was much more low key. Taham, according to his daughter Wangi, hasn't performed at all in the last two years due to his advanced age. The occasion was a kaolan of a haji from Tugu (a village that is absolutely fanatical about wayang) who vowed to sponsor a performance by Taham. Taham was in fine form - and while some of his puppet movement was weak and his sulukan and puppet voices were also not strong - he remained a fine story telling and his characterisation (particularly of Kresna, Gatotkaca and Cungrking) was superb. Rusdi and his son Dian were in attendance (they came in the sidnen Duniawati's car) and Wangi also brought along a few guests staying at Mulya Bhakti - a couple of film makers making a film on TKI and their Indonesian guide, a woman named Uji who works at Via-Via. The performance ended at 2am. Sadly the sound system was poor and I had trouble following much of the dialogue as a result. But it was an honour to be present at the show - Wangi commented that she did not know whether her father would perform again, and thus she videorecorded the whole performance.

Selingan at Sonobudoyo

2009-05-18T03:53:00.000+01:00

When I originally thought about coming to Yogya for my sabbatical, I recalled the Yogya of the 1990s, a time and place when there were many venues for touristic performance. I performed wayang kulit occasionally in Yogya during 1990-1991 - there was not much money, and tourist audiences were small and not always appreciative, but I enjoyed the experience a lot.

The multiple crises starting in 1997 brought about the near end of this vein of performance, and today there is only one venue where tourists come to see wayang kulit performed nightly - the Sonobudyo Museum in the alun-alun lor.

I approached Sonobudoyo (at the recommendation of the local branch of the Culture and Tourism ministry) shortly after arriving in Yogya and was given the opportunity to perform a single 'selingan' show - one of two slots that Sonobudoyo has annually that are outside of the normal schedule. This show was not for tourists, as I initially expected, but for school children, mostly 10-12 year old kids, that is the same age as my daughter Hannah. It was a way to increase the 'apresiasi' of wayang kulit. All local schools in walking distance from the museum were invited. I also invited some 'friends' from facebook and others via hp.

I was instructed to do a Ramayana lakon - this is the regular fair at Sonobudoyo and all the puppets are set up to do this - and chose to the classic 'Sinta Colong' (Abduction of Sinta) episode, an abbreviated version of a lakon I did at the British Library in May 2009.

The performance coincided with the opening of a topeng exhibit, which meant that the kids (and me) sadly had to sit around waiting for an upacara to run its course.

Once the show got off the ground though it went smoothly with three or four blunders on my part (a mix up between two puppets, tangled up puppets in the fight scene, a mistaken voice, a suluk in the wrong pathet). Again, at the request of the Museum, I performed in a combination of Indonesian and Javanese, with some English thrown in.

The highlight for the kids was definitely the Limbukan, which featured a contest with door prizes. The kids eagerly rushed forward to identify puppets, musical instruments and musical pieces. My daughter Hannah also appeared in the Limbukan as a guest star, doing a little wayang kancil story (Kancil dan Buaya) she has been working on with Nanang for the last couple of months. The kids cheered enthusiastically at a little trick I taught Hannah with a monkey puppet.

A photographer, Denny Wijaya, took pictures and generously sent me them after the show-- for which much thanks! -- and a reporter from the Jakarta Globe will be covering the event for this English language paper.

There is a chance I will perform again at the Museum - either next month or possibly next year. Thus: to be continued....

Anoman Obong

2009-05-10T05:08:00.000+01:00

Ki Seno Nugroho performed Anoman Obong at the monthly Ramayana wayang series sponsored by RRI, TVRI and Pepadi at Sasono Hinggil last night (Saturday 10 May 2009) to a large crowd. Seno said in the Limbukan said the ticketed audience (I paid Rp 8000 for my seat) was made up of real wayang devotees- different from the odd assortment of people who show up at his performances 'outside.' Indeed, Seno is one of the few Yogya puppeteers with a fan base, and many of them were in attendance.

It was an enthusiastic performance, with a strong supporting gamelan and 8 very attractive pesinden (a number of whom were ISI Yogya students). Mas Seno commented in the Limbukan about the importance of rehearsal (latihan)-- with training/studies (sinau) one can become competent (bisa) but only with rehearsal can one become good (apik). It was clear that the group has been rehearsing - there was a tight action-packed prologue showing Anoman's capture and numerous fast musical transitions.

Characterisation as always was strong. An angry and self-centred Dasamuka insulting everyone left and right; a beleagured Gunawan Wibisono left half-dead after being struck by Dasamuka and attacked again by the monkeys when he goes to help Rama. Sabetan, sulukan and language were all polished as always.

Again, the Goro-Goro went on too long for my taste but at least Mas Seno had the good sense NOT to include a perang kembang. In general though I think there was not enough plot development in this lakon - it felt to me like half of Anoman Duta elaborated to a full night's performance. This was perhaps not Mas Seno's fault entirely - the lakon was given to him by the organisers of the series I believe.

There was also a group of students from one of the parawisata academies handing out a very simple audience survey for a skripsi. I filled it in - and was gratefu to get a little snack box after for my efforts. The shoe is on the other foot.

Mari(e)-Mari(e)

2009-05-09T04:28:00.000+01:00

'Don't mock me, that's how kolaborasi [mixed media collaborations] go,' said Fitri Setyaningsih, one of the four performers in a fashion-dance performance to a fellow dancer from the audience after the show.

The occasion was a dance performance sponsored by the French cultural institute LIP at the upmarket Sasanti Restaurant (neary Yogyakarta's Hyatt Hotel) on 8 May. Three dancers Nita Azhar (from France), Fitri Setyaningsih (an ISI Surakarta-trained dancer who lives in Yogya) and Emily White (an American studying dance at ISI Yogyakarta) danced around Sasanti's garden in the high fashion of the Spring 2009 Paris season. Choreography (such as it existed) was by Marie Barbottin and dresses by Marie Labarelle. Tickets, though free, were very limited (available for one day only at LIP a week before the event - one ticket per person), and the audience was a combination of Yogya's glitterati, expats and artists.

The dance, which featured also Didik Nini Thowok as a 'guest artist' (appearing at the start and end in a noh mask and a long gown), was vague and spontaneous, with little in the way of technique, drama, or meaning. Fitri explained before the show that the concept behind the dance was a banyan tree with its long roots. What we saw instead was a series of costume changes. A dancer climbs a tree. Another dancer splashes around in a pond. A dancer imitates a bird. The semi-improvised movement was accompanied by rather bland neo-ethnic music improvised by the musical trio Enola & Improvasi. Marie Le Sourd, LIP's director, explained that this was the result of a 5 day workshop and was only 'work in progress'. But the question is progress to where?

