Javanese performance on an Indonesian stage by Barbara Hatley

BARBARA HATLEY

Javanese performance on an Indonesian stage: celebrating culture, embracing change

Singapore: Singapore: Asian Studies Association Australia and NUS Press, 2008

336 pp. 53 figs b/w + col. ISBN 9-78997-1694-104, pb US$28/S$38

Reviewed by Felicia Hughes-Freeland, Swansea University

Performance is such an established field in Southeast Asian studies and beyond that it may be difficult to imagine that in the late 1970s, Barbara Hatley was one of the few who had published in English on contemporary Indonesian theatre at that time. This is a long awaited book, based on over 30 years of work hitherto available only in journal articles and book chapters. It has been well worth the wait, and provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of popular theatre, comprising Javanese-language ketoprak ‘popular melodrama’ and modern Indonesian-language theatre.

As is often the case with anthropological monographs, the analysis is embedded in the intensive ethnographic engagement with performers and performances over a long period of time. This ethnography is mostly about theatre produced and performed in the city of Yogyakarta, in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, with additional discussion of some troupes based in Solo, the capital city of the neighbouring Province of Central Java. The book is structured largely around a chronological account of changes observed by the author from the 1970s to 2004. The early chapters outline the theatrical scene in Yogyakarta in relation to the social and historical context, with an amply illustrated description of theatrical conventions and social meanings most helpful for readers unfamiliar with Javanese theatre and culture. This prepares the reader for the complex and intriguing analysis of versions of two ketoprak plays from the early 1960s and late 1970s about Arya Penangsan and Ki Ageng Mangir. She explores the treatment of these, anomalous 16^th-century figures who die in the struggle for power while challenging ideas of Javanese kingship, rounding up the chapter with Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s play about Ki Ageng Mangir, written as a political prisoner in the 1960. She then introduces western-style Indonesian-language drama between the mid 1970s and 1990, explaining how it drew on Javanese stories and culture to produce particular kinds of political meanings and ‘competing styles of Javaneseness’ in Yogya, demonstated by Rendra’s Bengkel Theatre,  Teater Alam, Dinasti, and the sampakan troupes, Jeprik and Gandrik. By this stage the earlier emphasis on Indonesian-language texts has been replaced by ‘unmediated’ Javanese elements, so that Indonesian and Javanese are played off against each other to comment on aspects of social experience. This highly detailed chapter also discusses the Islamic theatrical revival, galvanised by the poet and political commentator, Emha Ainun Nadjib. Chapter 5 returns to ketoprak in 1990, when all five commercial ketoprak troupes had shut down. Scripted plays had become the norm. A ‘new guard’ (p. 161) including Bondan Nusantara, Marwoto, Nano Asmarandon, and Didik Nini Thowok were developing new forms of ketoprak, including ‘humorous ketoprak’  which played to middle class audiences on television and prestige venues.. At the same time, since his accession in 1989 the tenth Sultan (and also later Governor) of Yogya had been promoting a wider range of performances for annual court celebrations, such as the big productions in 1993, and the ‘People Theatre Performances’ for his first eight-year cycle (windu) of rule in December 1994, sponsored by Sunsilk shampoo. Hatley focuses on these big productions, though the Sultan had also been encouraging aristocrat-led dance troupes such as Suryakencana to bring their dance and martial arts skills to promote ketoprak in Yogya’s kampungs.

The events and performances leading up to chaos preceding the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the changes of Yogya’s characteristically heterogenous cultural mix are discussed in two chapters which trace national political reformation, deregulation through regional autonomy legislation, and the sultan’s cultural manoeuvres as Governor of the Special Region of Yogyakarta up to 2004. Hatley suggests the ‘Cultural Dialogue’ held in the court was an assertion of Central Javanese identity in response to the critique of Javanese symbols of identity following Suharto’s fall, but since his accession the Sultan had been developing a new role for the court in Yogya (city and Province), which is culturally differentiated from Central Java. The discussion embraces plays by the radically experimental Gapit troupe based in Solo and different audience reactions to their work, including prisoners, to support the argument that audiences were looking for enjoyment instead of understanding. The significance of plays about the hero, Gadjah Mada (for whom Indonesia’s first university in Yogya was named) links to the next chapter, ‘Celebrating Yogya Identity’, which discusses performances at the Yogya Arts Festival and Independence Day celebrations attended by Hatley during two weeks of fieldwork in 2003 and 2004. This chapter is more fragmented and less focused – a sign of the times it describes – though it does return to an appraisal of ketoprak’s re-emergence as populist people’s theatre rather than grand spectacles.

