“EUROPEAN WAYANG”, ELUCIDATE GENOCIDE WITH JOYNESS

CASSANOVA THEATRE “RAMBUT PALSU” Resume , GK Dewi Asri 23 October 2012

 By Riyadhus Shalihin

“Theatre going more and more sexy, because theatre will take our life with his way” ( Afrizal Malna)

Photography By May Lodra Nurohman

As the first theatre was a ceremony, theatre is more than art technic because they “celebrate the mean of pluralism and differentiation beyond the sacred communitarian”. During this time Theatre make a magnificient territory for a purify statue of human, Aristoteles called it “catharsis”, it was so long time ago when the spiritualism of art hold the rule of ceremony, but still there “catharsis” nowadays, when all the information spreaded faster than your heartbeat and they smashed into little part that hided in your phone,in your television and in the internet, where is spiritualism purify hided .
Ceremony of Theatre divided into 2 type, The first aimed into Aristoteles theory but the second theory said “celebrate the mean of pluralism and differentiation”. For the first we remain’s what is the function of art generally, Theatre especially for this life. Theatre live and exist to reach the opposite line of human hatred, Theatre planned a big meeting in the performing hall to take our cold mind,cold body,cold heart for hang in a warm ambience of humanism. Cold mind who hided in joyable of internet, cold body who hided in joyable of television and cold heart who hided in joyable of consumerism, to hanging out together and pray in the celebration of  body meeting, face meeting, adrenaline meeting, sweat meeting and breath meeting, to find the onthological core of humanism. So far it’s the archaic mean of thatre that exist until now although television and internet has token our body , Theatre will exist to gathering the originality of humanism.
New rite of multimedia age
Theatre is a totally performing art, that was the shape of aesthetics communication that I caught in RAMBUT PALSU performance By Peter Karvas, directed by Wangi Hoediyatno From Cassanova Theatre and Racksiwa Priwansa as art director. The Core of Performing art especially theatre it was the party space between actor and appreciators, but there was a side ornamentic of theatre that was never explore by theatre artist, it the capability of theatre who can maximize all the tools of art to became the unity of performation. Dewi Asri as central hall of performance have 3 space, it was parking space,basement space and centre space of drama, Wanggi Hoediyatno and Cassanova Theatre make a strange strategy to fill the theatre atmosphere from beginning until ending of the show, The suspence of beginning signed with a rude of Nazi’s bandit who ride some old germany motorcycle in front off Dewi Asri hall, they rode their motorcycle like a scum to give a “bastard shocking shape” from the first of performance, After all noisy rided they stop and the head of “boldy assassination” come to the podium of parking stage to claime some announcement, HAIRY and BOLD it was a keyword for the rule of this performance, HAIRY it a symbolism sign for GERMANY SOLDIER and BOLD it’s a symbolism sign for JEWS SOCIETY. Basement of GK Dewi Asri created to be a field of act foreshadowing, it was an experimental grave to explain the victim of Holocaust genocide, some performer laying between sharped wood and blooed light around them, there was a woman,children and man drowned with a void face and blinded vein wait until the ultimate of darkness claimed their soul to the real dead, real cremation.

Photography By May Lodra Nurohman

As the meting hall between artist and appreciator, RAMBUT PALSU was succesfull. It’s sign with a cram of people who waited for the performance continue their story, respectly I was confused be cause after “telecommunication ages” venoming most of human to forget their society and their humanity , in this performance all the people gathering together to reach the theatre rite, the theatre who lost their magnetism art power have repaired, and when I ask to the director of RAMBUT PALSU, Mr Wanggi said  he use the “multimedia as a friend not as enemy”, generally 21^st Century Society use internet and another technology application as informally habit, just like a breath. In case of depopularated theatre, be cause theatre wasn’t adapted the newest of global information, it’s truth that theatre it’s an euphemeral art who have limited act, also temporary quality of space but if Theatre recognize the main idea of global issues, jus’t wait until society leave theatre, “in fact not society leave the theatre, but theatre who won’t approached society”, global society and global issues. Wanggi and his art management shared the information of his performance to all the court of city, whoever and whenever. Back to the first aim of theatre argue that Theatre must be a new rite to “Celebrated the mean of Pluralism and differentiation”, Gather Doctor,Senator,Politician,Activist,Nurse to the holy hall, a purify space.
Mime as ingredients, act as meat
Rackasiwa Priwansa as art director give an ambience of perform space with some useless material like rotten iron,wood,paper or another material that match with anoter garbage list, but art have they unique destiny. Rackasiwa transform all that broken material that he found and collect, so he make a collage stagr craft using a combinations material between broken iron and another broken steel that he found around him. Art revive it into a new verb, combinations of ex-material he change it to be a half sites of performativity, and the rest of his work he finished it with a silentness of light and little orchestra temper that he putted in the high of appreciator chair’s. Racka make separated stage to argue a field of acting, like a cross sign and the appreciator can hear a voidness of hairy soldier prisoner, Wanggi and Racka positioned all that prisoner behind the central stage, and all the grudged,scream,cry and hopeless voice of the prisoner will be closer, close than your artery.

