Trading Art(s): Artaud, Spies, and Current Indonesian/American Artistic Exchange and Collaboration

Trading Art(s): Artaud, Spies, and Current Indonesian/American Artistic Exchange and Collaboration KATHY FOLEY In 1990-<)1 as part of the Festival of Indonesia, a government to government exchange of the arts, a wealth of Indonesian perfonnance toured AmeriCan cities. Over the same eighteen-month period there were an equivalent number of collaborative productions mounted by Indonesian directors, writers, choreographers , and U.S. groups (Keith Terry and I Wayan Dibia's Body Tjak in San Francisco and Arifin C. Noer's Ozolle with students from the University of California at Santa Cruz), which followed the earlier collaboration between Putu Wijaya and Phillip Zarrilli in the mid-eighties. In some cases cultural roles were reversed, as at the San Francisco and Los Angeles museums where Larry Reed perfonned Balinese Wayang Parwa (shadow theatre) under the auspices of the Festival, while Indonesian artists were showing their avantgarde batik paintings in the foyer. P.T. Barnum's museum of curiosities has finally been subverted. The Americans are the primitives, and the Indonesians are the moderns! I The questions inherent in the on-going process of artistic interaction between Indonesia and the U.S. are obvious. Are cross-culture drama, dance, and music the ultimate in cultural tourism: Club Med experiences of "the real thing" without any substantive connection to the internal stuff that codes a perfonnance? Of is it the very reality of the arts to allow us to test the boundaries of self and other where the experience stretches us toward realizing the other is only a possibility of the self that for cultural reasons is suppressed? There can be no definitive answers. The process of Indonesian-American cross-fertilization, while linked to older cross-cultural encounters, has only exploded in the last two decades as Americans and Indonesians have become for perhaps the nrst time well-trained in each other's arts and without the clear barriers of colonial relationships to impede their explorations. It will take more time to see the long tenn results of this work. My aim here will be Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 10 Maud, Spies, and Indonesian/American Exchange II to begin to chart some of the earlier history and see how models of the past may structure such Festival exchanges. 1930 Intersections In looking for ancestors for the fusion work of today, the work of the French actor/director Antonin Artaud and the Russian-born German painter/musician Walter Spies demand acknowledgement. In addition to drawing attention to Balinese performance, they set up a number of the presuppositions that have largely prevailed in the West until the present. Among these suppositions I include (I) the sense in Balinese (and Indonesian) theatre that the arts of music, dance, and theatre fuse; (2) the belief that this is a theatre where the sacred is nigh; and (3) the idea that this is a theatre where text is minimized. Artaud propagated these ideas via writing that responded to a performance seen in Europe. Spies shared some of these ideas in his writing, but also importantly communicated his values through commissioning the prototype of what has become a significant performance genre of the Balinese. Maud on The Exposition Coloniale Colonial exhibits like the one Arlaud attended in July 1931' had from the prior century whet the appetites of European and American artists for nonWestern work. Claude Debussy, hearing gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition, had introduced the sounds of gongchimes into some of his works, but the impact of the 1931 performance was on theatrical circles. Artists like Maud, who had become disillusioned with "fourth wall" illusionism that swept over the European theatre in the first quarter of the century in the wake of Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Ibsen, saw in the masks and movement of Asian culture presented at such exhibitions, tools to shatter realistic modes. What African art was for Picasso, what Chinese theatre was for Brecht, Balinese dance was for Artaud - a way to get beyond the perceived constraints of realism. Maud had already primed himself, by reading material on various types of Asian performance and by seeing the Cambodian court troupe that had appeared at Marseilles in 1922; and his response to the 1931 performance inflames to this day. "The spectacle of Balinese theater, which draws upon dance, song, pantomime - and little of the theater as we understand it in the Occident - restores the Iheater, by means of ceremonies of indubitable age and well-tried efficacity, to its original destiny which it presents as a combination of all these elements fused