There are two recognised centres of culture in Central Java, Yogya and Solo. Our original idea had been to go to Yogya, but at the last minute we changed our mind and went for Solo. Musically, this seems to have been the right choice. Fetching up at a small homestay frequented by gamelan musicians, we were immediately hooked into all the best classical music and wayang, none of it intended primarily for tourists.
Yogya is a different matter; here there is a well-rehearsed routine for capturing Western tourists and funnelling them into a series of attractions designed to sell Javanese culture. We started at the kraton, where our young tour guide was quick to identify our interest in wayang puppets; soon we were introduced to his father, who in turn put us in a becak to see a puppet maker. The puppet maker in turn encouraged us to meet him at the nightly two-hour tourist wayang held at the Sonobudoyo Museum.
We decided to give it a go, but what a sad and dispiriting event it was. A wayang is usually seven hours long, from nine pm to four in the morning. More crucially perhaps, as I'm now coming to realise, it is as much a social occasion as a performance. The tourist wayang was completely lacking in spirit not because it had been adapted and drastically shortened, but because this aspect was entirely missing. Also, at the risk of sounding like a semi-knowledgeable wayang snob, so many aspects were wrong.
There were chairs set up on both sides of the screen, the majority of them on the shadow side, where most of the audience were encouraged to sit. Not only that, but the sound system for the pesindhen and dalang was set up facing that side, making it very hard to hear from the musician's side. The audience was entirely made up of tourists, about three-quarters Westerners and the others maybe Japanese or Korean. It can be safely assumed that none of these people spoke Javanese, making any intelligible interaction between dalang and audience beyond simply the music and puppetry impossible.
About half-way through the piece I took up an invitation to go and sit in amongst the players onstage; this is not such an uncommon thing to happen. In broken Indonesian I said hello to the pesindhen and a few of the players, and even clapped along in a few places where I knew it was appropriate. With a mixture of trepidation and excitement, I realised that the goro-goro was coming up. This is the major comic interlude in a wayang; and I fully expected to become the butt of the dalang's humour, as commonly happens to Westerners at this point in the show. Nothing; of course there may have been a few sly jokes going on which I couldn't understand, but as far as I could see he completely ignored me.
As did all almost all the players; in fact, sitting in amongst the band, I realised how incredibly bored and jaded they all looked. These poor guys seemed to be serving out a life sentence of playing seven nights a week for uncomprehending audiences, and the music frankly reflected their boredom; lacklustre and sometimes pretty messy. They just couldn't be bothered, and under the circumstances I can't really blame them.
The night before that we had actually managed to find something off the tourist radar to go to, aimed more at a partly Indonesian and partly expat community of... arty types, I guess. This was Vincent McDermott's opera 'Mata Hari'. 'Can you make sure it's not actually... an opera!?', said Mags, and on enquiring it sounded an intriguingly similar kind of set up to Evan Ziporyn's 'A House In Bali', a band made up of half Western instruments and half gamelan instruments, with operatic vocal stylings combined with Javanese dance.
Not really the same kind of thing, though. One can appreciate how hard it must be to put on an event such as this, and I am prepared to make allowances; both bands were made up of capable but not particularly strong student players, while the production values were a bare notch above those of an amateur musical. I'll even forgive the fact that two of the principle singers apparently hadn't learned their parts yet, and were performing from music stands placed strategically and not so strategically onstage. The best aspect of the piece was probably the dance and choreography, particularly a quartet of male dancers who consistently drew the eye with a clever combination of modernistic and Javanese moves.
Opera sets itself up to incorporate all the arts, but in the end must stand or fall on the music, and McDermott's did not convince. The vocal writing was quite good (note to self; Indonesian is a grateful language for singers) but the instrumental material was tentative and lacking in drive and motion, often failing to support or carry forward the efforts of the singers. The programme made overt reference to the history and traditions of opera, so perhaps any criticisms on that ground are out of court, but... I feel more interesting work could have been made using the available forces by ditching any ideas of operatic-ness, or perhaps by being more playful or ironic with that tradition.
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