Intercultural Expectations I La Galigo in Singapore Jennifer Lindsay

Labels I La Galigo—a theatrical performance directed by Robert Wilson inspired by an epic story from Sulawesi in Indonesia, which premiered in 2003 in Singapore and then toured Europe, the U.S., and Australia. I La Galigo—a performance of the Bugis epic La Galigo, with music composed and arranged by Rahayu Supanggah; choreography by Andi Ummu Tunru; chanting by Bissu priest Puang Matoa Saidi; performers from Sulawesi, Java, Sumatra, and Bali; and a famous director from America, presented in Jakarta in December 2005 after first touring overseas. I La Galigo—the epic integral to the rituals of the threatened transgendered priests of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, which tells in an ancient language the origins of the Bugis people, now brought to world attention through this staging by director Robert Wilson, with artistic coordination by Restu Kusumaningrum, and text adaptation and dramaturgy by Rhoda Grauer. I La Galigo—a three-hour staging of the Bugis epic La Galigo, directed by Robert Wilson, featuring: lighting design by Robert Wilson, which was the dominant element of the production; traditional music from South Sulawesi and new composition by Supanggah; performers from various parts of Indonesia whose choreographed movement was at times dancelike; a minimal verbal component uttered by the musicians; chanting by a Bissu priest; and sporadic snippets of La Galigo text translated into English and presented as surtitles. I La Galigo—a contemporary staged rendering of a translated narrative summary of the huge corpus of epic episodes collectively called La Galigo, which tell the origins of the Bugis people. I La Galigo—a story of origins previously only sung in poetry by select people from one place, told and retold to other people from that place, now rendered visually by people from other places in a performance devised and directed by people who come from other other places, and performed for many people from many other other other places.

Jennifer Lindsay has spent 20 years in Indonesia, as a student, researcher, diplomat, and foundation program officer. From 2003 to 2006 she was Senior Visiting Fellow with the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, teaching in the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, and was previously on the faculty of the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a translator (from Indonesian into English), and Contributing Editor of Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia (Singapore University Press, 2006). She is currently Visiting Fellow at the Southeast Asia Centre at the Faculty of Asian Studies, the Australian National University.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 However I describe the performance of I La Galigo that I saw in Singapore in 2003, I must choose which elements to include, presuming readers will know some things and not others. I decide that certain words require explanation, and others not. “Bugis,” for instance, or “Robert Wilson.” It depends on where I imagine my readers are from and whether they have seen the performance. We bring our own labeling of “familiar” and “strange” to the performance or this essay, but we also make assumptions of familiarity and strangeness because of the assignment of known labels. Like the label “intercultural,” for instance.

The Culture of Interculturalism The words “intercultural” and “interculturalism” have been linked with performance for at least four decades now, and have long since entered common parlance among practitioners, critics, and audiences alike. Introduced by Richard Schechner to contrast with “international,” “intercultural” initially referred to work by and meetings of artists coming from different “cultures” (1983).1 In subsequent nuancing of the concept, interculturalism came to refer to a creative way of working with (or working out) difference. Over the 1980s and early 1990s, there was much debate about the ethics of this, when difference could be interpreted in terms of the appropriation of “third world” cultures by the “first world.” More recently, Schechner has conceptualized interculturalism in relation to globalization (2006:263–325). Implicit within “interculturalism” is the tension between identifying difference on the one hand and seeking commonality on the other. Difference must be acknowledged in order to name the Other as a “culture,” but some transcendence of that difference must be found to allow for “inter”-action. This identifying of difference while seeking commonality has led to a tendency for broad-stroke depictions of culture, such as East and West, North and South, traditional and contemporary. It has also encouraged attention, on the one hand, to a group process in terms of “us” meets “them,” and, on the other, to the visions of individuals, especially theatre directors, in creating a product out of that meeting. “Intercultural performance” is usually portrayed as something that happens among artists, and as something onstage that is shaped by directors and actors. I am interested in thinking about how the attention given to interculturalism shapes audience expectations of performance, both in terms of what they see and hear, and what they do not. What happens when we stop thinking of interculturalism as merely a practice of directors and performers, and turn our attention to the audience? How do audiences bring prior texts of theory, reviews, discussions, and notions of “interculturalism” to their moment of reading a performance? What references, cross-readings, and allusions do they make? To use Julia Kristeva’s term ([1974] 1984), what are the “intertexts” that constitute the audience’s intercultural expectations? What are the “cultures” of an inter-“cultural” performance, and what process of “inter”-action are audiences tuned to observe? And what, I ask, might they then miss? What is the culture of “intercultural performance”? I was stimulated to think further about these issues when I had the opportunity to see I La Galigo, a performance that specifically fits the intercultural bill on the production side. I saw one rehearsal and the final dress rehearsal, plus the opening performance, in Singapore.