together in a perspective of hallucination and fear.'" An aspect of Balinese performance that he prized was the synethesia of the arts. Artaud correctly sensed that the connective tissue between music, movement, and vocalization was essential to the impact of 12 KATHY FOLEY this theatre. Drums accent movements, modal scales define vocal placement, etc. More importantly, Artaud found in this theatre the figure of the double which, for Artaud, represented life in both its creative and destructive essence. In a letter he wrote to Jean Paulhan (25 January 1936) he explained the concept in the following terms, "By this double I mean the great magical agent of which the theatre, through its forms, is only a figuration waiting to become the transfiguration."4 While the letter was written five years later when the idea of the double was more fully formulated, it is apparent in the essay written for the October 1931 NO!lvelle Revue Fra1U;aise that Artaud considers the double of central importance. He uses the term in reference to the effect of costuming, the linking of the noble characters with a more comic companion, and as an image of theatre at its moment of apotheosis. "The hieratic quality of the costumes gives each actor a double body and a double set of limbs - and the dancer bundled into his costume seems to be nothing more than his own effigy.'" The clothing that Artaud saw would have included the wrapping of the torso and chest of refined characters in a mode that approximates swaddling with long, thin colored bands with gold overlays . This wrapping flattens and supports the upper body below the arms, allowing elbows and shoulders to maintain the high diagonals needed for the dance, and is combined with a cloth of gold skirt that sheathes the hips and thighs. For stronger characters he would have seen the dangling ribbons and cape of cloth of gold fabric over white pants and shirt characteristic of the military Baris dancer. When the refined dancer grasps the trailing yards of the cloth of gold skirt and extends its width to his side, or when the strong male Baris twirls to send his ribbons flying - the costume magnifies the dancer's movement, seeming to expand his implications toward the superhuman . What then was the particular representation of this double that evoked Artaud's use of the term? The Barong play that ended the performance was an episode from Aljuna's Meditation which shows how the great hero of the Malzablzarata, Arjuna, sits in meditation. Unmoved by the seduction of heavenly nymph, Arjuna only rises to stop an ogre named Mamangmurka (murka = passion) who has transformed into a Barong (a mythical beast). In this confrontation of Arjuna and the dragon (Barong) which represents the meditator subduing his passions, Artaud saw the double: "And behind the Warrior, bristling from the formidable cosmic tempest, is the Double who struts about, given up to the childishness of his schoolboy gibes, and who, roused by the repercussion of the turmoil, moves unaware in the midst of spells of which he has understood nothing.'" The "double" of the quotation above is almost certainly Artaud's interpretation of the typical clown-follower of the hero who would have appeared in Artaud, Spies, and Indonesian/American Exchange 13 this dance drama. This clown character is, by comparison with the epic character he serves, more realistic and less the "animated hieroglyph" (Artaud, p. 54) which Artaud felt in the other characters.' While just a joker, the clown is paradoxically also semi-sacral. In the Wayang Parwa puppet theatre the main clown, Twalen, is considered a high god of the universe. In folk performances around the Indonesian archipelago the clown player often doubles as shaman for the troupe, as in Ludruk in East Java. In trance performances like Sintren in Java the clown player often protects the trancer and may interpret the garbled messages of the spirit world that emerge from the seance. While no one fonn or explanation can sum up the multitudinous aspects of clown archetype, the idea of "double" is a reasonable try. The clown, in Balinese performance, linguistically translates the Kawi experience of the hero back into mundanely understandable Balinese terms. He becomes the double that can talk the local language and clarify what the hero's epic experience might mean in current practice. Due to this translation function the hero and the play cannot exist without him. It would be as if English language plays were in Latin with the clown roughly interpolating the text in the vernacular. The heroes and their opponents eventually die and the story continues with their descendants - but the same clown Jives on, appearing in every story. The clown is the traditional mediator through whom each story comes into the Balinese