Matthew Isaac Cohen

Contemporary Wayang in Global Contexts

Traditional norms and values stood in the way of radical experimentation with the form of wayang until Indonesias postcolonial era. The same impediments did not exist for colonial European artists. Edward Gordon Craig formulated his theories of the ūber-marionette with reference to wayang, while Richard Teschner adapted wayang puppets for his unique Viennese puppet theatre. This initial encounter of Europe with wayang articulated a pattern of colonial exploitation: Asian products were alienated from their producers and transported to Europe stripped of direct connections to the people and conditions from which they arose. The 1960s ushered in a new era of intercultural communication. A major influx of Indonesian puppetry came to the United States when a generation of budding American puppet artists received direct tuition from Indonesian puppet masters at California summer schools in the early 1970s. Many subsequently went to Java and Bali themselves for lengthy periods of wayang study and apprenticeship. Some of these artists crossed traditional Indonesian puppets forms with other modes of practice to create complex hybrids. Much of the most interesting contemporary wayang work today is taking place along transnational axes. Wayang has been embraced by international artists and companies in order to tell idiosyncratic myths and celebrate the sacred and the ethereal.

Puppetry and the Destruction of the Object

For all the violence in certain shows, many unfolded a drama about the care of puppets. It was as if they wanted to make these creatures the guardians of a kind of love that was relentless, yet also relentlessly vanishing. This came through only at moments, often in secret. One felt it in the way a puppet was cradled, passed from hand to hand, and then bundled into a box; the way a nightshirt on sticks might tenderly touch a living cheek, but then rustle shapelessly away; the way a gaudy rag was stuffed into or pulled out of a hollowed doll-like head; the way a performer quietly took a bow beside a resting harlequin, or abandoned a dead clown-puppet on a bier. The puppet thus seemed a thing subject to pain as well as reverie, entities with bodies such as ours are, the ponderable form of spirit. The effect was often unintended, almost accidental. It could betoken a lapse in technique, or a moment when technique was given over, when the puppet’s thingness was more visible than its capacity to be animated. But this phantasm of care contributed to a vision of things transformed: these performing objects were neither commodities, nor fetishes; they were lucidly present, but subject to dream; possessions freed of possessiveness, precious, but easily set aside, even trashed; sexual, yet without fixed gender; both weightless and grave, vehicles of an ancient tradition, yet without solemnity; things subject to our playful remaking, but demanding an odd kind of responsibility. These small things measured the size of the soul. (Kenneth Gross, ‘Love among the Puppets’, 1997)

Look at the Clouds: Migration and West Sumatran ‘Popular’ Theatre

The numerous interrelated ‘popular’ theatres of Indonesia provide important evidence for the study of artistic interaction and change. The West Sumatran Randai theatre emerged in a culturally hybrid space and has been a sensitive index to local, national, and international flows and conditions. Matthew Isaac Cohen traces the origins of Randai in the late-colonial period and discusses its associations with rantau – a time of temporary migration, traditionally associated with the rite of passage to adulthood, but increasingly a semi-permanent exile for many Sumatrans. He then traces how and why Randai has now become more than a local art form, having been exported out of the province of West Sumatra to be utilized as source material for modern theatre by Indonesian theatre makers in Jakarta and Australia. Matthew Isaac Cohen is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow, a scholar of Indonesian theatre and performance, and a practising shadow puppeteer.

DANCING THE SUBJECT OF ‘JAVA’ : International Modernism and Traditional Performance, 1899–1952

This article surveys the ‘Javanese’ work of non-Javanese ‘ethnic’ choreographers and dancers of the period 1899 to 1952, including Mata Hari, Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, Ada Forman, La Meri, Ram Gopal, Nataraj Vashi and Michio Ito. I will also consider the work of Eurasians such as Fred Coolemans, Takka-Takka (who danced with her husband ‘Yoga-Taro’) and Ratna Mohini, as well as the Javanese modernist Raden Mas Jodjana, to evaluate how they imaged versions of Java on international stages. I consider further the lasting significance of ‘Javanese’ movement in modern dance and touch briefly on the transformation of interpretive dance to burlesque, and the rise of ‘ethnic dance’, in which dance serves to educate about Indonesia as a foreign culture, rather than merely entertain. The Javanese movements end coincided with Indonesian independence, when Indonesia began to organise cultural missions to represent the nation.This article surveys the ‘Javanese’ work of non-Javanese ‘ethnic’ choreographers and dancers of the period 1899 to 1952, including Mata Hari, Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, Ada Forman, La Meri, Ram Gopal, Nataraj Vashi and Michio Ito. I will also consider the work of Eurasians such as Fred Coolemans, Takka-Takka (who danced with her husband ‘Yoga-Taro’) and Ratna Mohini, as well as the Javanese modernist Raden Mas Jodjana, to evaluate how they imaged versions of Java on international stages. I consider further the lasting significance of ‘Javanese’ movement in modern dance and touch briefly on the transformation of interpretive dance to burlesque, and the rise of ‘ethnic dance’, in which dance serves to educate about Indonesia as a foreign culture, rather than merely entertain. The Javanese movements end coincided with Indonesian independence, when Indonesia began to organise cultural missions to represent the nation.