1. In an interview with Patrice Pavis, Richard Schechner recalled: Intercultural Expectations Intercultural I believe I began using [the term “interculturalism”] in the early or mid-1970s, when I was editing a special issue of The Drama Review on the social sciences. I used it simply as a contrast to “interna- tionalism.” In other words, there were lots of national exchanges, but I felt that the real exchange of importance to artists was not that among nations, which really suggests official exchange and artificial kinds of boundaries, but the exchange among cultures, something which could be done by individuals, or by non-official groupings, and it doesn’t obey national boundaries. (in Pavis 1996:42) See also Schechner: “Here we are: North & South, East & West. This is more of an intercultural meeting than an international one” (in Schechner [1983] 1984:252).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 I also organized a one-day public forum about the La Galigo epic (which is also known as I La Galigo or Sureq Galigo; henceforth I will refer to La Galigo for the epic, and I La Galigo for the performance) at the Esplanade, held the day after the premiere. The forum was cohosted by the Esplanade and the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, and involved both production participants and La Galigo scholars. The performance went on to tour Ravenna, Barcelona, Madrid, Amsterdam, Lyons, and New York before being shown in Jakarta in December 2005. Some of the preperformance writing and reviews from stagings elsewhere reveal similarities to the Singapore case, but this essay focuses particularly on the Singapore performance and media coverage in Singapore and Indonesia.

Figure 1. Preparing for epic endurance. Front page of the Straits Times Life! section on 11 March 2004, the day before the I La Galigo premiere. The heading also draws attention both to Singapore’s Bugis links and the Bugis origin of the performance. (Image courtesy of SPH—the Straits Times)

I La Galigo is Coming to Town The world premiere of I La Galigo was held on 12 March 2004 at the Esplanade, Singapore’s large waterfront performance venue (dubbed “the durian” for its unusual architecture), which officially opened in 2002. Press coverage of I La Galigo began in Singapore in early March 2004, a few days before the opening. Singapore’s daily newspaper, the Straits Times, published a feature article by Tan Shzr Ee on 11 March 2004, which quoted interviews with Puang Matoa Saidi, Supanggah, Rhoda Grauer, and Restu Kusumaningrum, and provided background information on the production and director Robert Wilson. A huge two-page advertisement for the performance appeared in the Straits Times on 12 March (Esplanade 2004c). The Arts Channel, nominated as the official I La Galigo channel, continually broad- cast a short clip, produced by the Esplanade, advertising the show. This clip was also shown on Singapore’s English-language channels, as well as cable TV (Discovery Channel, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, and AXN). The Esplanade also printed a press kit and booklet using material provided by the I La Galigo production team (Esplanade 2004a, 2004b). Jennifer Lindsay