audience's purview. Artaud's double is probably the central concept of his theatre. The ideas of the plague, of alchemy, and of cruelty, can be argued to be permutations of it. The double is the dark and dazzling entity that dances behind the rational surface of human existence. Artaud feels it is the central mission of theatre to allow this energy to appear and clarify itself via performance. He warns us that if this energy is suppressed it is apt to burst through in less savory manifestations. For Artaud the double is the most important discovery in the Balinese performance, for it is a pathway to the sacred. However, field research would have forced Artaud to revise some of his initial impressions about Balinese performance. He feels, for example, that the theatre was lacking in improvisational possibilities. He implies that music dictates and circumscribes movement. He assumes that the prime creator of the performance he saw was a director who was successful in purging this theatre of words. In each instance he misses the mark vis-a-vis Balinese performance. Improvisation wit~in the strict constraints of the form is central, and music follows the dancer rather than the opposite, as Artaud supposes. Perhaps Artaud was most mistaken in his feeling that the constraints of language were finally broken in this theatre. Those who know Balinese performance will understand that the da/allg, the puppeteer of Wayang Parwa who uses figure, dance and music in conjunction with language and story is the '4 KATHY FOLEY central performer of this society. In this puppeteer's repertoire language is indubitably the most powerful of his tools: in various channs used for opening and making the transition into certain scenes, language reaches an apotheosis , becoming a mantra. Exorcism is linked with the performer's command of sacred texts and Kawi language. Significant trance forms also reach their climax in language, since what the spirit says needs an interpreter. For the average audience member it may be that the movement, sound, and image allow for the emotional trigger. But if you ask anyone what it really means they will refer you to the puppeteer or priest, who by command of archaic language and ability to interpret that into modem language, is the empowered performer. Structurally speaking the puppeteer or priest is in some ways analogous and complementary to the clown. All are translators of the alternative reality [the story (for the dalang), the spirit (for the priest), or the hero (for the clown)) to the here and now. Language is needed to make the connection with that powerful world possible and then understandable. Communication comes in the performer's command of Kawi language, and translation comes in his command of the vernacular. Artaud's impressions - "age-old rites," "Gestures made to last," "An exorcism ," "A state prior to language," "Intoxication which restores to us the very elements of ecstasy ... Bestiality and every trace of animality are reduced to their spare gestures: mutinous noises of the splitting earth, the sap of trees, animal yawns'" - could today be critiqued in hindsight for their orientalist tone. In the post-Colonial milieu, Artaud would no doubt have been more politically correct in his choice of words, making sure he would not confine images of intoxication, ecstasy, and animality only to the Balinese, and recognizing the historicity and cultural specificity of the performance he saw. But if Artaud did not follow through on the particulars, he was right on intuitions. The Balinese theatre conceptualized itself somewhat differently from European art theatre - the energy 'and focus of the Balinese theatre is in assessing and accessing archetypical emotional experience. Artaud was interested in playing with the primal and, in his search for the sacred, stumbled upon the Balinese model. For him it was unencumbered by its history. Nor did he seek the particular Balinese messages of religion and culture that were in the language. The theatre became for him, instead, a weapon against European realism and all its pomps and works. Music, movement, puppet, mask became ways to exorcise realism. Artaud saw a way of working - visual, sound and movement orientated - and a concept of theatre as the reality, and the world as a dim representation thereof. Despite, or perhaps because of its orientalist aspects, his essay remains a significant statement of how the Westerner is apt to conceptualize theatre of this area. Fusion of the arts and a sense of awe will be recognized, but a minimization of text is likely to prevail. Artaud, Spies, and Indonesian/American Exchange 15 Walter Spies and the Beginning of Kecak The Balinese performance at the Colonial Exhibit was a media event that roused the curiosity of many upper-class