Stanford Drama

Artists educated in Western modern thoguth and arts created modern Indonesian theatre to express their new hybrid identities. Intellectuals from throughout the Dutch East Indies created an Indonesian nationalist movement to express a new hybrid identity in resistance to Dutch and later colonial hegemonies. Indoneisan modern theatre and nationalism have developed alongside each other since the 1920s, both attempting to represent a post-colonial social entity (i.e. Indonesia) that could not be expressed by older practices rooted in ethnic identities. At the same time, all attempts to imagine a modern idiom in Indonesian arts and politics have been seen as derivative from the West until they are indigenized through traditional practices that are ethnic in association. Recognizing this conundrum, politicians and artists have BOTH sought to represent Indonesian identity as a hybrid figure mediating between an exogenous modernity and indigenous traditions.

The PROBLEM is that the artists and the politicians increasingly did not share the same goals in representing Indonesian identity. Although the two spheres of activity initially joined together in resistance to Dutch colonialism, AFTER the revolutaionary war (1945-9) they pursued conflicting programs of postcolonial development. The Indonesian state ultimately sought to represent a people unified under the figure of the president. Indonesian theatre, in contrast, sought to represent a nation that could be discovered individually by actors. In other words, as the Indonesian state became more authoritarian, Indonesian theatre became more democratic (at least in theory). The figure of the actor in Indonesia increasingly served as an alternative to the figure of the president.

Thsi dissertation traces the parting of ways between Indonesian modern theatre and the anti-/post-colonial Indonesian stage in their respective representations of Indonesian identity. In Chapter Two, it describes the primary sources in priyayi (Javanese aristocratic) and Western thought from which thespians and politicians have drawn ideas and images of Indonesian identity. In Chapter Three, it compares compatible theatrical and political representations of just leaders derived from priyayi models, but appropriated to anti-colonial resistance in the 1920s and 1930s (i.e. Rustam Effendi's Bujangga and Sukarno's "son of Mother Indonesia"). In Chapter Four, it shows the divergence of theatre and the stage in the 1950s when theatre practicioners turned from anti-colonial epics to a new Indonesian psycho-spiritual realism, while President Sukarno consolidated executive power in his own image. In Chapter Five, it shows the emergence in the late 1960s and 1970s of the oppositional political theatre of W. S. Rendra, who imagined the Indonesian actor as an alternative to President Suharto.

The research CONCLUDES that Indonesian modern theatre has always participated in the national project (and this is why it often seems conservative), but that it has also diverged from the Indonesian post-colonial stage. Specifically, that it reoriented itself towards democratic images of Indoneisan identity rooted in the actor, while the Indonesian stage returned to authoritarian models of Indonesian identity rooted in the president.