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 As part of the preperformance buildup in Singapore, the Esplanade also mounted associated exhibitions and activities, collectively titled “Indonesian Odyssey.” This included: an exhibition of photographs by Indonesian photographer Andi Alimuddin Sultan of Toraja (an area, language, and a people in Central Sulawesi) titled Land of I La Galigo, which was mounted in the underground walkway to the Esplanade (the main thoroughfare from the MRT underground and Raffles City shopping mall); exhibitions by Indonesian artists EddiE HaRA and Samuel Indratma, which were installed in the main foyer of the Esplanade; performances of Javanese gamelan music played by the Singapore group Asmaradana in the Esplanade concourse; and performances on the waterfront by a visiting Malay wayang kulit group from Kedah, Malaysia. In Indonesia, the preperformance buildup had begun much earlier, with a concerted campaign to involve journalists from both the English- and Indonesian-language press in the whole I La Galigo production process. The weekly Indonesian-language magazine Tempo began featuring articles by arts correspondent Seno Joko Suyono in January 2003, well over a year before the performance opening, with a follow-up in September 2003. Carla Bianpoen’s articles started to appear in the English-language daily Jakarta Post in February and early March 2004. The English-language magazine Latitudes, published in Bali, devoted a whole issue to the production (vol. 37, February 2004). Arts journalist Efix Mulyadi started filing coverage from Singapore for the major Indonesian-language daily Kompas in March 2004, prior to the opening. Certain common themes emerge in the preperformance write-ups in Indonesia and Singapore, presumably from common publicity material provided to the journalists by the I La Galigo producers, but also presumably transferred intertextually from one write-up to another. Some of this was presented as basic information, such as: The La Galigo is an epic, a myth of origins of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. It is an ancient epic, probably from the 14th century. It exists in written form in manuscripts written in Bugis script, each of which presents fragments of the story. If all the fragments were put together, the epic would be huge, but only around one third of the “whole” has ever been assembled. The La Galigo is written in archaic language and is chanted at certain ceremonies by the Bissu transgendered priests. Very few people can read the manuscripts or understand the language. The production came about through the interest of an American filmmaker, Rhoda Grauer, who was making a documentary about the Bissu.2 She involved various Indonesians in the idea of making a theatrical performance and proposed the project to renowned director Robert Wilson, who reacted enthusiastically. The process of creating the performance involved extensive research, as well as workshops with the all-Indonesian cast. In telling this story, the preperformance publicity stressed various common themes. First, all the write-ups, without exception, pay great attention to the length of the La Galigo epic, which is usually expressed in terms of the number of pages (“over 6000 pages”), as though this in itself signifies “epic” grandeur. Its “size” and “epic” nature are inevitably emphasized through comparison with other epic texts. The La Galigo is “longer than the Mahabharata,” or “longer than the Mahabharata or the Odyssey.” The phrase “longer than the Mahabharata” becomes a mantra, part of the vocabulary of the production itself.3 The theme of antiquity also runs throughout the publicity. The La Galigo dates from “pre-Islamic” times. It is so Intercultural Expectations Intercultural old that only a select few can understand the language. Antiquity is related to the sacred, to the world of the Bissu priests, and to the pre-Islamic world and rituals of the Bugis people. Closely linked to the theme of antiquity and obscurity are the associated themes of loss, of threat, of an epic “almost forgotten.” From threat and near loss follow the themes of

2. The film by Rhoda Grauer is The Last Bissu: Sacred Transvestites of South Sulawesi, Indonesia (2005). 3. This mantra existed prior to the Robert Wilson production; it is part of the language of La Galigo scholarship.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 discovery and salvation: Someone comes upon it and has the idea of bringing the epic and its plight to world attention through a performance directed by someone the world pays attention to. As the performance premiere drew near, another common theme emerged, namely the actual attention the performance was already attracting and would presumably continue to attract. Mention was made of the premiere as an event in itself, and the anticipated VIP attendance. In Singapore, even before the opening, the I La Galigo premiere was dubbed “the biggest theatrical event of the year” (Tan 2004a:L3). There were differences, though, in the preperformance tellings from Singapore and Indonesia. In Singapore, performance advertising, publicity, and preperformance coverage for I La Galigo highlighted Singapore as a transnational/transcultural hub, bringing “Asian” repertoire to an international public, stressing Singapore’s technological advancement, with the Esplanade capable of providing the most modern technological support for the production. The opening sentence of the Esplanade’s press release reads: Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay brings to life Asia’s greatest literary find in recent history—the Sureq Galigo, an epic poem of the Bugis people of South Sulawesi—in a theatre, dance and music production of I La Galigo, designed and directed by acclaimed master of theatre Robert Wilson. And later: The significance of I La Galigo lies not just in the work itself, but in the employment of modern theatre staging techniques that have made such an important text accessible. (2004a:5) The Straits Times preperformance write-up by Tan Shzr Ee was more explicit. The I La Galigo premiere, she pointed out, will “turn the international arts spotlight onto Singapore” (2004a:L3). The emphasis is on Singapore being the first in the world to host this technologi- cally demanding performance and being judged internationally as up to the task. Singaporean publicity also highlighted Robert Wilson’s name and a “contemporary” image. The advertisements were, in visual terms, relatively neutral—that is, downplaying cultural specificity. Staff at the Esplanade told me they wanted to convey an “international” and not an “ethnic” image.