My sense is that most of us at Sasanti were present for the occasion - not the performance. It was a meet and greet sort of event - and there certainly were a lot of attractive, rich, interesting and talented people present. Mas Didik's photographer explained that one of the major purposes was to get a video of Mas Didik performing in noh style to post on youtube. 11 videos on the Didik channel and counting....

Apparently the two Marie-s have created like dance-fashion events in France in the past. More rehearsal, better lighting and a lot more dancers and a faster pace might have helped.

Miliran

2009-05-03T09:53:00.000+01:00

Miliran, where I am living, was apparently once known as a kampung of artists. It still is, I guess, to some extent: our Pak RT is an ex-wayang wong dancer and kethoprak actor, and a neighbour practices saron daily. But it is also part of a perumahan, a modern housing project, and I have had less interaction with my neighbours here than my neighbours in London.

One of the pleasures of living here has been the constant flow of itinerant salespeople with their different cries and sounds (of infinite interest to my daughter) and the performers who pass by. Some have little talent, but the drummer and singer from Banyumas (pictured above) who have been touring by foot around Yogya for the last 2 weeks or so and performed here last week are exceptions. With all the talentless beggars singing songs at intersections, it felt good to hear a nicely executed Javanese lagu dolanan...

Tiga Perempuan

2009-05-03T04:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday (2 May) I spoke to Pascasarjana students at Universitas Negeri Semarang and rushed back to Yogyakarta in order to see Tiga Perempuan, a new play by the Padangpanjang-based theatre company Teater Sakata, at Teater Garasi.

I arrived late and thus missed the opening but saw enough to make it worthwhile blogging about it.

Teater Sekata was formed in 2000 and has performed a mixture of Indonesian and European plays by Ionesco, Wisran Hadi, Genet, Riantiarno etc. Tiga Perempuan (Three Women) was the first script by Sakata actress Via Suswatia, directed by Tya Setiawaty. This play performed by three youngish actresses concerned three Minang women living together in a traditional house (rumah gadang) - one with many boyfriends, another who is preparing to leave Sumatra to study, a third who is a faithful wife.

Much of the language was in bahasa Padang - which made the play difficult to comprehend - and the acting style was prone to over-the-top melodrama with shouting, crying etc.

What was wonderful though was the integration of live Dendang Saluang music - a constant backdrop to the action. The final scene in which one of the three women is left alone on stage in a state of emotional distress near to terror. She is joined by the two Dendang Saluang performers who rock back and forth with her as they make music. Her emotions, her lifestory and confusion, becomes mixed with the music of tradition. A stunning tableau.

Keluarga Tut

2009-05-01T11:42:00.000+01:00

Last night (30 April) I saw Teater Gandrik Yogyakarta perform their adaptation of Keluarga Tut (The Toth Family) an absurdist comedy by Hungarian writer Istvan Orkeny.

Gandrik, one of the best known theatre groups in Indonesia, is well known for its folky satire and topicality. While Orkney's play is set in Hungary during set in WWII, the Gandrik production routinely references local (Yogyakarta) culture, with frequent semi-improvised comments in a mixture of Javanese and Indonesian. Acting drew upon some of the conventions of kethoprak style clowning.

Briefly the play concerns the visit of an army Major on furlow to the rural house of the Tut family. While initially taken as a great honour, the Major overstays his welcome. The Major drives the Tut family's patriarch to despair after he insists that the family stay up night after night assembling cardboard boxes.

I really liked Djaduk's jazzy live music, appreciated the shadow puppets battle scene that opened the show and enjoyed the comic acting of the leads. But the singing and dancing was rather rather amateur and the pace was plodding (more than 3 hours without an intermission!). I also didn't get many of the jokes pitched at the 'lesehan' audience sitting on the ground in front of the stage, and the jokes I did get weren't all that funny to me. Tired from the Hari Internasional Tari, I found myself dozing off at moments.

There were some definite highlights - one of which was a mime-filled scene in which the Major and Tut family patriarch sat down together for a man-to-man chat in the latrine. Tut sprays the toilet basin first and tells the Major that it is all clean. The Major feigns shock though when he sees there is still a lombok in the basin. Tut picks it out and pops it in his mouth, saying 'tidak pedas' (not too hot) as he chews on it.

Wayang kulit at Sono Budoyo

2009-05-01T09:12:00.000+01:00

I am performing a wayang kulit at the Sono Budoyo museum on 11 May, and in preparation for this visited a tourist performance of a Ramayana play on 28 April. These abbreviated performances, which run about 2 hours, are held nightly - though sometimes they are cancelled for lack of visitors, it was explained. The company has three dalang in it - who take turns performing. (The dalang not performing play gamelan - apparently the drummer at this performnace was the best of the three dalang.)

Tickets for the show cost Rp20,000. Nearly everyone attending was a foreign tourist - with a few guides along for the ride. While a leaflet was handed out at the start, there seemed to be little comprehension of what was going on. Many were more interested in getting pictures than in seeing a dramatic performance. The gong player encouraged a young boy to step into the gamelan so he could photograph the simpingan from up close. While some of the audience sat and watched the puppets, they were encouraged to go round back and watch the shadows. Not everyone stayed for the whole show.

I found the performance to be dutiful rather than spirited, and with one or two exceptions was very conventional. A slip by the pesinden in the execution of the gending dolanan Slendang Biru during the goro-goro gave the puppeteer a chance to rib her - which caused the gamelan players to laugh. Otherwise there was very little humour.

There was also a stand outside of the venue (a small air conditioned hall) where wayang making was demonstrated before and after show. I presume there were also puppets for sale - but didn't get a chance to see this myself.

Plencung Two

2009-05-01T09:02:00.001+01:00

I attended the monthly performance at Padepokan Seni in Kasihan, Bantul on 27 April. This month it was Teater Ruang from Solo performance performing Plencung Two, the second version of an intense physical theatre work for 2 adult and 4 child actors. (The first version featured just 2 adult actors.)