Europeans, and the tour industry immediately capitalized on the interest. The obscurity of the island in 1930 contrasted with its notoriety seven years later: "Today almost everybody has heard of Bali. To some it means a smart place to go, one of the many porrs in a round-the-world cruise; to others it brings mental images of brown girls with beautiful breasts, palm trees, rolling waves, and all the romantic notions of a South Seas paradise,''' But indeed it was Europeans who became instrumental in helping create the Balinese image for this new tourist audience through their arricles, books, films and, in some instances, development of new performance genres. Austrian author Vicki Baum, English dancer Beryl De Zoete, Americans like composer Colin McPhee, anthropologists Margaret Mead, Jane Belo, Gregory Bateson, and actress Katharane Mershon - all lived on the island for lengthy periods and through their careful research and unbounded enthusiasm contributed actively to the idea of Bali as a lost paradise of the arts. Of them, it was Russian-born German Walter Spies who was arguably the most significant. He had come to the island earliest, lived there permanently for over twenty years, and became both a host and guide/advisor to many of the others. Even as Artaud sat down to write, Walter Spies was in Bali contemplating a performance geme that the majority of the tourists would come to think of as a prototypically Balinese performance, but which in actuality was a "fusion" piece, Kecak. This performance was a spin-off of a collaboration he underrook in 1932 when he acted as a consultant for a German film "The Island of Demons" ("Die Insel der Damonen") directed by Victor von Plessen. The plot drew on exotic aspects of Balinese village life: a witch has brought an epidemic on the village; a young peasant seeks advice from an ascetic, and the young men of the village hold a Sanghyang Dedari, an exorcistic trance dance, ending the problems. Rather than using the actual Sanghyang Dedari, a curative theatre form in which two small girls to the vocal chant of a male chorus would go into trance and speak for the gods, an adumbrated performance was constructed which borrowed musical features from this older tradition but wove a narrative which would be striking to the Western audience. In this earliest example of Kecak the hypnotic vocal chanting by a male chorus was expanded from the normal forry to a hundred voices. Men from Bedulu village sang and accompanied a dance drama that told episodes from the Ramayana epic. In 1938 Spies and Beryl De Zoete describe this form as "the famous Ketjak known to all tourists," They relate the evolution of this "Monkey Dance" to Sanghyang Dedari, but note "It is true that the creative efforr which produced the astonishing ensemble that we 16 KATHY FOLEY have attempted to describe was partly inspired by certain Europeans."'o Perhaps one of the longest running musical dramas of this century, it has been made by the Balinese in recent years an indigenous art genre, as choreographers like I Wayan Dibia created pieces for his Balinese students at the ASTI (Akademi Seni Tari Indonesia - the Balinese Academy of Dance). NonBalinese like Sardono, a major Javanese choreographer, and Terry have used it as a base for their fusion work. Spies was a Russian-born Gennan painter-musician who in the wake of World War I was inspired by Rousseau's paintings to seek his own Tahiti. After a sojourn in Germany, where he came into contact with the avant-garde artists and young film industry, he took a freighter to points east, jumped ship at Java and became a concertmaster in the Yogyakarta Sultan's palace. In 1925 he visited Bali where he soon moved. In a letter of 16 April 1925 he spoke of a performance of Sanghyang Dedari which he saw in the private temple of Tjokorda Raka of Sukawati. He describes the event as "the most unbelievable, perhaps the most important and most essential of all that I have up to now seen on Bali." What impressed him most was this male chorus: Loud, single voiced, the core melody, [came to] a gigantic crescendo, then all of the sudden broke off. A breathtaking still again came on. Again very softly began the song, in the midst of it an unexpected, unprepared, a frenzied cry (all in chorus); ... The last phrase was repeated, again and again, slow and insistently; Like a sick gramophone when the needle is stuck on the same place on the record and returns to it always. It went faster and faster, louder and louder, until suddenly after an unending crescendo and accelerando in prestissimo everything broke off with a high cry and the whole chorus - thirty or forty men - fell again fortissimo into a rattling, rhythmic tsike~take, tsike~take. II This distinctive chant style already had a secular version in