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:
- Singapore’s status as a ‘cultural orphan’ owing to our migrant history makes it difficult to communicate a strong sense of tradition
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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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