FAITH IN INDONESIA

FAITH IN INDONESIA
The shape of the world a generation from now will be influenced far more by how we communicate the values of our society to others than by military or diplomatic superiority. William Fulbright, 1964
Showing posts with label wayang kulit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wayang kulit. Show all posts

Thursday, May 01, 2008

JOKO SUSILO

Puppet diplomat charms Kiwis (c) Duncan Graham 2008

Dr Joko Susilo is a bit of a cheeky lad.
At a big event in the South Australian capital of Adelaide last year, the Indonesian dhalang (shadow puppet master) took a shot at monolingual Australia; he knew the then opposition leader Kevin Rudd was in the audience and that academics and linguists were lobbying for improved language teaching.
Susilo suddenly stopped his Indonesian commentary to announce: “This is John Howard country – I must only speak English here!”
His aside delighted the 1,000 strong audience unconcerned about an outsider commenting on local politics. And in Jakarta it may well have brought an approving nod from his more famous namesake Djoko Susilo, the outspoken and influential nationalist Indonesian politician who loves baiting Australia.
Susilo, the musician plays it close to the line but he does so with style. Certainly he’s well-placed to poke fun at the West. He married New Zealander Kathryn Knox and has fathered two Kiwis who are now teenagers. He has permanent resident status and lives in Dunedin on NZ’s South Island where he makes a living teaching Indonesian arts and working as a dhalang.
He has a doctorate in ethnomusicology and has been absent from his home in Mojopuro in Central Java long enough to know what appeals to foreigners.
Stints in Australia, England, Scotland (where he was an artist in residence at Glasgow University), Holland and the United States where he’s held visiting lectureships, have helped sharpen Susilo’s communication skills.
When you’re a little brown man with a quirky accent from a curious land far away it helps having a jokey relationship with the audience to transmit complex messages about Indonesian history and culture. Particularly to those whose only knowledge of the archipelago have been gleanings from tabloid headlines about bad, sad and mad events.
Handling this category needs care and charm. Fortunately the bubbly Susilo has these qualities in spades.
His repertoire includes hands-on interaction with the public, handing out the perfectly perforated multi-colored puppets made of buffalo hide. He lets little kids jerk the figures’ spider limbs and finger their grotesque features while he delivers snippets of knowledge. Susilo’s technique is matey, not declamatory or serious. So there’s only a sense of fun, not formal learning.
In his presentations from behind the screen where he cooks under hot lights wearing heavy Javanese clothes Susilo works references to football teams, the weather and local events into the classic Mahabharata and Ramayana epics.
Susilo knows Westerners don’t have the attention spans of the patient Javanese who are prepared to stay up nine hours to watch the full performance. So his scene selections are cut to less than two hours.
He also encourages onlookers to loosen up, to behave like Indonesians, to chat and walk around during the show, to view the puppets from either side of the screen and peer closely at the gamelan players. These are all Westerners drawn from Victoria University’s School of Music, apart from leader Budi Putra who works for the Indonesian Embassy promoting culture.
Budi, 38, who also comes from Central Java, won the job through his ability to play every gamelan instrument and an egalitarian approach to the arts. He arrived in Wellington in 1996, mastered English and chose to stay.
“New Zealanders know little about Indonesia though their interest is strong,” said Susilo. “In Australia, where they understand more about their northern neighbor, enthusiasm is huge.
“In NZ I spend time explaining my country, culture and music. I do that at the start of the performance, in the middle and at the end. I want people to relax and enjoy, for the music of the gamelan is just like heaven.” Then he added with a chuckle: “Well, it is when it’s played well.”
But he wasn’t referring to the bule gongers who have earned their credits by performing in Indonesia, including the cultural heartland of Yogyakarta. During a three-week tour last year they astonished locals with their dexterity and knowledge of Javanese arts and language.
There are two gamelan orchestras in Wellington, one Javanese the other Balinese. Also among the foreign players is Susan Pratt Walton, a pesinden – the woman singer in a Javanese gamelan. She’s from the University of Michigan.
Susilo came to NZ in 1993 when he was 30 for further study after graduating from the Indonesian Arts Academy of Surakarta, though his introduction to the ancient arts started at his birth. Typically his father wasn’t there for the event – he was out of town working as a dhalang, the job that’s been in the family for ten generations.
“When I was ten my mother made a booking for my dad to perform. However she favored the modern seven-day week calendar,” he said. “My traditionalist father used the Javanese five-day week calendar for his arrangements. Not surprisingly there was a double booking. So I had to fill in.”
Another factor in Susilo’s rapport with onlookers is his undoubted competence. Westerners normally feel uncomfortable about peering behind the scenes while a formal performance of any type is underway, but given an invite curiosity usually wins, at least with the kids.
Seeing a dexterous dhalang work a collection of more than 100 whirling puppets, flashing them across the screen, dodging and receiving arrows and spears, spinning them up and down while singing the story and adding sound effects redefines multi-tasking.
In the competition for entertainment interest wayang kulit is seriously handicapped when measured against cinema’s special effects and computer games’ electronic gizmos. You can’t miss the sticks and strings, the manipulation is obvious. Because there’s no sleight of hand watchers have to exercise their imagination.
To keep the shadow puppet arts alive Susilo has composed modern plays for overseas audiences – Wayang Skotlandia in Scotland, Ubu Bush Pig in Tasmania and Karetao Puppet Aotearoa in NZ using Maori tales.
This last production was developed despite early opposition from nationalists who argued that only Maori could work on traditional stories. But jolly Susilo looks and sounds nothing like a cultural colonialist out to plunder other people’s heritage, and he says his work now enjoys Maori support.
In a country where inter-cultural relations can sometimes rub raw on such issues, that’s no minor achievement for Indonesia’s arts diplomat.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 30 April 2008)
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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