One of two central analytical strands is the engagement of transforming popular theatre with socio-political circumstances and characterisation and its relationship of theatre to the ‘powerholders’. Ketoprak and then modern theatre have both been subjected to surveillance and repression, from the vicissitudes of populist ketoprak troupes in the 1920s as the Dutch colonial regime attempted to curb the nascent nationalist movement and the first communist party to be founded outside the Soviet Union through Suharto’s New Order (1966-1998), which had been founded in a purge of left wing politics and gradually neutralising any political engagement. Sporadic resistance elicited brutally disproportionate reprisals by the regime, though Hatley does not always spell this out: the student protests at Gadjah Mada in 1977-78 were put down by tanks coming on to the campus and people were taking refuge from bullets under desks and in bathrooms. Not until the breakdown of New Order hegemony could Indonesian citizens talk politics with impunity. The second analytical strand is the question of gender and changes in women’s participation in theatre. Hatley has been one of the very few performance scholars to focus on gender, and Chapter 8 presents her analysis of how theatre has contributed to changes in gender expectations during 30 years of research. This marvellous account discusses how the assertive and comedic improvisations of women heroines of the romantic ketoprak plays of the 1970s were lost in the stricter controls of scripted plays and the domestic idealisation of women as wives and mothers during the New Order. The material includes the life histories of leading performers such as the ketoprak actor Marsidah and the dramatist and Institute of Indonesian Arts (ISI) lecturer Yudiaryani – a rare mention of this significant academic training institution, incidentally. Hatley argues that  developments in the 21^st century such as the emergence of all-women troupes, including Sahita and their innovative productions which challenge dominant cultural representations of women, mean that gender on stage now represents ‘contested female forms’(p. 251) and a wide variety of female images. 

This rich complex book will become a classic in its field. Hatley tells the story of the changing forms of theatre and its audiences so that the material is accessible to those who cannot experience this book as a time machine taking them back to a dear and familiar place, though Yogya’s identity as an educational centre attracting students from all over Indonesia could have been made clearer. I have a number of small quibbles. At times I wanted more of the personal tone of the introduction to give a sense of the research process. I would also have liked more detail of place and year in the photo captions. The writing includes evocative plot summaries and quotations from audience members, but there are very few examples of language from the plays. As someone who has spent nearly as long as Hatley in Yogya but researching ‘dance’, I would have been interested to know about the relationship between ketoprak and the courtly dance theatre (wayang wong), given the longstanding porous boundary between performances of the court and the folk, which has then been subjected to politically defined cultural boundaries – a question for another publication, perhaps? I also recognised that this book, with its impressive scope and depth, of necessity avoids complexities of performance taxonomies arising from the importance of kinaesthetic elements in Javanese theatre which make a clear division between dance and drama problematic.

Despite the current negative commentary about the rise of fundamentalism in Indonesia since regional autonomy and 9/11, Hatley concludes with an optimistic view of the future of theatre and the roles for women both on and off the stage. As if to remind us of the unpredictability of every day life, her epilogue reports on how Bondan Nusantara used theatre as a morale-raising tool in villages south of Yogya hit by a major earthquake in May 2006. Didik Nini Thowok took me to one of Bondan’s events which included ketoprak and performers from Yogya’s gamelan festival, and I invited him to dance in a village being helped by a group of Acehnese volunteers (KYPA). This ended up as a major event, with a full evening’s entertainment including acts by local children and television personalities. I can testify personally to the power of Hatley’s last example of theatre’s socio-political engagement in the Yogya region. Her book is a tribute to the many artists she discusses, and a triumph of longitudinal research. I hope that an Indonesian-language version is in production, so that all theatre practitioners and audiences in Yogya and elsewhere will be able to read this version their story.