Janger (Djanger), a popular theatre which had begun earlier in the century. In Janger the chorus was intermixed with Arja (Balinese opera), as well as Malay opera and Stambul, popular theatre genres from mainland Southeast Asia. Janger however had characteristics that alienated a viewer of Spies's refined taste. Costumes mixed Balinese and European dress,movement borrowed indiscriminately from various genres, as in one example where a Javanese in Western dress en route to Europe is shipwrecked in New Guinea and meets the native chief who wears an American Indian headdress, soccer socks, and an Inverness cape. "This curious spectacle, fascinating in its absurdity, raises rather acutely the question ofstyle. The Balinese, deprived orhis tradition, seems to have no style at all. He is not left with Nature, but simply with an inexplicable gaucherie."" If Janger aroused Spies's scorn, it nonetheless showed that the chant he had so admired might be borrowed from its sacral context. The film was an opportunity for him to suggest ideas. If Dance and Drama can be believed, Artaud, Spies, and Indonesian/American Exchange 17 he did not dictate the particulars of the performance, but acted more like an artistic director, commissioning the performers of Bedulu to create within the guidelines he established. He wanted the chant's vocal style and felt a narrative with dancers would add to the viewing pleasure. The Ramayana was probably chosen since the monkey-like, chattering sound of the interlocking chant would have a narrative link if the story was from this epic where monkeys help Prince Rama fight the kidnapper, Rawana. The relatively simple plot in which good and evil are clearly differentiated would be easy for Western film-viewers (and eventually tourists) to grasp. All these factors fit the movie which Spies hoped would be "Something unbelievable, astounding , since it is a sound film, the gamelan, a few necessary words and lots of natural sounds will be heard." Spies longed to show the otherworldly: "Trance, dream, spirit exorcism, possession."l3 It is interesting that the images that Spies, who knew the range of Balinese performance and many aspects of its inner meaning, offers in Kecak images which would fit the tastes of an Artaud. The genre gives a sense that the arts of music, dance, theatre are fused. The trance association of the music and placement of Kecak in the original filmscript as an exorcistic ritual contribute to the impression that this is a genre where the sacred is nigh, even if Kecak and the movie itself may have been ultimately more about tourism than trance. From the beginning Spies had minimized the importance of words in Sangj hyang Dedari: "The words are less words than power-giving sounds."" For a foreigner music, movement and sound become all. But even in Kecak today, as a genre is created by Balinese, a Dalang/narrator has a central role. He gives the cues for the transitions and weaves the story's narrative through the musical sounds created by the singers. Using the Kawi language and vocal style of the Wayang Parwa, a Dalang leads the story and directs the dancer's actions. The Dalang's words are given in Bali (as elsewhere in Indonesia) a privileged place, even in a form like Kecak. It is only when we come from the outside as dancers, actors, or musicians that we will fail to see,the centrality to the indigenous performers of the improvised narrative and its words. What is evident in the works of Artaud and Spies is that the power i~ selecting and crafting the image, while participated in by the Balinese, was in the first instance interpreted by and in the second crafted by the European artist to give it a certain meaning. The Balinese artists in both cases were working actively to allract a Western audience and when this occurs the performance, limited as it must be by lack of linguistic and cultural understanding will be shaped in ways that favor the musical and visual. Festival of Indonesia While the hundreds of performances included in the Festival are too complex to deal with here, I would like to offer some assessment based on the discus- 18 KATHY FOLEY sion of Artaud and Spies. In this Festival, initiated by the Indonesian government in hopes that the U.S. will better respect the rich cultures it contains, the Indonesians are in firm control. However, the constraints of being appealing and entertaining to a Western audience do frame their choices and there is no doubt that some ways of packaging Indonesian performances remain. The Bedhaya, the court dance with all its sacral associations, fits most precisely the preconceptions that Indonesians expect Americans to have. It fuses music and movement, some sense of an abstract narrative (Aljuna's Meditation was the theme). The sense of the sacred was