ASIA PACIFIC ARTS FESTIVAL

THE BATAKS ARE COMING, HURRAH, HURRAH © Duncan Graham 2007

Si Gale-gale sounds like a lonely backblocks farmer's fantasy – a rich harvest for any Freudian psychoanalyst to winnow. But this is culture, so read on with safety and don't hide the paper from the kids.

Once upon a time Datu Panggana went into the forest on the shore of Sumatra's Lake Toba where he discovered a small tree, minus branches. Being a bit of a sharp man with the axe he set to work and had soon transformed the trunk into, well, a trunk.

As you might have expected, this resembled a woman. Bao Partiga-tiga happened to be passing by. He was a dealer in materials and fashion accessories. The two lads thought it might be a fun thing to clothe the figure with the best gear available. Come nightfall and the fellows' fun was over, but the clothes and jewels could not be removed.

There's a cautionary tale here that might resonate with married men but we'll let it pass, along with the rest of the story. This involves the sap rising, the carving coming to life, marriage proposals and lots of other jolly woodland events, like cursing, magic spells, barren wives and nasty spirits.

If you haven't heard this tale before, worry not. Hardly any Indonesians have apart from the Batak who own the folklore. Their numbers would probably be challenged by New Zealanders who are not only familiar with the plot, but have also seen it performed on the streets of their national capital.

For during a week in windy Wellington a group of 10 Batak artists called Suarasama (one voice) danced the Si Gale-gale ritual in their black suits and red mitres looking much like a bothering of bishops. Props included a wooden-faced puppet standing at the end of a carved coffin and waggling his ochre fingers.

Their audiences were hundreds of curious Kiwis watching performances inside and outside the world-famous Te Papa National Museum of New Zealand.

The Bataks were there along with other Indonesian performers and composers from Java and Bali to take part in the 26th Asia Pacific Festival, a celebration of music and performance from around the region.

Festival artistic director Professor Jack Body from the NZ School of Music at Wellington's Victoria University agreed that the definition of 'Asia-Pacific' was a bit squishy.

"It doesn't go as far as India but it does include China," he said. "Indonesia has always been welcome but there have been political tensions. Indonesia joined in 1980 but membership lapsed even though the fee is only US $100 (Rp 900,000).

"You've been on-and-off members for some years. I suppose it's not easy to develop a national organization in a country as diverse as Indonesia and keeping all the different groups informed. I'm really sympathetic towards those difficulties."

Body's concerns aren't just academic. He spent two years teaching Western music at the Art Institute in Yogya and has been active since in pushing for Indonesian involvement in international events. He also helps organize teaching of the Javanese gamelan.

At one time he had access to buckets of money through the NZ-Asia Foundation. This was trying to improve relationships with neighbours and helping pay for artists air fares to the shaky isles, but that cash has almost evaporated.

This means the Festival has been afflicted with the curse of seeking sponsors. This year that onerous task was eased by the Ford Foundation helping four composers attend with the North Sumatra provincial government backing the Batak team.

"This is an opportunity to show that North Sumatra isn't just a place of natural disasters, but also has rich cultural traditions and art forms," said Rithaony Hutajulu who manages Suarasama with her husband Irwansyah Harahap. '

"It's also our chance to say thank you to the people and government of NZ who so generously helped us after the 2004 tsunami." Total aid topped NZ $ 90 million (Rp 600 billion) from a population of four million.

Suarasama was formed in 1995 by the US educated couple who both teach ethnomusicology in Medan.

The other Indonesian crowd-pleasers were wayang kulit (shadow puppet) shows overseen by the effervescent Dr Joko Susilo, originally from Solo and now an academic at Otago University in NZ's South Island.