Photography By May Lodra Nurohman

Silentness of the stage craft meet a comical strategy directing, Wanggi Hoediyatno as Mime artist as specified have a high virtuosity of homour. It appear in option of characterization who mixed a territory of pantomime slapstick with dynamic accordination of acting capability. In fact this performance have another value, that was a forgetness value who left by another theatre artist, it’s the assimilated tactics with the core of our local performing art, who called Wayang, as the art wayang absolutely have their own aesthetic requirements to appear a beauty value, but Wayang’s artist aware that art it’s not fighted with only aesthetics value, art need a magnetism tool’s to take public concerned to the show, that is a strange act and also comedy act to make a magneted show. Strange act in art as ussualy we know in eccentric style of staging or absurdism of rhyme, in tradition art a strange strategy ussualy use  a meta-physics helpness, that activated with some paranormal stimulant, in wayang this strategy used too, but there was an important requirements to make wayang performance be come great show, it was comedy trick. In wayang there was a lot of comedy actor like Semar,Gareng,Petruk  they are I called “a smooth maker of performance” without them a performance will be bored, but who said wayang just a play of comical laughing all night long, wayang have they own philosophy, and there was a mean maker of performance like Arjuna,Bhisma and another pandawa, it was a simbiosism between “Smooth Maker and Mean Maker”, Between Comical Rhyme and Philosophy Meant, without one of each Other Wayang change to be cheapness comical show or to be bored performance all night long, between one and another value light the magnetism of each other.
In RAMBUT PALSU performance a strategy of wayang fill into the dynamic of rhyme, it was a  silk strategy to combine a harshness of Holocaust Tragedy with a slippy comedy. General Hog Trilmik Dor Homent played by Ad Akbar appear an idiotic slavery desire of germany statue, with the act of slowless gesture and baldy speech, Ad treated his act as a “body narration”, be cause he use all the media of this imagination to be come a horrory general. As ajudan Wail Irsyad give a huge of his caricatural performativity into a reacted and acted balance, as a foreman of Hog’s power Wail who played as Ajudan create his body and face into sadistic mimical, between governor and his workers appear a “violence loyality”, a loyality that grown up to be “hided traitor” because they created with fearness and cruelty of government, it was a black humourical of militarism government.
Actually Wanggi as Mime artist hire his performance with a naïve stereotype of pantomime, it looked from make up as a based requirements of pantomime aesthetics, all actor’s face shaped with a naughty touch of wanggi mimetic intuition. But Mime just a fake ingredients without talented of actor, all the homourical set will be nothing, but Ad Akbar and Wail Irsyad shake the unity of Aristotelian dramaturgy with a passion of act and ludic motivation, so the humanity meaning of this perfroamance communicated without pressure of philosophy, it be come a childhood performance with risky directing. Added by Slaras Mini Orchestra we felt that the genocide of jews big massacre tragedy can be helded into a tricky staging, that shared all the breath and sweat of humanism.After all the theatre as Afrizal Malna said “will take our life with his way”, Hopefully.

website : http://mediateater.com/?p=117
 

Review Tentang #PertunjukanTeater RAMBUT PALSU, Oleh : Josh Stenberg,

Oleh :  Josh Stenberg, Culture Writer [Dharmasiswa STSI Bandung] dari China Kelahiran Canada

First arriving in Bandung in September of this year, I found the senior students of the theatre department in the process of rehearsing various plays for their final exams. Some script choices did not surprise me particularly, being taken from the Indonesian modern repertoire of classics, such as Riantiarno’s Rainbow. Other scripts were by acknowledged masters of European theatre, in this case Genet and Ibsen. I am a PhD student in a theatre department in China, and this dual concern with honouring the international (Eurocentric) canon and valorising the independent national tradition is familiar. There was, however, one choice that came as a particular surprise—Peter Karvaš 1964 play The Big Wig (Veľká parochňa), translated here as Rambut Palsu.