The only illumination for the work was fire - first matches struck by performers and then a single lamp that illuminated parts of the actors' bodies - heads, legs, hands. There was little text - the most memorable being a monologue spoken by a child about a flood.... not of water but of technology -- playstations, cell phones, televisions etc. Actors walked around the stage mostly on their hands. It was difficult to see what body part belonged to whom, and occasionally grotesque combinations of parts were formed. This was dystopia - a world where people fragmented, technology replaced human relations, and the vision of the spectator was unable to bring clarity or wholeness. I was reminded of Bali's leyak, the witches whose bodies fragment, and basic Balinese fears (described so richly by Bateson and Mead) about the fragmentation of the self.

Before and after the performance, the company's director and some of the actors spoke in a moderated conversation. They were asked why they had such long hours of rehearsal - including rehearsals starting in the evening and going on to the morning. The director answered that it was out of imposed boredom (kejenuhan) that ideas originate. He admitted there was some truth to the accusation that he is anti-humanist (anti manusiawi). The adult actress in the production spent so much time rehearsing on her hands that she cried and begged for time off - which he offered (for 2 days). However, he asked, what is more anti-humanist - the slumped postures of a person at a playstation or riding a motorcycle, or the intense physicality he requires of his actors?

UNIMA Indonesia

2009-05-01T06:02:00.000+01:00

For the last couple of months, I have been helping out a group of young Yogya-based pupeteers, namely Maria "Ria" Tri Sulistyani of Papermoon Puppet Theater, contemporary dalang Catur 'Benyek' Kuncoro and animator and dalang Ananto Wicaksono. Together, we arranged a planning meeting to establish UNIMA Indonesia, a national centre of the international puppet organisation. I am a member of British UNIMA (BrUNIMA), and was appointed to sit on the exec committee of BrUNIMA. I also currently serve on two international commissions.

Only one Indonesian puppeteer, I Made Sidia from Bali, attended the last UNIMA Congress in Perth, and it was my feeling (and Made's) that Indonesia needs a greater voice in this international organisation. UNIMA has made repeated overtures to establish a national centre in Indonesia, without success.

This meeting took place at Taman Budaya Yogyakarta on 26 April, and attracted perhaps 35 puppeteers, puppet experts and cultural organisers from all over Java, with Dewa Wicaksana (head of ISI Denpasar's puppetry department) representing Bali. Both Senawangi and Pepadi, the two existing national wayang organisations, were represented, and there was much lively debate about the place of the local (particularly emphasised by Slamet Gundhono and Jlitheng Suparman), the need for autonomous expression, the value of exchange and cooperation. Enthus Susmono offered many humorous comments along the way.

The day before the meeting a small group of participants from out of town and the organising committee toured Yogyakarta puppet sites.

We visited first the wayang museum Kekayon, located about 7 kilometers out of town. The museum is basically the work of a single collector- with puppets in glass cases displayed to make scenes. Most of the major traditional wayang genres are represented, some by new puppets, some old. Many of the puppets, perhaps most, were commissioned by the collector. Thus there is a room dedicated to the 100 Kurawa siblings, with sketches and puppets of them all. (Most kotak or sets of puppets have no more than 10 of these, and very few dalang will have their names memorized.) There are also a scattering of more traditional puppets - one representing a rock star; a small set of puppets from an experimental wayang produced circa 1975 in Yogya. Puppets from other traditions are also represented and around the museum there are statues and ornaments of a variety of cultures (Chinese, European etc) to illustrate that wayang is a meeting place of different cultural streams.

Kekayon has volunteered space for a UNIMA Indonesia secretariat, and this offer is being seriously considered. The present owner of Kekayon said that this would be a way to 'menghidupkan' (bring life to) the museum, which is looking rather tired and desolate - there was some structural damage during the 2006 earthquake, and visitor numbers are low.

We then visited the studio of legendary puppet creator Sukasman, best known for his daring new buta, setan and punakawan figures and his wayang ukur productions. Sukasman has been experimenting with wayang for decades; his wayang ukur was performed at the UNIMA Congress held in 2000 in Germany. His studio has a full working theatre in it - with a gamelan, a raised podium for a stage, provision for lighting and sound equipment - and is decorated by stone carvings on the walls and a huge unicorn statue.

Sukasman spoke to us at length about his approach to making puppets, bringing out various diagrams (see above) and puppets - including 4 different Gareng puppets. He also interpreted many of the figures and other aspects of wayang in terms of sexual symbolism. Formerly, Sukasman was very angry about his figures being imitated by other carvers and used by puppeteers without his permission. He now has a more laissez faire attitude, and recognises that he is part of a larger tradition, and that he can always make new figures.

From Sukasman's studio, we visited Papermoon. Ria showed her work on her computer and spoke about a range of community projects she has conducted in Sumatra, Papua and Java- including teaching kids how to construct puppets out of recycled goods.

The final stop was Ledjar Subroto's house on Jalan Mataram. Ledjar brought out many of the puppets he will be bringing with him to the Tong-Tong Festival in Holland - ranging from portrait puppets, puppets in the Willem series, wayang revolusi, wayang kancil, Batman, different sorts of kayon etc etc. It was an impressive assemblage.

Djaduk Ferianto on Rhythms Meeting

2009-05-01T04:15:00.000+01:00

Composer and musician Djaduk Ferianto delivered an informal address (obrolan) at Padepokan Seni on 24 April about his experience touring Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, India and Switzerland with Rhythms Meeting, a group of nine musicians from six countries (see also http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/02/15/rhythms-meeting-where-differences-make-perfect-sense.html). Djaduk, who plays a variety of wind instruments (including sax) and also sings, was one of two Indonesian musicians in the group. The other was Purwanta, a contemporary gamelan musician who was in the audience for the event and also spoke briefly about his experieces.

Djaduk's talk took the form of slide show in which he explained various photos taken in the journey, mostly not of performances but of sights and social gatherings. He spoke eloquently about jazz as a metaphor for social interaction, the hardships of touring (food, inadequate equipment), the joys of friendship and free exchange among artists.

The musicians in the group spoke English to each other, but none had English as a first language. Yet somehow through signing, laughter and guesswork they communicated. Djaduk saw music everywhere - even in the dhobi women of urban India (a popular tourist destination). His constant companion was a bottle of kecap manis - which he spread over everything he ate, including pizza, bringing the sweetness of Yogya cuisine to exotic dishes. (Stuffing down a pizza before a gig, Purwanta commented, 'what is important is to be wareg' -- or have a full stomach.' Not all the gigs provided adequate equipment - speakers in a restaurant-theatre in India fell well below par - and some of the musicians complained loudly about this. But Djaduk coped and was proud of the fact that the group enjoyed most the warm intimacy of Indonesian audiences.

