Going Local: Observations Since Returning to the Homeland

January 18, 2011 at 5:05 pm (Academic, Fieldwork)
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Teater Dian Open Call E-flyer

1. Teater Dian (Education)

A few friends and I are working to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in early July 2011 (the e-flyer is above! Do spread the word about the open call to friends who might be interested in acting). In this project, we are experimenting with the Wayang Kulit theatre as the optic through which we tell the story of Hamlet. We started out wanting to explore Asian – Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Indian – theatre, but eventually managed to find a better fit by narrowing our focus to the Wayang Kulit theatre, specifically the form practiced in Central Java.

This is due to the similarities that Hamlet and the Wayang Kulit theatre have in common – Hamlet’s ability to communicate with supernatural beings (the ghost of his father) and the Wayang Kulit’s illustration of man’s relationship to the cosmos.

[Side note: “Teater Dian” is “Candle Theatre” translated into Indonesian (also Javanese and Malay). In the early days, settlers who came to Singapore would tell stories by candlelight. When the candle had burned out, these stories would end, and the settlers would have to light another candle to begin again. It was in this spirit of communal storytelling that Teater Dian was formed]

The concept was particularly inspired by Theatre Moollee’s re-staging of Macbeth that was staged as part of the Singapore Arts Festival 2010. The performance, in the style of the theattre of cruelty, focused on Lady Macbeth’s guilt at instigating Duncan’s murder. In incorporating shamanistic ritual, chanting, and traditional Korean instruments, it was incredibly effective in communicating the sense of hauntedness Macbeth and Lady Macbeth experienced, and caused the audience to suffer as much in their seats as the characters did on stage. You can watch a clip of the play here to get a sense of how it was done:

It’s been an interesting experience so far playing the role of the (amateur) cultural mediator: processing the knowledge I have of Indonesian culture and passing it on to others. In the first creative meeting that we had, Silei and I had to translate the experience of traditional Javanese performing arts (that emphasizes community ritual and archetypal characters from Indian epics which many are familiar with) to fellow Singaporeans friends who are far removed from the Indonesian cultural context.

Even in the process of translation, there was a disjunction between what we were trying to communicate of Javanese culture and an average Singaporean’s lived experience. This would be attributed to two causes:

  1. Singapore’s status as a ‘cultural orphan’ owing to our migrant history makes it difficult to communicate a strong sense of tradition
  2. Singapore’s emphasis on materialism resulting from the hyper-modernity that accompanies economic progress might have caused us to forget what is ‘sacred’, or ‘spiritual’, which seems to be prioritized in Javanese culture. Or it could just be due to the culture of pragmatism. This is a quote from an article (“John Gray on Humanity’s Quest for Immortality”, The Guardian 8th Jan 2011) that I’ve been chewing on:

“Their [philosophers of the 19th century] quest for an afterlife was partly driven by revulsion against materialism. Science had revealed a world in which humans were no different from other animals in facing oblivion when they died and eventual extinction as a species. For nearly everyone the vision was intolerable. Not fully accepted by Darwin himself, it led the biologist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace – acknowledged by Darwin as the co-discoverer of natural selection – to become a convert to spiritualism. Wallace insisted he did not reject scientific method. Like Sidgwick and Myers, he was convinced science could show the materialist view of the world to be mistaken.”

If this repeats itself, an over-saturation of modernity has the potential to drive societies towards primitivism and by extension, tradition. Is this possible in Singapore?

2. Notes on research

  1. Someone once told me that research was a lonely business – I’m starting to understand why. On the other hand, I’m very thankful that I’m doing a project that forces me to interact with people (online and consequently more so offline). The relationships I formed during my trip, and the knowledge that this project does make a difference to the community (even if it may not be a significant one!) gives me motivation to plod on
  2. Writing (communicating) effectively is difficult to do, especially when I am tired or panicked! Nevertheless I still hope that this project will be able to accomplish what I proposed, to help the stakeholders in the Wayang Kancil community in managing this cultural resource.
  3. I’m like a blind man feeling an elephant. Unlike the blind men in the story, however, each new discovery brings me closer to fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, and in time (ideally) I will be able to see the big picture

Blind men feeling an elephant

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

January 18, 2011 at 4:27 pm (Academic)
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“In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artefacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new.

…Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be…The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity”.