Figure 2. Drawing by Robert Wilson used in Singapore publicity for the I La Galigo premiere, reproduced on the cover of the booklet produced by the Esplanade. (Image courtesy of Change Performing Arts and the Esplanade; original in color) Jennifer Lindsay

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 The performance logo itself, which was designed by Robert Wilson, had nothing in it that is readily identifiable with Sulawesi or Indonesia. The birdman-type figure shown against splashes of orange and red appears nonspecific, reminiscent perhaps of a generalized idea of Native American or other “native” art (and with the red and orange rather resembling a MasterCard® advertisement). In the Singaporean advertisements, the words “Bugis” and “South Sulawesi” appeared with this logo, but with no visual references to place those words. But while the advertising for I La Galigo fostered a “non-ethnic,” “international” image, the production was being framed in other ways. In Singapore, this was particularly complex. As mentioned earlier, the Esplanade organized the Indonesian Odyssey series of events (note the gesture to Homer here), which placed I La Galigo geographically as Indonesian (rather than South Sulawesi or Bugis). Even the photographic exhibition of Sulawesi that was part of this event and was titled Land of I La Galigo featured photographs from Toraja, in Central Sulawesi, which has a language and culture that has no relation to that of the Bugis. The Indonesian Odyssey, while situating I La Galigo as “Indonesian,” localized this Indonesianness through the inclusion of a local Singaporean gamelan group. But at the same time, this Indonesianness was also widened to the Malay world in general through the inclusion of wayang kulit performers from Kedah. This has to be understood within the ethnic politics of Singapore, a nation that legally requires its citizens to state ethnicity in terms of one of the four official ethnicities: Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other (CMIO). Indonesia was thus localized as “Malay” within the CMIO ethnic divisions. Bugis, Sulawesi, and Indonesia were all conflated in the Malay world. And yet, advertising for the show also alluded to the long history of Bugis links with Singapore. There have been Bugis communities in Singapore since its founding. In the mid-1800s, the language most used in Singapore after Malay was the Bugis language, as Roger Tol (2003) has written.4 This history is marked in Singapore with the names of Bugis Street (formerly infamous as a red-light and transvestite district) and the area named Bugis. Preperformance write-ups about I La Galigo also drew on these references, with newspaper headlines such as “Bugis Village” (Straits Times 2004:L1) and “Right up Bugis Street” (Tan 2004a:L3–4) Thus, while on one hand there was the tendency to embrace the whole Malay world (placing Singapore, Indonesia, Sulawesi, and South Sulawesi within it), stress was also given to the specific, long-established direct links between Singapore and the Bugis people. In Indonesia, preperformance publicity for I La Galigo stressed the rehearsal process, which took place in Bali. Mention of Wilson focused more on his working style, rather than citing him as a known “great name” as in Singapore (where he was also familiar to the arts community because of his production Hot Water, which was presented at and coproduced by the Singapore Arts Festival in 2000). Seno Joko Suyono’s three articles in Tempo magazine, for instance, were insightful and perceptive. Suyono explained Wilson’s use of “human material” in performance—in effect preparing an Indonesian audience for a different way of viewing (2003a:158). The Indonesian articles also paid great attention to the story of how the production came about, from Grauer’s interest in the epic, to the involvement of Kusumaningrum, to convincing Wilson to participate, to Grauer’s work with La Galigo manuscript expert Mohammad Salim, to the selection of the cast. The writers are extremely

careful to stress cultural sensitivity in the project; for instance, the point is made that Wilson Expectations Intercultural was responsive to the wishes of the Bissu priests (Suyono 2003a:160) and that he agreed to an