There were many surprises along the way. The group spent some time rehearsing in Patravadi's art centre in Bangkok, a centre which Djaduk said was very much like the Padepokan Seni in many ways, except that Patravadi had erected two statues of herself. Thais working and studying at the Patravadi Theatre would bow before these statues went they went by out of respect. Djaduk said he was initially astounded that anyone would be so vain to erect statues of themselves while still alive. But then he reflected that many Indonesian artists now are writing their own biographies and life stories, another sort of monument to vanity.

After the event, I spoke briefly with Padepokan Seni's director Jeannie Park, who said how important it was for Indonesian artists to speak about their experiences of touring in these sorts of formats. Only then will realistic expectations be possible, and plans drawn up for future international collaborations that build upon past experience.

Cembengan at PG Madukismo

2009-04-25T03:34:00.001+01:00

Yesterday (24 April) I attended parts of the Cembengan ritual celebration at Pabrik Gula Madukismo, a factor that processes sugar and spiritus (a kind of alcohol) located in Bantul, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta, just south of the ring road. The factory is in fact owned by the kraton, but Cembengan is very much a rakyat affair, and a legacy of colonialism.

The ritual is meant to insure a good harvest of sugar cane and the proper functioning of equipment in the processing (gilingan) into refined sugar. A sugar cane bride and groom are symbolically married, a buffalo head is decorated and buried near the factory, various offerings (including flowers and burnt honey) are given and prayers in Javanese and Arabic offered. Various performances also happen before or after the ritual. A machinist I spoke to said the ritual appeases spirits of the land associated with rice plants and disturbed by the transformation of sawah to sugar fields. My colleague Wisma Nugraha Christianto describes this ritual (known by different names in other parts of Java) as a conscious effort of Dutch colonials to insure that Javanese workers invested in their work, treated the machines (which were given lofty Javanese names) with respect and were conscientious and docile labourers.

Madukismo has only been operating since the 1950s but the ritual of cembengan is very much alive. The factory is one of the largest in Java, with over 500 permanent employees (and a larger number of seasonal labourers) producing 40,000 tons of sugar annually.

This year there was a lively pasar malam complete with stands (where I purchased a copy of an Enthus Susmono VCD) and a ferris wheel, various cultural performances (ketoprak, wayang kulit, campursari, band) staged over a period of 4 or 5 days and a festive procession. I attend the start of the procession, which featured a number of floats on agricultural themes, a small jathilan troupe, a colonial army marching platoon with gongs and drums, a host of people in Javanese costumes and so on. One of the participants spoke with pride about how the buffalo head is decorated in HIS village before being transported to the factory. There was a real sense of popular participation.

The wayang performance by Seno Nugroho (Yogya's most popular puppeteer) was a major event. Invited guests sat in rows of folding chairs underneath a canopy. Behind the screen there was a buffet dinner for them. Thousands watched the wayang from a distance and on large projection screens. I was tired and only managed to stay until the end of the Limbukan (which ended after 12 midnight!). In the opening jejer Duryudana spoke with force against the inadequacy of his senior advisors - blaming Astina's problems on their ineptness and holding up Amarta as a model of development. One sensed behind his words Seno's passion for reform and justice. But the audience seemed more interested in the Limbukan. One of the nicest moments was an interaction between Seno and his own daughter - a sinden-in-training who sung one song. They joked about her payment for participation. There was clearly lots of affection there, and also the hint that she was more than just her father's daughter but also an aspiring artist.

'Sum: Cerita dari Rantau' at Teater Garasi

2009-04-24T03:00:00.000+01:00

Last night (23 April 2009) I was invited to attend a dress rehearsal for Sum: Cerita dari Rantau (Sum: A Story of a Journey), a 40-minute solo monologue by Teater Garasi actress B. Verry Handayani in collaboration with writers Andri Nur Latif and Joned Suryatmoko. The play concerns Sum, a TKW (Indonesian female worker) from Indramayu who was physically and sexually abused in Saudi Arabia, and also relates the experience of other TKW in Malaysia, Korea, Hong Kong and elsewhere. Supported by a number of LSM (non-governmental agencies), the work toured around Yogyakarta in 2008 and is being remounted for a tour around rural Java, including Indramayu. It is a work of documentary theatre, based on interviews conducted by the actress herself. Photos of TKW (not necessarily ones of the women depicted in the play) adorned the set, as did newspaper clippings on the topic of TKW.

Verry proved to be a very capable mimic, assuming a variety of postures and accents ranging from an elderly relative of Sum (speaking in a mixture of Cirebon Javanese and Indonesian) to a pompous airport official on why TKW need to have their own arrival terminal in Jakarta. This was interspersed with commentary in her own voice, and a few moments of audience interaction. A live guitar provided musical accompaniment.

The LSM connected to the project are concerned that TKW often depart without full knowledge of working conditions and the hazards they face as vulnerable, isolated women. After one of the Yogyakarta performances, a woman told Verry that the performance had moved her to reconsider her decision to be a TKW. After each performance, there will be a chance for the Teater Garasi team to dialogue with spectators and reps from the LSM or local government will assist with questions.

The portrait of Sum was perhaps not as psychologically nuanced as desired, but the work raises important sociological problems. After the rehearsal, one of the Garasi members watching wondered how it would play to a pesantren audience. Would devout Muslims feel affronted by the depiction of Saudi violence? And how might this stage work be channelled into meaningful social action?

Gamelan Buskers

2009-04-24T02:41:00.000+01:00

Yogya has a long history of busking musicians - guitar players on Malioboro, siteran on Prawirotaman and the like - which has provoked some comment from ethnomusicologists. Yesterday (23 April 2009) as I was coming back home to Miliran after picking up Hannah, I was surprised by the sounds of a small gamelan on the streets. It was a busking outfit - consisting precisely of two male musicians, a kendang player (who also sung a melody) and a saron player, probably the smallest unit that might legitimely be called a gamelan. I stopped them and asked how much it cost to get them to do a melody so that I might photograph them. The kendang player answered 'seiklase' (whatever you wish to donate) and promptly launched into a piece. Possibly this was their only piece - it was the same song they were playing as they arrived, and the one they played as they left. A different relation existed than with siteran players. There was no suggestion that they would like to sit down as they played, no hint that possibly I might request a song. They showed little enthusiasm for the work (and it was work for them, not personal expression) but they were competent musicians. I shot a 2 minute video of their playing with my digital camera, something perhaps to be used for teaching or lecturing at a later date. Sadly, I didn't get their names.

