Reviewed by: Den Kisot (Don Quixote) by Goenawan Mohamad Arthur S. Nalan, Irwan Jamaludin, and Kathy Foley DEN KISOT (DON QUIXOTE). By Goenawan Mohamad, directed by Endo Suanda. Indonesian Cultural Arts Insitut Seni Budaya-Bandung Theatre, Bandung, Indonesia, 15 July 2022. Goenawan Mohamad, author and co-founder of Utan Kayu artists’ community and Salihara Theatre in Jakarta, has long been tilting at windmills. In this performance, a 2019 production based on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote narrative was reprised and reworked in 2022 showings. Combining the traditional art of West Java’s wayang golek rod puppetry and the narrative of Don Quixote, this work, directed by ethnomusicologist and cultural entrepreneur Endo Suanda, was a testament to the power of stories to free minds that prelates and politicos confine to strict limits. The Cervantes (hereafter spelled Servantes as in Indonesian) story was new to most Indonesian viewers. But the message of freeing the artist’s voice was not. Mohamed has repeated this theme in his life and scripts. His call for works of the imagination and free speech resonates with current Indonesian needs. As editor of Tempo (Time), the most important news magazine in Indonesia, Goenawan Mohamad has been longtime supporter of modern theatre as a conduit of open public discourse. His reviews of drama in Tempo have responded to and guided the development of modern theatre as a space of free speech in Jakarta since the 1970s. At Tempo, he employed the playwrights (for example Putu Wijaya), ensuring authors’ livelihoods as journal writers, which allowed them to stage their works. In the 1970s and 1980s, most important modern theatre performances played at Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) in Jakarta—a performance complex which was established under the political protection of the then Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin. [End Page 192] TIM served an island of free speech during the dictatorial government of President Suharto until the 1980s. With Sadikin’s removal from governance, Taman Ismail Marzuki faded and censorship accelerated. With Suharto’s closing of Tempo, in 1994, Goenawan founded Teater Utan Kayu (Forest Theatre), an exhibition, meeting, and performance space where the intelligentsia continued the conversation, freely critiquing Indonesian politics and society. Since the fall of Suharto (1998) which allowed the reinstatement of Tempo, Goenawan’s performances have come out of the community of Utan Kayu’s writer-thinkers and, since 2008, been located at Salihara, the art center he created in south Jakarta. Works have often explored the rise of political Islam. He writes on how religious intolerance in Indonesia’s multicultural and diverse society joins force with political power to limit expression. Den Kisot is only Goenawan’s latest foray into the performing arts as a sociopolitical critique and follows the pattern of some of his recent opera/musical librettos such as his version of Calonarang, The King’s Witch,1 or his production of Suluk Malang Sumirang (The Song of the Crazy Saint),2 the story of an antinomian Sufisaint of Java who flouted sharia conventions. The former played in New York and Seattle as well as in Indonesia. The Song of the Crazy Saint he used to open the Frankfurt Book Fair where his efforts for Free Speech were being honored in 2015. In Frankfurt, Goenawan’s speech made his intent clear: Malang Sumirang can be seen as a tale of the cruelty of those in power—both politically and religiously. But. . . power ceases when faced with ambition and energy that gives birth to writing. Thus, writing makes the condemned one into his/her opposite, from the accursed, he/she becomes exalted. Malang Sumirang writes—and so turns the powerful into the helpless. . . . I hope that all here will remember what Malang Sumirang achieved: we write to affirm human equality; we write to enliven the discourse; we write to cultivate freedom. (Mohamad 2015) This production under review here continued the theme of the artist’s need to speak freely. However, it was different from some of his earlier work in that instead of following a fully modernist vein of elite Jakartans (whose work may remind more of Phillip Glass operas as in The King’s Witch), this production used wayang style traditional theatre. The genre chosen...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jul 31, 2023
Fitria Nurul Ramadhani 
Open Access