Apart from the performances he and colleague Budi Putra, who teaches gamelan in Wellington, ran workshops explaining the art of making the puppets, and the stories behind their characters.

These were hands-on events with audiences famished for information. Why does this puppet have a long nose? Why is that one's face red? Not easy for anyone to grapple who has never visited Indonesia but expects a one-line answer.

The gamelan orchestra has been functioning at the School of Music for the past 25 years. All performers are Caucasian and they've made several trips to Java and Bali playing the complex instruments to their own compositions – making the gamelan as universal as the piano. (Last year a gamelan festival was held in Berlin.)

Curiously none of these events were followed up by tourism promotion. No brochures were distributed – not even posters showing the location of Lake Toba – or Indonesia. Organizers agreed this was an oversight.

Kiwis are great world travelers and the questions asked at the public events showed a genuine curiosity. This was unlike Australia where emotions tend to be grounded on fear and suspicion.

Commented Body: "We're too far away in NZ. No one is going to bother us down here. We want to know about other people. Indonesia is very important to us. Music transcends lines marking territories, theories and cultures."

Filipino academic and conductor Ramon Santos has been another long-term advocate of using music to banish boundaries. He said a meeting of the Asian Composers' League in the early 1970s made a startling discovery that helped start the festivals: "We suddenly realized that we all knew Mozart and we all knew Beethoven, but we didn't know what our colleagues were doing in neighboring countries. How come?

"Why not get together and absorb the different aesthetics of our cultures and traditions? Music helps bring people together."

Veteran Javanese composer Slamet Abdul Sjukur, who lists himself in the 'Western-educated' category because he trained in Paris, agreed. At this Festival he found himself fascinated with mouth music demonstrated by some participants. Their cyclical breathing skills allowed notes to be maintained for long periods.

Slamet, who works at the leading edge of experimental contemporary music helped start the Indonesian Composers' Association (AKI) in 1994. This now has 110 members. "In the past the accent used to be on the differences between East and West," he said.

"We've finished with that kind of thing. No more. Ideas of centralization and competition are out of date. We recognize the existence of difference. Composers have to get ideas from everywhere. Compositions need to be cross-cultural.

"There are only two types of music – good and bad." So how do you tell the difference? "Ah! No one knows."

And if they did they tended to keep criticism sotto voce. All invitations to be frank on the record were declined – and off the record comments were by most critical standards in the arts industry most restrained.

At times the conference workshops and debates - which ran parallel with the performances – tended to become as obscure as the music the experts from 23 countries study and make.

The solo performances demanded intense concentration – to enjoy the piece and spot the ending. Was the audio hum part of the work or an aberration? There was seldom a crashing finale - compositions might suddenly revive once the clapping started. Catchy, shower-humming tunes were out. These may have been the sounds of music but they certainly weren't The Sound of Music.

Not all were seeking the purity of mountain flutes played by goatherds. NZ composer Helen Bowater was in Yogya one New Year's Eve where she found inspiration in the celebrations with "jubilant crowds blowing countless varieties of hooters ingeniously created from recycled junk."

To the average visitor this the midnight soundscape bouncing down Yogya's Jalan Malioboro would have been one great raucous racket, but Bowater used her experience to create New Year Fanfare. This was played by the NZ Symphony Orchestra in a splendid timber-clad and acoustically perfect concert hall in central Wellington.

After the performance Bowater said that her time in Java as a gamelan player was "one of the most moving musical experiences of my life – it's such a creative place and people were so tolerant."

Other cross-cultural creations included Spinning Mountain, a collaboration between composers Gareth Farr (NZ) and I Wayan Gede Yudane from Bali. This full work will be performed in Wellington in March.

In between the notes were the esoteric debates. Does composition precede performance – or are they simultaneous creative events? Are value paradigms cross-cultural? Can European composers learn from their Asian counterparts, or is traffic just one-way?

Is music political? Or should it be seen as timeless and spiritual, far above the mire of worldly events? If you accept that religious teachings have inspired great compositions then it's logical (though not always emotionally sound or wise) to argue that politics can do the same. It's OK to accept John Lennon's Imagine as a generic cry for peace, but when that's made specific – as in Iraq – discord begins.

"This has been a Festival of delights," Brody told The Jakarta Post as delegates and performers snapped the locks on their instrument cases and headed for the airport in a sweat of hugs and handshakes. "It's been creative, entertaining, shocking and exciting.

"We had to sort through 450 scores from the region and chose the few that would best represent diversity and innovation.

"We wanted the composers and artists from Indonesia to project their country as a multi-ethnic and creative nation – and not just a cheap holiday in Bali or Java.

"The Indonesians have done just that and made a major contribution to the Festival. They've brought performances and ideas that have been far more beautiful and wonderful than I've ever heard before."

(First published in The SundayPost 4 March 07)
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