Makutharama by Surwedi

2009-04-21T06:27:00.001+01:00

I spent a long weekend (18-20 April) visiting the fieldsite of Bp. Wisma Nugraha Christianto. Pak Christ, a lecturer in Sastra Nusantara at UGM, is working on his PhD on eastern Javanese ayang kulit with a focus on the arts management of Ki Surwedi (b. 1964), one of the province's most admired puppeteers. We saw Ki Surwedi perform on 18 April at a hajatan in Gresik, and spent most of 19 April and the morning of 20 April in his company.

Ki Surwedi, who owns three sets of puppets (2 in East Javanese and 1 in Solonese style) performs in a mixture of Solonese and Surabaya style. We arrived as the ngremo dance - performed by two rather solidly built women in male costume and pencilled mustaches - was going on. This, according to Surwedi, is a modernized (garapan) version of this dance, choreographed in Malang. The dancers alternated singing poetic verses (parikan) with movement. Normally, according to Pak Christ, they dance on a separate panggung (stage) but as the hajatan took place in a densely inhabitted perumahan (housing complex) there wasn't space for this, and they performed on a small stage extension in back of the gamelan.

Then followed the main performance of the classic lakon Makutharama. Surwedi began with a mantra or kidung, removed Semar and Bagong from behind three kayons, and then launched into an opening jejer.

The lakon was a very condensed version of the standard story - a wahyu was announced as falling in the mountains of Astina, various parties vie for it, Arjuna wins the divine favour, which turns out to be in the form of sage advice. There was a brief Limbukan (an innovation introduced from Solo in the 1990s) and a longer goro-goro (also a Solonese import), both with a campur sari band mixed with gamelan. (Suwendi explained that while the dancers, gamelan players and sinden are regular members of his crew, he hires in campursari as he is convinced this is a passing fad and doesn't want to take permanent responsibility for the musicians.) I found some of the Solonese material to be uninteresting - but really enjoyed the lively music accompanying battle scenes and the banter of the punakawan in the quickly moving scenes after the goro-goro. Movement was interesting too - with more emphasis on dance than in Yogya or Solo.

A highly intimate atmosphere prevailed throughout the performance. Rather than rows of seats, there were rows of tables where people sat (and came and went) throughout the night. Food was offered (a whole cow's worth of meat was purchased for the hajatan), the host offered many kind words while at the same time being respectful of our desire to watch the show.

Pak Christ has been investigating how Ki Surwedi maintains a network of followers and supporters and a reasonable price (about 5 million rupiah - exclusive of camursari and soundspeakers) for his shows. One of the ways he does this is maintaining excellent social relations among fans - encouraging arisan to hire him; meeting with fans in 'perkebunan' (gardens) before shows rather than arriving just in time to perform or hanging out in hosts' houses; drinking together with fans and friends; opening his house/sanggar to all to play gamelan etc.

Surwedi understands wayang to be under attack by Islamic modernism and is convinced that as long as kepercayaan (belief in supernatural forces) is strong, wayang will exist. I found him outspoken, intelligent (he started two S1 programmes but didn't complete either) and resourceful - very much in tune with his 'market' and able to react to new interests and demands.

Anoman Duta

2009-04-12T04:17:00.000+01:00

Last night (11 April) I attended the monthly wayang kulit performance at Sasono Hinggil, a large hall in the southern alun-alun. These all night performances (lasting til 4am), sponsored by a variety of agencies, are broadcast live on RIR Yogyakarta. Admission is ticketed (8000 rupiah for first class seats and 6000 for second).

This year Sasono Hinggil is hosting a Ramayana series, with different dalang performing every month.

Last night Ki Hadi Sutikno presented Anoman Duta (Anoman, the Envoy). The alun-alun is very lively on Saturday nights, with lots of young people on motorcycles eating and drinking at warung. But Tikno does not have a huge reputation and the hall was perhaps half-full

While the puppets and keprakan were Yogya style, many of Tikno's sulukan and other aspects were Solonese. The wayang was very classical - following a traditional structure (Limbuk and Cangik even stood in front of the gapura as Rama went inside) and using customary language. Puppet movement was controlled and precise rather than strong or flashy. Tanceban were particularly elegant - and there was a nice use of shaking to bring life to arm and body movements.

Hadi Sutikno won the prize as best Yogya dalang at the wayang festival in December 2008, and while there was little in the way of excitement or passion (even Rahwana systematically asked his siblings and courtiers one by one to support his interest in Sinta), the storyline was clear and there were some nice dramatic touches. (I liked particularly the binding of Anoman by Indrajit.)

Also present at last night's show were Ki Enthus Susmono (plus entourage), Ki Seno Nugroho, Toro (Tikno's son) and his family. A number of Yogya dalang were keen to talk with Enthus, and a free-wheeling discussion was held for the whole of the goro-goro section in an adjacent hall/warung.

Topeng Monyet

2009-04-11T12:53:00.000+01:00

Itinerant troupes of the monkey show or topeng monyet, also known locally as ledhek kethek, continue to roam the streets of Yogyakarta. I hired a company of one trainer plus monkey today as an entertainment for my daughter, and a chance to compare the show today with the shows I regularly sponsored between 1988 and 2002.

The acts were much the same as before - carrying various props, putting on a reog mask - but the showman, a young man named Pariyana, did not utter any of the customary narration, and instead sung a wordless melody as he pounded on his drum.

The tricks were much simpler too - no acrobatics from the monkey - but there was much more physical contact between the monkey and me (as the adult) - a wink from the showman indicated that this was part of the show, and that there was no physical danger involved. (The last time my daughter watched the show the pattern was similar - with a different sponsoring adult being targeted.)

The fee - 6000 rupiah - was similar to the past - but the audience (three young girls watching outside our fence plus my daughter and me) much smaller.

Quo vadis topeng monyet?

Ramayana Ballet

2009-04-08T02:17:00.000+01:00

My visiting professor friend provided me the excuse and motivation to make the trip out to Prambanan to see the Ramayana Ballet on Tuesday night (7 April 2009). I last saw this sendratari more about 20 years ago (if memory serves)- the ballet itself, a national project initiated by President Sukarno, has been running since 1961. We saw the so-called full version, all episodes condensed into a single 2 hour dance drama. (It is also performed over 3 or 4 nights.)