4. Indeed, it was because of these Bugis-Singapore links, as Roger Tol pointed out in his presentation at the forum, that some Bugis La Galigo manuscripts ended up in the United States. They were purchased in Singapore by Captain Charles Wilkes in 1842. See also Tol’s article “Pengembaraan La Galigo ke Washington DC” (La Galigo’s Wandering to Washington, DC; 2003).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 all-Indonesian cast (Bianpoen 2004a:14). The overall tone of these published articles is non- judgmental, but curious as to how the performance will work out. The advertising and preperformance coverage in Singapore and Indonesia shaped and reflected public expectations of the performance. These expectations were specifically framed in terms of interculturalism long before audiences saw anything on stage. The Singaporean press release was specific, articulating the idea of intercultural exchange. It read: “‘The debut of this significant Asian epic provokes intercultural dialogue,’ said Benson Puah, CEO of Esplanade.” And it went on, “‘Asia and in particular South-East Asia has a long and rich history, with a wealth of folk tales, myths and legends which the world has yet to discover’” (Esplanade 2004a:5). In other words, the Esplanade, along with Singaporean society, was fostering and facilitating this “intercultural dialogue” between Asia/Southeast Asia and the world; Singapore was playing the part of cultural broker within Asia, and for Asia to the rest of the world, through making the unknown known. Intercultural expectations were also built up by evoking other intercultural icons. For instance, when Suyono interviewed Borja Sitja, Director of the Barcelona Universal Forum of Cultures (which hosted I La Galigo in May 2004), Suyono asked Sitja how Wilson compared with Peter Brook, “who is also known for adapting Eastern mythology” (2003b:106).5 And Efix Mulyadi, writing in the Indonesian national newspaper Kompas, points out that Supanggah, the production’s music director and composer, has worked before with “Peter Brook and Ong Keng Sen” (2004a:11). So what kind of “intercultural” experience were audiences and readers expecting? The constant comparison of the La Galigo to the Mahabharata provided intercultural framing on two fronts. First, it is in itself a cross-cultural comparison, from Sulawesi to India (and Southeast Asia), highlighting that “this here” is in some way comparable to something from an entirely different “over there.” But perhaps more significantly, the comparison also evoked the great icon of intercultural performance, Brook’s production of the Mahabharata (1985), the performance that gave rise to so much of the debate about interculturalism, and which provided fodder for academics for years. Long before the Wilson performance hit the stage, the intercultural dialogue was assumed to be in some broad, vague terms of East and West, as seen above in Suyono’s reference to Brook “adapting Eastern mythology” (emphasis mine). And the combination of Western director, Indonesian cast, and an epic “larger than the Mahabharata,” was an inevitable recipe for such classic “intercultural” framing. These contrasted cultures were then reinforced in terms of ancient versus modern; traditional versus contemporary; local bounded identity versus international unbounded rec- ognition; and loss versus salvation. The Singapore press release says the production “looks to merge the traditions of the Bugis people with Wilson’s unique contemporary and visionary theatrical language” (Esplanade 2004a:6). Indonesian journalist Carla Bianpoen mentions that this is “the first time that this poetic heritage of the proud Bugis people of South Sulawesi will be taken out of the country for a contemporary staging” (2004a:14), and elsewhere that the “ancient Bugis odyssey begins its modern journey” (2004b:18). Suyono quotes Sitja on I La Galigo’s director: “Wilson endeavors to view tradition with a new perspective. He makes the classic become extremely modern and actual for the present” (2003b:106).6 Diana Darling quotes Grauer: I couldn’t get I La Galigo out of my mind. I wanted to do something—something big, that could bring attention to this incredible text [...] Wilson is internationally acclaimed for his epic style of avantgarde theatre. His visual genius would be particularly appro- priate for the magical images in La Galigo. (2004:36)