–   The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936

(1936! I wonder what he’d say if he saw the technological advances today)

1. Going (Digital) Native: The Necessity of Technology in Building Audiences

A lament that echoed in conversations with Pak Surjono, Pak Eddy, and Mbah Ledjar was the lack of young audiences to watch their performances. In order for the Wayang Kancil tradition to be sustained in the long run, it is crucial for practitioners to build new audiences.

It’s refreshing how open Mbah Ledjar in particular is to the idea of extending Wayang theatre through time and space with the use of multimedia technology. It seems that he prioritizes the need for the public to be educated about Wayang Kancil – the ‘diffusion’ of his work – as opposed to the need to strictly adhere to the conventions of ‘traditional’ performance. By all accounts, the 80-year old Wayang Kancil is an innovation that broke away from the traditional performance of the 200-year old Wayang Kulit – this possibly explains the flexibility that practitioners give to experimentation in their craft.

As Dani (a Wayang Beber pracitioner) remarked, the only way to be contemporary is to be rooted in tradition.

Children invited to watch the Wayang Kancil performance

Another method of sustaining the Wayang Kancil through building new audiences is through staging performances for child-audiences. In the first Wayang Kancil performance I watched (insert hyperlink) while I was in Yogyakarta, three primary schools from around the area were invited to watch in order to nurture a lifelong love for Wayang theatre in the long run.

2. Imagineering: Engineering a Radical Innovation of Story Collection

Pak Surjono

AKAKOM Calendar (designed by students)

Pak Surjono is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems at Universitas Gadja Madah, and at AKAKOM (the Academy of Computing) Yogyakarta. He is also a dhalang. His interests in both fields of engineering and Wayang Kulit converge in his latest project: the creation of software to collect stories that can be stored up for future generations. This software is certainly a worthwhile investment for future generations, and will go a long way in ‘reproducing’ Wayang theatre.

I’ve also found an National University of Singapore equivalent of Pak Surjono in terms of research interests and skills in Dr. Golan Ashraf, a professor in the School of Computing with a background in Engineering and Computer Science. In addition to conducting research on knowledge-based character synthesis, motion editing, and interactive stories for babies, he also has produced and directed theatre productions. (He even started a group called “Precocious puppets”!). His biography states that he ‘weaves together knowledge gathered from street theater (Badal Sircar – Kolkata), puppetry & clay modeling (Shyamli Khastagir – Shantiniketan, Bengal), and a variety of computing concepts (animation, parallel processing, data management.)’.

I’m impressed by how both professors are able to utilize knowledge and expertise from both new media technologies and old media landscape to tell stories (talk about radical inter-disciplinarity!). Each media has its unique affordances, market, and cultural status. It’s the interaction of both communication channels that defines the broader contemporary and historic media landscape.

3. Old in New: Keeping Tradition Alive through Trans-media Storytelling

 

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Trans-media storytelling. In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins defines the term as ‘the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms…storytelling that immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story’.

Trans-media storytelling is also acknowledged to be a 360-degree approach to

Trans-media Storytelling: The Matrix

storytelling – 360 content, 360 platforms, and with the potential for the full 360 experience. The basic premise of trans-media is that different media channels can be utilized to communicate different elements of the story. Its success relies on fragmenting a narrative and making each platform do what it does best, which in turn, extends the life and longevity of the story. The bottom line, argues [trans-media designer, consultant, and PhD researcher] Christy Dena, is that with a solid trans-media strategy in place, ‘everything remains connected by the same central narrative and theme, but each channel excels at what it does best, rather than bending to fit a central idea that’s being repurposed for multi-platforms’. This means that narratives and characters are fragmented and ideas and begin to take on new life of their own as they are virtually (literally) owned and driven by community.

Since trans-media experiences are generated through co-creation of a product by different users in different mediums (e.g. Ophelia in Hamlet extending her life on the stage through the creation of a blog journaling her thoughts and feelings) rather than adaptation from one medium to another (e.g. a filmed version of the play), they will be able to reach wider and more diverse audiences.

“The value of a good story remains and is vital; the question is will you prefer to read, listen, watch, or do?”

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Curious?

December 9, 2010 at 5:58 pm (Academic)

All will be revealed...

I’ve included a writeup about the project background and objectives here.

Feel free to check it out if you’d like a better understanding of the aims of my research, its interdisciplinary features, and the significant impact it aspires to have on the community  – that is, the public in general, and Central Javanese society in particular, especially Wayang Kancil makers, practitioners, and academics.

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