Dancing remains at a reasonably high level. Costumes are fresh. Blocking is clean. The temple backdrop remains stunning. And particularly the garepan for gamelan is lovely - dramatically exciting, precise, and supportive of the story.

Most of the audience the night we attended seeemed to be school kids from Jakarta on a study tour. They arrived in buses and left a huge mess outside the theatre (remnants of nasi kotak) . They received a long talk in Indonesian before the show about the Ramayana, and were generally well-behaved for the duration of the performance.

Some of the highlights for me included Marica (a lovely Cakil dancer - energetic and humorous), the golden deer (great choreography, imaginative costume, lithe execution), the burning of Alengka (the close of Act I - we could feel the heat as the straw structures erected at the back of the stage caught fire), the dismemberment of Kumbakarna. The arrow shooting (not always perfectly accurate) felt a bit gimmicky to me - I would have preferred something more symbolic. My daughter Hannah felt a bit let down about Jatayu - the dancer was bird-like but I think more work could be done on this to give the bird's flight majesty and grandeur. Rahwana was bit overweight (almost as big as Kumbakarna) but was energetic, proud, vain - a really convincing despot. Rama, Sinta and Laksmana were all a bit empty as characters, and Hanoman received very little time on stage. It is nice to see local children performing as monkeys but their antics could have been more humorous and varied.

All in all a very entertaining spectacle that presents the tale in a succinct but not watered-down form. My daughter Hannah, who knows the Ramayana well after assisting me in a 12 hour version I performed at the British Library last spring, said she'd now like to read the epic. And I think other children present might also be inspired to learn more.

Bosche

2009-04-07T03:01:00.000+01:00

A professor friend from London is visiting and, after some hinting that he was in search of some night-time recreation, I took him out to a Yogyakarta club last night. We first tried to go to Hugo's, an expat hangout, only to find it closed - perhaps we arrived too early (9.30 pm). We then went over to Jalan Magelang, Yogya's nightlife centre, and at the recommendation of the cabbie went to Bosche. At first, when he pronounced this, I heard 'Pussy', causing some titters and embarassment.

Boshce as it turned out is a very loud, very East Asian type of club. Waiters and waitresses are dressed in primary school like attire with their hair died red and spiked. On the ground floor there are private rooms for 'parties'. There is also a karaoke bar and a 'cafe'. We waited in a lounge/bar area until the latter opened and then were marched upstairs to a very loud and spacious bar area. A band played on a stage - with video projections in the background. Some of the songs were in English, some in Indonesian, but it was sometimes hard to distinguish, due to the distortion of the soundsystem. Men sat at barstools and tables. Male and female singers alternated songs. The latter were dressed in somewhat sexy costumes, and later socialized with the guests and waiters. A single barmaid introduced herself to my friend and me, and then walked away. We drank our beers (at Rp 35,000 each). After the band finished their set, waiters took to the runway stage in front of the band instruments and danced to flashing lights and projections and music with a throbbing bass line that shook me to the bones. After an hour we called it a night, and went somewhere quieter for hot drinks and snacks.

Who goes to these clubs? Why?

Z.Z..Z..Photography

2009-04-06T11:31:00.000+01:00

Soeprapto Soedjono, the rector of ISI Yogyakarta, gave a solo exhibit of his photographs at Jogja Gallery on 21 March - 5 April 2009. I attended a moderated discussion with the photographer and colleagues at the Gallery.

Prapto's pictures - blown up in full colour to huge scale - show people sleeping in public spaces. Airports. Beaches. Town squares. Subways. Buses. Park benches. The project occupied Prapto for some 5 years. Everywhere he went (Japan, all over Indonesia, Europe, US etc) he took pictures.

One of the people at the discussion reported the delight he took - miming a sort of evil chuckle - when he encountered a subject. Another spoke about how he was glad Prapto did not have the opportunity to photograph him. A third said that the exhibit lacked a photograph of Prapto himself sleeping - and when Prapto said there was an image, the participant said that this did not count as it was not 'objective' as it was taken by Prapto's son.

I found the pictures to be ethically troublesome. They depict people in a moment of weakness, prone to being exploited. Clearly permission to take the photographs (implicit or explicit) was impossible. (Prapto pointed out that he only took their picture - others might have taken their purses.) Prapto claimed there was no 'misi' behind the photographs but I wondered how the images would be received by a Yogya audience. Would they read these as proof of human universals that all people are prone to faults (falling asleep at the 'wrong' moment), as one religious-minded participant claimed? Or would they find other meanings? I would question, for example, the relation between Prapto's position as rector and the sort of power he exerts over his sleeping subjects.

This came through even more clearly in the exhibition's opening (which I did not attend, but was described at the discussion) in which Prapto paid a model to pretend to sleep on a bed in the gallery. She asked not only for payment but told him that she didn't have a nice 'baju tidur' which Prapto took as a sign that she was requesting him to buy a negligee. He bought the negligee, she wore it and visitors to the opening took lots of pictures of her.

I see - and others chimed in - the problems with this exhibition. Intentional or otherwise. Yet at the same time I recognise the ambition of his project -and am thankful to have attended a free discussion and received free refreshments and a free copy of the catalogue. Does this make me complicit?

undisclosed territory #3

2009-04-06T02:17:00.000+01:00

I was at Lemah Putih [White Earth], Suprapto centre in Solo, for the second day of an international performance art festival curated by Pak Prapto's daughter Melati Suryodarmo, a German-based performance artist.

Lemah Putih is located on the hilly outskirts north of Solo. Once fairly isolated it is now surrounded by small shops and near a housing complex where the puppeteer Slamet Gundhono lives. Prapto's 3 hectare complex has a variety of traditional buildings (pendopo), a shrine to Maria, a mandala, various megalithic-like stone structures, terraces, hills, shaky foot bridges and gardens. The festival took place all over the compound, responding to its unusual features. While the weather was uncooperative (it rained heavily between about 4 and 5pm) and the turnout was not huge, the work was consistently interesting, if not always cogent.

In '(At) Tension,' Jason Lim unrolled a roll of tape around the pillars of a pendopo and leaned against the tape, playing with the sounds and tension of the material.

Su-En, a Scandanavian butoh dancer, dressed in a tight-fitting red dress, cut open tropical fruits on the grass and lay down in the middle of them in her piece 'Fruitful.' She then squeezed out the juice on to her own body. An audience member commented loudly 'bagus.... bodinya.'