5. Translated from the Indonesian by the author.

Jennifer Lindsay 6. Translated from the Indonesian by the author.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 While the place of Singapore—a first world hub situated in Southeast Asia—somewhat blurred a sharp East versus West opposition, the preperformance intercultural text was one of technological translation between the traditional, mythical, local, and threatened on the one hand; and the modern, contemporary, international stage on the other—via the language of modern staging, with the “inter”-ing facilitated by Singapore as cosmopolitan hub and Robert Wilson the artistic visionary. The grid worked something like this, with the first three items crossing in ways I discussed above: Asia International/the world Indonesia International Bugis The world East West Local International Unknown Known Ritual, myth, ceremony Stage Textual complexity Technological complexity Ancient Contemporary, avantgarde, modern Scholarship Performance Loss Salvation

Performance and Forum Opening night was a Friday, and the performance played only twice in Singapore, on 12 and 13 March. During the day on Saturday, the Esplanade cohosted with the Asia Research Institute a free public forum about the La Galigo and the current production. (I was instrumental in pulling this together and thus party to the preperformance framing of the production as linked to the world of “international scholarship.”) The Esplanade’s 2000-seat theatre was sold out. How might one categorize the audience? First, there was a very small but significant group of specialists and scholars of the La Galigo, some of whom had been invited to speak at the forum and others who had come at their own expense. Many of them were non-Indonesian.7 At the other end of the spectrum, there was a larger group of Robert Wilson fans, thoroughly familiar with his work and keen to see his latest production. There were specialists of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, some of whom had deep knowledge of Sulawesi and Bugis history, and some of whom (and here I list myself) had a specialist’s interest in Indonesian and Southeast Asian performance, though little knowledge of Sulawesi. There was a very large contingent of people from Indonesia, who had flown over to Singapore for the show, and non-Indonesians who were living in or had lived in Indonesia, some resident in Singapore, and others from elsewhere who came to Singapore for the performance. The Indonesian contingent included a group of about 70 people from Sulawesi, including the then–Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare, Jusuf Kalla, who is now Indonesia’s Vice President. It also included many journalists and prominent people in the arts from Jakarta. Singaporeans and residents of Singapore in the audience (apart from the Esplanade’s usual theatre subscribers) included “VIP” groups—invited primarily by the

Esplanade’s sponsor, Volkswagen, but also included a National University of Singapore group Expectations Intercultural hosted by the university president and the Asia Research Institute (which I was part of);

7. The speakers were Professor Anthony Reid, director, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore; Dr. Roger Tol, director, KITLV-Jakarta; Sirtjo Koolhof, head of KITLV Library, the Netherlands; Mohammad Salim, translator of Sureg Galigo; Dr. Ian Caldwell, University of Leeds; Professor Leonard Andaya, University of Hawai’i; Professor Rahayu Supanggah, composer; Restu Kusumaningrum, artistic coordinator of I La Galigo; Rhoda Grauer, dramaturge; Andi Ummu Tunru, member of the board of advisors; Puang Matoa Saidi, member of board of advisors and leader of Bissu community of Segeri.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 theatre and arts practitioners, cultural officials, and cultural and postcolonial theorists perhaps on the lookout for an article possibility. There was the sense of something markedly “intercultural” about the makeup of the crowd mingling and greeting in different clusters in the lobby, a few of whom knew a great deal about La Galigo, some of whom knew very little, but most of whom probably knew nothing at all. The public forum attracted around 200 people. The speakers were experts on Bugis literature and history (Ian Caldwell, Leonard Andaya, Tol, and Salim) and artists and others involved with the production (Grauer, Kusumaningrum, Supanggah, and Andi Ummu). Erythrina Baskorowati gave a short pakarena dance demon- stration, and some musicians from the show did a presentation. The forum was attended by journalists, many of the Indonesian arts crowd who had traveled from Jakarta, and a large proportion of Singaporeans and Singapore residents involved with the arts and academia. On the whole, the reviews and media coverage of the performances in Singapore and Figure 3. Erythrina Baskorowati demonstrates pakarena dance Indonesia and the audience movement at the forum on 13 March 2004. (Courtesy of Asia reactions at the forum referred Research Institute, National University of Singapore) to the preset intercultural text: epic grandeur, insiders and outsiders, local versus global, plus discussion about sensitivity to the “original” and to ritual. Singaporean reviews highlighted the length of the performance—particularly the fact that with no interval, there was no toi- let break (see for example fig. 1; Straits Times, 11 March 2004:L1). A great epic, longer than the Mahabharata, demands suffering, it seems—or perhaps one precisely knows a great epic through the suffering it inflicts. Tan’s review noted that the “6000-page epic” lasted three hours and ten minutes; Singapore and the “global stage” are mentioned (2004b:L4–5). “Last Friday and Saturday night, the 63-year-old American theatre guru (Robert Wilson) played God and put Sulawesi on the Singaporean and global maps via I La Galigo,” Tan wrote. She noted the “fanfare guest list of Singapore politicians, international arts journalists, and 70 proud Buginese, some flying at their own expense.” The only performers named are Supanggah and Puang Matoa Saidi. Other intercultural performance associations are made: to “the Lion-King-esque pantomime of kiddie creatures”; to Japanese noh; and to “kabuki-like frozen stances” (L5). But Tan finds the performance “linear,” “flat,” “two-dimensional,” and the “pace too even.” She surmises that this is because Wilson has been “too deliberately beholden to Sulawesi’s performing traditions,” and his “over-careful respect,” a view also expressed by some Wilson followers.8 Singapore’s own intercultural icon, the internationally known theatre director Ong Keng Sen, “would have done things differently,” Tan says. She sees the “text, movements, and gestures very much left untouched and unchanged.” On the other hand, she praises Supanggah:

8. See also Ken Smith’s review in the Financial Times. “If, one shudders to admit, there was room for more Wilson in the production,” he writes, “I La Galigo as it stood provided an ample showcase for the cast”

Jennifer Lindsay (2004:10).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 So, thank God for the superb score by Rahayu Supanggah and friends, the strongest suit of the production. Honed through work in the field as an ethnomusicologist, and also in collaborations with Peter Brook and Ong Keng Sen, the composer turned his team of singers and instrumentalists into twisting vocal strands and a racket of pre- Islamic rhythms, textures, and effects. (L5) Indonesian reviewers were generally torn between pride in the international fuss over an “Indonesian” epic and disappointment in the production overall. While they were impressed with the positive audience response to the show, they were concerned about the production’s respect for and sensitivity to the “depth” and “ritual” or “sacral” nature of the Bugis original, and wary of cultural appropriation. When the performance disappoints, it is because it “lacks emotion” (Yuliandini 2004:18), is weak in costumes, in “verbal interpretation,” in the “sendratari-(traditional dance-drama) like” presentation, and particularly because of the “non- professionalism” of the actor-dancers (Mulyadi 2004b:19).9 There is also disappointment that the performance does not reflect emotional intensity: “The extreme emotions at play in the epic poem were not fully exploited by director Robert Wilson” (Yuliandini 2004:18). Indonesian theatre director and playwright Ratna Sarumpaet’s scathing review was even stronger. Searching for moments of emotional depth—such as when the hero Sawérigading sees his sister for the first time and falls in love with her—she writes, “there was no tension between wild passion and restraint, between the power of the mind and the power of life, other than an awkward man struck dumb, astounded by female beauty” (2004:19).10 This disappointment and perception of flatness, I believe, is also an outcome of the intercultural pre-text of the performance. The preperformance insistence on I La Galigo’s epic grandeur, through comparison with the Mahabharata, led audiences to expect a Mahabharata- type of epic—namely, a story full of emotion, thick with conflict and tension between public duty and personal passion. But in this case, it was an intercultural association that backfired, for La Galigo is not such an epic. Lengthy it certainly is, if one imagines it beyond its epi- sodic and fragmentary existence (for, unlike the Mahabharata, it is not and has never been written out as a whole). But it is indeed primarily linear in nature, for it is more like a highly elaborate genealogy of gods and humans, moving progressively, not concurrently. It is a story of origins. The Mahabharata, on the other hand, is concerned with Hindu dharma, and so tells interlocking stories of characters and events, with foreshadowings and fates, where any deed at once answers and predestines others. The centuries-old popularity of the Mahabharata in Indonesia, and its representation there in myriad performance, visual, and literary art forms, deeply color Indonesian expectations of what “an epic longer than the Mahabharata” might be like, and probably even expectations of “epics” in general. Singaporean audiences, too, are cognizant of the Mahabharata. Furthermore, since Brook turned the Mahabharata into an icon of intercultural performance, international audiences are also familiar with this kind of epic presentation, and presumably their intercultural expectations of an “epic larger than the Mahabharata” also hailing from Asia are of similar dharma-type narrative complexity. The intercultural pre-text inevitably also sharpened the focus on “insiders” and “outsiders.” This, after all, is what the word “intercultural” highlights most of all. There have to be at least two discrete cultures to work between, and the “intercultural performance” calls our attention to this process, provoking us to identify these cultural blocks in terms of insider and outsider. Intercultural Expectations Intercultural

