The theatre and dance of the islands of Indonesia are among the most ancient performing traditions in the world, and endure virtually intact—not as museum pieces, like the Noh theatre of Japan, or as self-conscious revivals, such as European folk dance, but as a component of ritual in fulfillment of their traditional role. Dance has always been essential to the expression of Balinese religion; in Java, performances of the wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet drama, are still the popular accompaniments to Muslim weddings and circumcision ceremonies, just as they were hundreds of years ago.
For that reason, the performing arts here remain profoundly isolated. There is innovation aplenty, but it addresses Indonesian concerns, to an Indonesian audience. There is little contact with performers from beyond the islands; transformative influences on the stage come mostly from the electronic media. Performances of Indonesian arts outside the archipelago are mostly stuffy folkloric affairs, except where elements are taken out of context and pastiched, as in the frequent use of cliched images of the wayang kulit. Conversely, contemporary world theatre is all but unknown here.
At long last, the twain have met. The introduction was made by the American director Robert Wilson in a visionary staging of a classic of Indonesian literature called I La Galigo, an epic poem almost unknown outside Indonesia until now. The four-hour spectacle of song and dance, mantra and martial arts received its premiere in Singapore on March 12, at the equatorial city-state’s flashy new performing arts center, the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay. Based upon the creation myth of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi, I La Galigo is a stirring saga of gods and demons and heroes, love sacred and profane, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. After its premiere, the production embarks upon an epic journey of its own, a series of performances in Europe and America, culminating in an American premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.
It might seem an odd choice for Wilson, a native of Texas who has long held a position of unquestioned pre-eminence in the world of highbrow experimental theatre. His production of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, presented at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1976, was at once the break-through and the high point of avant-garde theatre in his native country. Since then he has become best known for his austere, abstract interpretations of the classic repertory, particularly Romantic opera. A sprightly production of Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables, which opened in Paris in February at the Comedie Francaise, enjoyed a crazy success.
Wilson created the new piece in Bali, with an international creative team and an all-Indonesian cast and orchestra. A workshop performance last fall, at the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts, in a jungle ravine amid terraced paddy fields, showcased Wilson’s stage legerdemain at work, infused with an earthy vitality that has sometimes been lacking in his interpretations of Western classics, which often rely upon on monumental abstraction and eccentric lighting for their impact.
Befitting the magical material, flimsy stage properties wielded majestic effects: a great seagoing ship was created with a few artfully twisted bamboo culms; a parade of animals sprang to thrilling life from bits of cloth, paper and string, animated by just-so gestures. The birth of the title character was represented by winding and unwinding the mother from a series of gorgeous sarongs—a simple, graceful illusion that matched the solemnity of the event.
The story of I La Galigo is vastly complicated, spanning seven generations; even the synopsis of the greatly slimmed-down scenario, by Rhoda Grauer, goes on for several single-spaced pages. Stripping away the cosmology, the story is simple enough, revolving around the incest taboo: Twins, male and female, fall in love in the womb and are separated at birth to prevent the world from being destroyed. The hero, Sawerigading, roams throughout the world, Odysseus-like, and after many interesting adventures meets a girl named We Cudaiq, who resembles his lost sibling. At first she refuses his advances, but eventually the two marry and have a child, I La Galigo.
A unique, unifying aspect of the production is the central role played by bissu, the ambisexual priests of the pre-Islamic Bugis culture that produced I La Galigo, who (although nominally Muslim) continue to practice the ancient religion in rural South Sulawesi. In Wilson’s production, as the drama is enacted on the stage, a bissu shaman named Saidi intones verses from the text of the poem, which imbues the piece with a magical aura. Bugis shamans such as Saidi embody characteristics of both male and female, expressed by wearing the sash and kris of a Malay man, and the heavy make-up and elaborate hair-dressing of an Indonesian woman. As Saidi explains, “We don’t know if the gods are male or female, so we are both. We are both, we are neither, and we are pure.”
The germination of the production dates to 1995, when Grauer, a filmmaker from New York City, was traveling in Sulawesi to research a documentary film about the Bugis, and learned about the cult of the bissu and the epic poem it sheltered. I La Galigo, she learned, survives in thousands of fragmentary manuscripts, written in an archaic language which no more than 50 people today can understand. The poem runs to some 300,000 lines—19 times the length of Homer’s Odyssey—making it one of the longest literary works in existence.
Dazzled by the material, Grauer determined to bring the work to the stage, and recruited her friend, the dancer and creative director of Bali Purnati, Restu Kusumaningrum. Both women had previously worked with Robert Wilson, and set their caps at him as director of the piece: “The reason I chose Bob is because he’s epic,” Grauer explained simply. After the team’s presentation at his summer workshop in Watermill, N.Y., Wilson agreed to take on the project. The final key ingredient of the production was the choice of Rahayu Supanggah, one of Indonesia’s leading ethnomusicologists and composers, to create the score.
At its premiere in Singapore, Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo was visually rich, occasionally even stunning, but dramatically flaccid. In an interview at Bali Purnati, he explained that for him, the key to a successful production lies in structure, whether it be an opera starring Jessye Norman, an evening of rock theatre with Lou Reed—or the staging of an ancient Bugis epic. “Paris is a beautiful city because it has a beautiful structure,” he said enigmatically. He drew a quick sketch of a grid, to represent the structure of a piece, and said that the interstices can be filled in with a wide range of dramatic elements—thereby enunciating in a few compact phrases the postmodernist aesthetic of which Einstein on the Beach is the most famous example.
However, what makes theatre history with a Philip Glass score doesn’t necessarily work for an Indonesian epic. The piece’s most glaring weakness was its lack of coherent choreography: the dancers were recruited from across the tropical archipelago, so even when they performed well, they never formed a convincing consort. An energetic dance for couples brandishing fans resembled an ethnographic floor show like those presented at fancy resorts in Bali; a boisterous cockfight scene verged uncomfortably near the orientalist fantasy of a Sinbad epic by Ray Harryhausen. The principals were able enough performers, though they appeared to suffer from jitters in what was for many of them their first experience before a big international audience. Kadek Tegeh Okta, who played Sawerigading, made an exceptionally charming and especially handsome impression at the workshop performance in Bali.
Taken individually, many of the elements of the staging were superb, theatre art of a quality rarely seen in Southeast Asia. The costumes, designed by Joachim Herzog, a longtime Wilson collaborator, using fine hand-dyed batik textiles made in Java by the Bin House firm, were mostly magnificent (the intentionally ill-fitting outfits for the comic sidekicks again invoked the unfortunate Sinbad aesthetic, with fussy little red vests over bulging bellies). The lighting, conceived by Wilson himself and executed by A.J. Weissbard, was fresh and gorgeous, at moments exhilarating. The supertitles, by Rhoda Grauer, were a model of how it ought to be done: just enough text to keep the audience informed, discreetly positioned above the bissu’s post at stage left, so as not to spoil Wilson’s stage pictures.
Above all, Supanggah’s score was superb, sophisticated and ceaselessly energetic, whether weaving a haunting, elegiac melody or raising the roof with complex rhythms and choral chant. I La Galigo is an important step toward bringing the arts of Indonesia into closer contact with the mainstream of world theatre.
Jamie James is a critic, travel writer and novelist who lives in Jakarta.