After the rain stopped, Willem Willhelmus performed 'Nail.' He gathered a small crowd around him on the grass and handed out small nail clippers. We trimmed our nails together in silence. Then he dropped some nails into the ground. He hammered them in so that they formed the outline of his body. He then dropped the hammer into a puddle. I asked him afterwards if he wanted his nail clipper back and he said it was mine to keep - for which I thanked him.

After a break, the evening performances started. Suprapto created a happening that went on for about 2 hours (though I only saw about 30 minutes of this). He was buried in soil and rice stalks were planted on top of him. While this was going on, a young man dressed in a loincloth danced atop a pedestal with a rod on top of his head. A beautiful young woman in traditional Javanese costumes slowly descended the stairs, dancing with a lamp in her hand. Artists drew rough images of a face in red and planted the canvases in the grass. A slompret played on and off. Three men pounded a gong into shape. A large sheet glass was placed on top of the mound that is Suprapto. It shattered - perhaps unintentionally. Water from a plastic bag suspended high above the mound dripped on the glass. Suprapto emerged from the mound and moved slowly and dramatically. He then soaked himself in a vat of water. And the piece went on.... (Earlier in the day Suprapto had spoken about various sorts of tapa or harsh devotions, including tapa pendem, and it is likely the work had something to do with this.)

Juliana Yasin, a part-Chinese part-Malay Muslim performance artist from Singapore, perforemd 'Centre of Emptiness' in the mandala. She walked around the mandala slowly with a candle in hand. Candles were handed out to audience members who planted them around the mandala.

Rakini Devi performed two short pieces dressed in neo-kali makeup and costume. Calcutta Underground 1, at the gua maria, involved the grimmaces of kathakali and slow dancing. Calcutta Underground 2, at the pendopo besar, involved dancing in shadow and faster dancing ala bharatanatyam. I sensed this was ironic - but it was hard to say why. Perhaps kitsch is a more accurate descriptor.

Yogya-based Mella Jaarsma performed 'Follow Me.' She sewed a small container out of a miniature red and white flag, emptied her wallet of its contents and put a photo inside the container. She then had us walk to the garden with her where she moved the container on her finger next to a man waiving a flag. A bamboo pole was next to them, weighted down with various flags. Clearly this had something to do with the upcoming elections.

Melati Suryodarmo and Boris Nieslony concluded the formal programme in a joint piece titled '(?) tiada akhir (?)'. Boris grimmaced and crumpled paper and shouted in an autistic fashion. Melati in contrast, dressed in a bright red skirt with a traditonal biskop jacket of the sort worn by priyayi men, sat on a chair and slowly and carefully created ornaments out of glossy white ribbon which adorned her costume. I read this as a postcolonial critique of the traditional Javanese aristocracy - busy with creating their own honours, inattentive to the world outside.

Then followed an 'open session' in which various audience members/artists joined in the tableau. It was late and we left.

Wayang Wahyu recording at RRI Solo

2009-04-06T02:11:00.001+01:00

Spent a couple of hours at RRI Solo on Sat morning (4 April) observing a recording session of a wayang wahyu, a form of Christian wayang. The dalang this time was Siti Amini Subanto, and again the music was directed by Blacius Subono (who also played kendang) and the other musicians were all school employees.

The story was Yusup Dadi Wong Pinunjul - the biblical story of Joseph - and while no puppets were used for the recording it was a joy to observe. The puppeteer (one of the very few woman puppeteers around) was brilliant in bringing the different characters to life- an aged and easily fooled Jacob, a well-mannered Joseph, Joseph's cruel and petty brothers, a slave trader desparate to make a deal etc. While she had some trouble with suluk (not helped by Bono's very difficult musical arrangements) her humour and charm and conviction made for wonderful storytelling.

The play will air on Radio RRI Solo on Saturday night 11 April (the night before Easter).

Wayang Kancil at LIP

2009-04-03T01:04:00.000+01:00

Papermoon Puppet Theatre, a Yogyakarta-based puppet theatre run by energetic puppeteer-children's book author Ria, held its third 'birthday' party at LIP (Lembaga Indonesia-Perancis) last night (2/4/09). Ria over the last months has become close to Ledjar Subroto and his grandson Nanang and engaged them to perform wayang kancil - as a sort of preparation for their upcoming tour of Europe.

Nanang gave a 25 minute show with Mexican puppeteer Carla Pedroza (who has also worked with Papermoon) - a rendering of a Kancil Mencuri Ketimun in which Kancil is accompanied by a Mexican horse and steal the timun and other vegetables of Pak Tani. The horse insists on singing after eating and is beaten by Pak Tani - proving his stupidty. Most of the show was in Indonesian, but Nanang (who played both Kancil and Pak Tani) also used Javanese particularly for comments addressed at the audience that made fun of the Mexican horse. A laptop played synthesized gamelan accompaniment and Nanang provided the kendang sounds by mouth.

Ledjar then took the stage for a 40 minute show. Beginning with a tembang (from Serat Kancil) which he interspersed with comments and translation (hewan = binatang etc) he gave a rendering of another classic Kancil tale in which a water buffalo helps a crocodile across a river and in the middle the crocodile tries to eat the samaritan. Kancil comes and saves the day by trickery. The brief narrative allowed Ledjar a chance to talk about Kancil (formerly used for moral instruction, it now is important for teaching about lingkungan), allude to the audience (including wayang I have ordered from him), meditate on Javanese culture (children don't know wayang now, which is why it is important to do Kancil), comment on the conditions of performance (no food and drink allowed in the LIP auditorium, but God how I need a beer right now) and his own location in the world (Ledjar performs more often abroad than he does in Indonesia).

Both Nanang and Ledjar did not use a screen - which allowed the beautiful colours of the dekor (trees, plants, grass, the river) to shine and also (according to Ledjar) allowed a direct relation and communication with the children in the audience (who mostly sat on the floor in front).

The gracious audience laughed at even the smallest of jokes and Ledjar was treated as a celebrity - with lots of people taking his picture before and after the show.

In the news, again

2009-04-02T08:59:00.001+01:00

Seems my talks are starting to attract some media attention - not everyone knows I am an academic in addition to being a dalang!

Home>>Panggung
DIDOKUMENTASIKAN MATTHEW COHEN; Minim Literatur tentang ‘Dewi Dja’

31/03/2009 09:24:28 PADA awal abad ke-20 Indonesia boleh bangga karena mempunyai seniman yang mampu mendunia bernama ‘Dewi Dja’ dan bersama dengan kesenian tonilnya ‘Dardanella’ sempat melanglang dunia. Dewi Dja telah berkeliling Asia dan dunia yang pada akhirnya memutuskan untuk menetap di Amerika. Tapi hanya sedikit buku yang mengupas tentang kehidupan Miss Dja ini.