            Several factors contributed made this script seemingly unlikely. First, Karvaš, while frequently produced in middle Europe—that is to say, in the German- and Western Slavic worlds—his impact on the Anglophone or Francophone theatre world has been modest. Secondly, it would seem that Karvaš’s work, written during a time of Communist control of literary production in Czechoslovakia, and thematically deeply concerned with the trauma of the Second World War—would be of little interest to young Indonesians, born not only forty years after the end of the war, but many of them after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Intrigued, I began to follow rehearsals, continuing my attendance to the end.

            Under the direction of Wanggi Hoediyatno, the cast and musicians developed a fast-paced, tragicomic rendering of the script, accented, though never interfered with, by a small cabaret-style ensemble.  The madcap, slapstick elements brought to mind the antics of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator and the clownish make-up invoked both pantomime and (for a viewer like me) the strange history of minstrel shows. Another resonance was the uncomfortable humour of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful or even of older American comic shows like the POW-camp-set Hogan’s Heroes.

Watching such cultural products, the question has always been, where, and how far, is humour allowed? If Theodor Adorno claimed that poetry was dead after Auschwitz, how is it that we have not only poetry of the Holocaust, but comedies thereof? Why is Edgar Hilsenrath’s Holocaust satire The Nazi and the Barber more effective than most straight-faced, moralistic accounts? In general, we don’t seem to have a great handle on the functions of humour—are we covering embarrassment, approaching otherwise taboo themes, reacting to incongruity?

STSI’s Rambut Palsu is an incongruous world for me. The Hairy ones—here by their costumes and insignia unequivocally identified as Nazis, historically so devoted to racial prejudice—are white-face Southeast Asians. The language—already in Karvaš divorced from its historical German—is naturally taken into a third language. The set is claustrophobic and always in danger of crushing the actors, seems places the general himself in a prison (appropriate, since he is oppressed by the need for new victims). And there is that uncomfortable sympathy one feels for the General—who is never off-stage, and crushed by a succession of failed interactions. The play is not set up to allow easy distributions of guilt—terrible things must occur because of an incomprehensible system which incorporates the general, the adjutant and Norbert as much as the victims, and the cause of which is observing at a safe distance (the audience?). Karvaš’s plot might be using absurdity to illustrate the Third Reich’s real bizarreness (perhaps the inverse of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil), or even allude to the witch-hunts of Stalinist Czechoslovakia—which also needed an unending supply of enemies. The Slovak press found the original “a tragicomedy rather than a comedy because there were too many topical references in the conflict between the bald ones and the hairy ones and the spectator sensed many associations with the present. (The New Czech Dramatic Avant-Garde, 7.) … But what does it mean when performed in Indonesia? Surely, we aren’t talking about Slovakia anymore? Do we direct ourselves towards Kafka, and see it as a comment on nightmarishness of all institutions? Is it (still) about the absurdity of prejudice?    

            Perhaps it is a little cheap to fall back on universal themes. As a foreigner and a newcomer to Indonesia, I am not able to do more than guess how these resonances work for an Indonesian audience. For me, I watch this production—and think, which imprisonment is this? Europe is not the only region to have produced traumatic histories, and Europe’s not the only literature to try and come to terms with it—sometimes, like the Enlightenment Europeans writing dramas set in India and China—one can borrow very far afield to talk about home. Perhaps that which never resonated in the Anglophone and Francophone West—never having experienced bureaucratic dictatorships—fits well into Indonesian narratives of historical trauma? 

            A theatre performance is embedded in the society of its practitioners and its audience. My references for understanding such a show, implicit and explicit, are Western. Yet the meaning of scripts alters according to its environment and no amount of exchange will produce the same expectations in diverse audiences. And so watching this play—entertaining, tightly plotted, brilliantly acted by inexhaustible talents— my experience is indirect but very rich, as I sit wondering, exploring, guessing what new meanings this story is accruing in its transplanted context, in the expert hands of young people three generations and fifty countries away.

As often with theatre, one finds oneself baffled and deeply impressed, and knows that the show is making sense, but not knowing why, or in which part of oneself…and remembering that the sense it will make will be different for everyone else—a reminder, for me, that the observer is always missing things, but only rarely lucky enough to be conscious of it.  