Wayang in Museums: The Reverse Repatriation of Javanese Puppets

Abstract:Transported to museum settings, wayang puppets from Java (Indonesia) are inevitably disembedded from performance traditions and the techniques and events animating and framing them. But this essay argues that it is possible to involve puppets in processes of “reverse repatriation,” bringing home to objects far from their sites of origin, as well as catalyzing new dialogues in sites of storage, exhibition, and performance. Puppets in the British Museum collected in Java by T. S. Raffles during the 1810s are venerated by Javanese visitors, but generally museum visitors were more taken by wayang hip hop puppets acquired in 2016 and displayed alongside Raffles’s figures in the exhibition Shadow Puppet Theatre from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. (2016–17). The new puppets serve to challenge Orientalist preconceptions of wayang as an unchanging tradition. A wayang performance occasioned by the exhibition Die Welt des Schattentheaters: Von Asien bis Europa (The world of shadow theatre: From Asia to Europe) (2015–16) at the Linden Museum Stuttgart enabled an intergenerational dialogue about the tradition of wayang for a German Javanese diasporic family. A set of puppets collected in Java over several generations by a Chinese Indonesian family, gifted in 2006 to Simon Fraser University’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in British Columbia, has been used to explain stories of migration and multiculturalism in Canada. The private museum Rumah Wayang 2 (House of Wayang 2) in Tegal, Indonesia, is a way station for the puppets of puppeteer Enthus Susmono. Rather than safeguarding puppets, Enthus’s museum promotes his reputation as an innovator and whets appetites for his puppets’ future sale.

Global Modernities and Post-Traditional Shadow Puppetry in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Abstract Under global modernity, Southeast Asian shadow puppet theatre is being re-worked in art galleries, the internet, community arts contexts, intermedial collaborations and festivals. Even while cultural conservatives mourn vanishing traditions, a generation of Southeast Asian practitioners are seizing the codes of performance culture, inhabiting received forms and re-making them to speak to both local particularities and global issues. These post-traditional artists mine traditions for political parody and carnivalesque revelry, violating the sacred aura of puppets to assert their own authorship and critique heritage discourse and development policies. Puppeteers fashion new performance genres, ephemeral creations re-negotiating connections between the local and the global. Animators and game designers re-work the figures, performance dynamics, and stories of shadow play traditions in digital milieus. Such abductions and radical interpretations stoke debates about cultural identity and patrimony, aesthetic norms and moral values, individual agency and collective creativity, postcolonial exoticism and the politics of recognition.

Introduction: Global Encounters in Southeast Asian Performing Arts

Long considered an isolated backwater of global cultural flows, a proud possessor of artistic traditions seemingly immune to international fashions, Southeast Asia is now coming into its own as a cultural powerhouse, refashioning old traditions and taking on new forms and ideas, with connections being rapidly formed between ASEAN member states in anticipation of the region’s Economic Community in 2015. This introduction positions this volume’s articles and the World Symposium on Global Encounters in Southeast Asian Performing Arts, where they were presented, in relation to the region’s cultural shifts. It argues that the critique and subversion of tradition is a sign of its vitality and future viability. A new paradigm is emerging in which Southeast Asian theatre and performance are not being treated as the West’s exotic “Other” or in relation to nation building but as a site drawing interested parties into a conversation regarding both local and global issues.

Anthologizing Indonesian Popular Theatre

This report discusses the issues and realities of compiling and editing materials for an anthology of Indonesian-language theatre that dealt with popular urban theatre that has been little studied and/or translated.

British Performances of Java, 1811–1822:

This article looks at the reception of the British interregnum of Java (1811–1816) in the theatre through a comparison of Jane Scotts pantomime The Poison Tree (1811), George Colman the Youngers melodrama The Law of Java (1822) and the case of ‘Princess Caraboo’, a Devonshire serving girl who posed as a princess from ‘Javasu’ in Bristol in 1817 and later performed the story of her career as an impostor on stage in America. The author examines these productions in their historical contexts, as well as later stagings, including the film Princess Caraboo (1994) starring Phoebe Cates, and the 2006 Royal Holloway production of The Law of Java. He suggests that not only did stage interpretations of Java offer a ground for imperial fantasy and virtual travel, but they also presented opportunities for the articulation of a range of contemporary issues related to class, gender, human rights and modes of governance.

Eva Gauthier, Java to Jazz

Javanese, Balinese and other migrants from the Indonesian archipelago and Malay world could be found in small numbers studying and working in early twentieth-century Europe. There were almost none living in the United States; the 1920 census registered only 19 Malays in the entire country.1 It is all the more noteworthy, then, that in interwar America, Java was considered, in the words of Stella Bloch (see Chapter 4 below), an ‘up to date’ topic, sitting happily alongside psychoanalysis, socialism, cubism, free love and anti-militarism in parlour conversations. Travel books about Java written in English and translated from Dutch were avidly read and discussed. Batik was taught in home economics courses around the country and exhibited in galleries and museums. Department stores created lines of batik-inspired products. A raft of Hollywood fictional films set in Java or featuring Javanese or part-Javanese characters were made in the 1920s and early 1930s starting with The Idol Dancer (1920), a D. W. Griffith South Seas picture starring a grass-skirted Clarine Seymour as a mixed race (French-Javanese) free spirit awakening to sexuality.2 A Hollywood Boulevard specialist shop called Javartam, abbreviated from Java Art in America, sold wayang puppets, batik and handicrafts.