Demikian disampaikan Matthew Cohen PhD, staf pengajar di University of London dalam diskusi kesenian Bali-Jawa di Amerika ‘Dewi Dja Goes to Hollywood’ Sabtu (28/3). Lantaran minimnya literatur tentang Dewi Dja ini, maka Matthew Cohen tertarik untuk mendokumentasikan kembali kehidupan guru, performer dan artis film ini bersama kelompoknya di Amerika Serikat dalam sebuah buku yang sedang disusunnya bertajuk ‘Performing Java and Bali on International Stages: Routes from the Indies, 1905-1952’.

Dalam buku ini nantinya juga dikupas ‘Stella Bloch: Javanese Dancer in Jazz-Age New York. Eva Gauthier: From Java to Jazz, Mata Hari, Richard Teschner, Jodjana dan† Rabindranath Tagore. Penelitian telah dilakukan dengan cara studi literatur, interview dengan banyak teman dan sahabat dan penelusuran dokumen yang ada di Indonesia, Amerika dan Belanda untuk dapat menghasilkan tulisan yang akurat.

Diskusi berseri ini masih akan berlangsung sampai dengan bulan Juni 2009. “Acara diskusi ‘Devi Dja Goes to Hollywood’ terselenggara atas kerja sama antara American Corner Perpustakaan UGM, Program S-2 dan S-3 Seni Pertunjukan UGM,” ujar GR Lono Lastoro Simatupang, staf pengajar FIB UGM.
(Asp)-o

This, that and the other thing

2009-04-02T08:25:00.000+01:00

I have been remiss in keeping up with the blog over the last three weeks. First there was my two week trip to Cirebon, when I had only irregular access to the internet and intense days with much travelling. Since coming back to Yogya on 24 March I have been involved in a huge variety of activities. I'll try to summarize, though inevitably there will be omissions.

There were four main reasons behind my trip to Cirebon. One was to prepare a grant application on wayang golek cepak - to be submitted later this month. The second was social - it had been 5 years since my last visit and I found myself missing old friends and colleagues. The third was practical - I hoped to perform some wayang awan (matinee wayang shows). The fourth was that I hoped to see some shows and catch up on the progress of Cirebonese performing arts (a book on the arts of Cirebon is still something I am thinking about). I managed to accomplish all four goals in the end.

I met with a variety of people about the grant - puppeteers, cultural experts, EOs (event organisers - a new category of cultural worker here in Indonesia that has rapidly taken centre stage), potential co-sponsors etc - and eventually secured two letters of support and a number of verbal promises. The grant looks to be on firm ground now, though you never know with UK funders.

I saw quite a number of my closest friends in Cirebon and Indramayu. Among the people I met with were: glass painter Opan, batik artist Katura, shadow puppeteer Purjadi, carver and all-round artist Sujana [Gegesik Kidul], shadow puppeteer Udaya, shadow puppeteer Bahani, glass painter Bahendi, shadow puppeteer Mansyur, shadow puppeteer Herman Basari, shadow puppeteer and dancer Wangi Indriya, shadow puppeteer Taham, tarling artist Kang Ato [Sunarto MA], tarling artist Kang Fendi, shadow puppeteer H Rusdi, shadow puppeteer Sudarso, topeng manager Edi Rasinah, all-round arts expert Elang Tomi, musician Jaja, shadow puppeteer Nono Suryono, music teacher Waryo, rod puppeteer Akmadi, rod puppeteer Sukata, pesinden H Iwi, pesinden H Samii, drummer Warsadi, drummer Jaya. I also visited the house of sandiwara actor Wartaka and learned that he passed away 3 or 4 years ago. A sad shock. I went to the house of shadow puppeteer Grami in Gunungsari and learned he was sick, and I was unable to meet him sadly. I spent quite a bit of time with some new colleagues - an EO named Arief, a school teacher named Anna Schatz and her drummer husband [who plays sometimes with Samba Sunda], It was a great joy seeing all these people for the most part - and catching up on local gossip. My friends and colleagues in Cirebon have a special place in my heart, and I was delighted to learn that Herman named his third child Tri Hannah Sita (after my own daughter) and that Kraton Kacirebonan will be bestowing a title on me shortly.

I managed to perform 2 wayang awan shows of Mapag Sri in Kab Indramayu. I had forgotten to bring a copy of this lakon with me and Nono (the dalang bengi) quickly narrated the play to me before the first show. Both shows flowed pretty well - though suluk were a problem and I sometimes struggled to recall wayang formulae.

I find much has changed in the last years in Cirebon. Number of performances is about half of what it was in the 1990s. Some artists such as Kang Fendi are in sad shape. Others have found other avenues of income. Herman is a practicing dukun. Tejda (who I didn't meet) is running for office as a caleg. Sujana [Gegesik] is thriving from giving condensed topeng shows and working with sanggar, the government and in education. Bahani suffered a stroke or such and is no longer able to perform wayang - instead he is teaching gamlean in a school in Cirebon. Purjadi wrote a book on wayang (based in large part on materials we collected together in 1994-5) and is working on developing wayang organ. Opan has taken a leading role in cultural management in the various kraton - and invited me to speak at STAIN and also instigated the idea of getting me a royal title.

Since returning to Yoyga on 24 March I have attended a lecture by St Sunardi on French postmodernism in Indonesia at LIP (surprisingly well attended), been to a performance by Enthus Susmono in Gamping (remarkable - needs further comments), delivered a lecture on Devi Dja at UGM (written up in KR, unfortunately with some major technical problems), went to an evening of student and professional shows at ISI (a monthly event, very lovely atmosphere - though quality uneven), attended a showing of 4 solo dance pieces by emerging Javanese choreographer/dancers at Padepokan Seni (again a lovely atmosphere, though the work was just so-so) and went to a fantastic event - a biweekly performance lab in a little pendopo in Limasan in which a solo actor named Ari improvised a Javanese language dialogue about a suicidal ketoprak actor who accidentally kills his son. The performance had some problems -but the post-performance dialogue was intense and open and sensitive. On 1 April I attended another wayang golek performance by Sukarno at the kraton, and found (again) that I had a hard time following because of the very poor accoustics.

I have also been helping out to establish a UNIMA Indonesia - again something for another blog entry.