PERTUNJUKAN TEATER : RAMBUT PALSU [KAMP KONSENTRASI] Karya : Peter Karvas]

 

Selasa, 23 Oktober 2012
Pukul : 20.00 WIB
Tempat : Gedung Kesenian Dewi Asri STSI Bandung, Jalan Buah Batu No.212. Bandung, Indonesia -

Sinopsis RAMBUT PALSU :

 

Rambut Palsu [Kamp Konsentrasi] menceritakan tentang kekuasaan yang anti orang – orang berkepala botak. Sebuah kediktatoran rezim seorang Jendral yang bernama  Jendral Hog Trilmik Dor Homent bersama dua orang bawahannya yaitu ; Ajudan dan Norbert  (pimpinan orang-orang berrambut).

Norbert datang memberikan laporan pada Jendral bahwa ia telah selesai memusnahkan orang-orang berkepala botak. Ia mendapat penghargaan dari Jendral berupa kertas piagam karena tugasnya tetapi ia tidak terima, namun jendral tetap memberi kertas piagam. Setelah kepergian Norbert, Ajudan menghina Norbert dengan sebutan yang tidak layak menurut Jendral. Ajudan mengusik pikiran Jendral dengan akal liciknya,dan penyakit jantung jendral kambuh.

Ajudan memberitahu  jendral  bahwa  ada  seorang  juru  rias  teater  raja  yang  ingin bertemu. Juru rias ahli menumbuhkan juga membikin rambut rontok. Pada saat yang sama ajudan melaporkan bawah ada kekasih jendral bernama lina menunggu di luar namun jendral tidak ingin menemuinya.

Tiba-tiba Lina masuk ruang kerja dengan keheranan, jendral tidak ingin berbicara. Lina membuka topi dan Jendral kaget ketika melihat rambut Lina botak. Jendral terpaku, namun setelah Lina membuka penutup rambut palsunya ternyata Lina hanya menguji kesetiaan cinta Jendral padanya. Perdebatan  Lina dan Jendral pun terjadi, Lina mempertanyakan tentang rasa cinta Jendral padanya, Ia merayu jendral agar menarik kembali pernyataan dan perintahnya kepada Norbert dan komplotannya, jendral tetap pada pendirian. Lina pun pergi meninggalkan Jendral.

Saat Jendral gelisah menyendiri dan meratapi keadaan negaranya dan masih penasaran dengan sosok yang di bicarakan Ajudan yaitu seorang  juru rias teater raja (Hanjo), Jendral memanggil Ajudan masuk ke ruang kerja, bahwa  jendral  ingin bertemu dengan Hanjo. Ajudan pergi dan membawa Hanjo ke ruang kerja. Jendral dan hanjo berdua di ruang kerja. Hanjo menyarankan agar Jendral menghentikan pemusnahan dan pembunuhan orang botak,  tapi Jendral  tetap bersikukuh. Jendral menanyakan tentang keahlian Hanjo membuat tumbuh rambut dan membikin rontok dengan lotion.

Jendral terus menanyakan lotion yang bisa membikin rambut rontok kepada Hanjo. Jendral marah lalu kemudian ia membicarakan tentang lotion bernama Vlasolin. Lalu hanjo berbicara mengenai Vlasolin  bahwa  lotion  itu  adalah  penemuan  dan  ciptaannya, lotion yang mula-mula menumbuhkan rambut lalu kemudian rontok. Jendral kaget bukan kepalang karena dia dan yang lainnya juga memakai Vlasolin yang di buat oleh Hanjo. 

Jendral tiba-tiba merasa pusing dan kebingungan oleh situasi keadaan diri dan negaranya yang mengalami suatu bencana yang tidak terduga sebelumnya, ia di racuni oleh pikirannya sendiri. Ia harus menerima kenyataan pahit yang  sedang di alaminya, Hanjo keluar dengan penuh kepuasan bersama ajudan. Jendral merasa kehilangan si tai Norbert, Ajudan kucing buduk dan Lina kekasihnya yang banci tak berhati juga Hanjo si juru rias teater, ia terus mengingat mereka semua. Menyalahkan Tuhan serta sekitarnya dan tidak bisa berbuat apa-apa lagi. Dan semua yang hidup akan menjadi tiada.