potent, and although words may have been sung, they would have been perceived purely as sound by an American public. Extensive program notes and interviews were provided, but much of the success of the Bedhaya tour can be linked to the fact that it is the kind of performance which always has received good reception abroad. Terry and Dibia's Body Tjak likewise found success through a fusion of the arts. Dibia, a creative choreographer who has innovated in the fonn for Balinese audiences, was a nice complement to Terry, who has studied gamelan and Kecak, and various other dance/music traditions. The performance was celebratory in its thrust and served up the playful enjoyment that one has after seeing a good Balinese or Javanese clown. Though words entered, this modem perfonnance was successful because it exploited the rich soundmovement combinations derived from Indonesian models that historically have appealed to a Western audience, combining them with elements from tap and Afro-American body percussion. For the modem drama pieces, language is the crux of the piece. The theatres of Arifin and Putu, like those of the other major dramatists which include W. S. Rendra and Nano Riantiamo, are heavily language based. Although movement and music are integrated, the real significance of most modem work is the message that it has to share. For Indonesian modem drama this is customarily a message about the economic, social, and political status of the country. A sense of a relation of the individual to the cosmos is usually a by-product of these scripts, but hard-hitting critiques of the governmental policy are the core. The productions that were done for the festival had a higher emphasis on fusion of music and movement in the performance than they might have had they been prepared for a Jakarta audience. Arifin's Ozolle at UCSC was much more "ethnic" in its musical and costume·choices than the original production had been in Jakarta. But significantly, of all the presentations available, the modem Indonesian drama had the greatest difficulty in arranging performance venues. Clearly this was because the form and the message contrasted most visibly with the image that Americans have of Indonesian art. It begins from the verbal, while the American audience traditionally looks to Indonesian . performance for liberation from the word. Artaud, Spies, and Indonesian!American Exchange [9 NOTES I Performances by Westerners of tradilionalthearre as well as fusion pieces such as those of Julie Taymer (Way ofSnow, Tirm) and John Emigh (Urrle Red Riding Shawl) are incre:'lsingly frequent in Indonesia (see Stephen Snow, "Intercultural Performances: The BalinescM American Model," Asian Theatre Jouma/3, 2 [Fall, 1986J. 204-232). Director Ron Jenkins, mime Leonard Pitt, and performance artist Sha Sha Higby have been affected by Indonesian work. Tours by American groups are frequent, Sekar Jaya, a San Francisco based Balinese gamclan that Terry has been associated with is preparing for its second Balinese tour in 1992. The University of Hawaii gamelan has taken performances to Indonesia on occasion , and the UCSC gamelan did a 1988 tour under the auspices of the government of West Java. 2 The program as reported in Leonard Pronko, Theatre East alld West (Berkeley. '967), p. 24, included Gong, Gong dance, Kebyar, langer, Lasem, Legong, Baris, Rakshasa, and Sarong. Gong and Lasem were musical. While it is difficult to establish the nature of the "Gong dance," the other pieces have recognizable names. Kebyar was a fast and dynamic sitting dance by a young male, Djanger is a popular group dance of young males and females which involves group formations and singing between episodes of solo or small group theatre performance, Legong is a court dance done by prepubescent girls, Saris is a warrior dance, Rakshasa is an ogre dance and Sarong is a dance-drama in which a protective animal, analogous to the Chinese/Buddhisl lion, appears in a drama of some sort. While Ihe Balinese performers found Paris cold and alienating the economic success of the venture was apparent in the relative wealth of Ihis gamelan on their re.um to Bali (Colin McPhee, A House ill Bali [New York '9441, p. 16.). 3 Antonin Artaud, trans. M.e. Richards, The Theater and its Double (New York, 1958), p. 53· 4 Julia Costich, Amonin Artaud (Boston, (978), pp. 45, 1J8. 5 Artaud, p. 58. 6 Artaud, p. 67. 7 In "Artaud and the Balinese Theatre," Modem Drama, 28 (1985), 397-412, Patricia Clancy identifies the clown as Artaud's double but finds the use of the term strange. 8 Artaud, pp. 58,59,60,62, 65-{;6. 9 Miguel Covarrubias, Island ofBali (New York, 1937), p. xvii. 10 Walter Spies and Beryl De Zoete, Dance and Drama;n Bali (Kuala Lumpur, '938), pp. 71, 83· [I Hans Rhodius, Walter Spies (The Hague, •