9. Translated from the Indonesian by the author. 10. Translated from the Indonesian by the author. For an Indonesian response to the 2005 performance in Jakarta, which discusses the I La Galigo as an intercultural performance in terms of the inequity of huge funding raised by Indonesian private sponsorship to bring the performance “home,” compared to the pitiful funding support for preserving and transcribing La Galigo manuscripts, see Ugoran Prasad (2006).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 Publicity in Singapore, as I discussed above, blurred the Indonesianness of I La Galigo. On the one hand it stressed Sulawesi (in general) or Bugis (rather than Indonesia) as the epic’s source, while on the other it localized Indonesianness as generally “Malay” in Singaporean terms. This was then located as “Asia” being brought to the “global” stage or “international” world.11 In the Indonesian reviews after the performance in Singapore, one finds uneasi- ness about the insider/outsider question, and general dismay that there were (at that time) no plans yet to bring the performance to Indonesia. There is also thinly veiled envy that the premiere took place in neighboring Singapore, thus relegating Indonesia to the technologi- cally challenged “third world,” unable to supply the “international standard” demands of a Wilson production (see for example Suyono 2004:77). When the insider/outsider issue was openly discussed, the division was made in more nationalistic terms of Indonesians versus non-Indonesians—considering both the people involved in the production itself, and the presentation and reception of the production “outside.” The international world starts at Indonesia’s national border. The starkest expression of this view, already quoted above, was the review by Indonesian dramatist and activist Sarumpaet, who challenged the presentation of I La Galigo as a world epic and questioned Indonesian pride in having the performance on the world stage. The view that I La Galigo [referring to the epic] is world property is understandable. But it is no mere chance that Sulawesi, the I La Galigo, the Bugis, and Luwu are all in the territory of this republic and not that of China, for instance. This is what makes us, the State, artists, cultural observers, and even arts agents, responsible for respecting I La Galigo as invaluable national treasure that must be protected. [...I]s the performed [Wilson’s] I La Galigo [...] equal in worth to the epic, to the extent that we should be proud of it? (2004:19)12 The public forum in Singapore, though, revealed yet another undercurrent of insider/ outsider sensitivity, namely the “Bugis” or the “Sulawesi-ans” versus the non-Sulawesi Indonesians. A woman from Singapore of Bugis origin proudly claimed Bugis ownership of the epic and credited the Bugis community (not Indonesian) for sharing it with the world. Questions from the floor included queries about the “origins” of the cast. Supanggah, the (Javanese) composer and music director, was asked where the musicians came from (his answer: seven from Sulawesi, two from West Sumatra, two from Java, and one from Bali). A ripple of laughter went through the audience as the musicians introduced themselves and where they were from. The fact that they were not all from Sulawesi seemed to play into a notion of reduced authenticity. And indeed, some postcolonial theorists in the audience appeared to be on the lookout for presumed “Indonesian” appropriation of “Sulawesi” culture, beyond the suspected Wilson appropriation. In lobby conversations, and before the performance was even staged, some had already judged (erroneously) that “most of the dancers are from Bali,” a comment expressed to me disparagingly.

11. Another conflation or confusion of origins is evident in reported interviews with Wilson himself, just prior to the July 2005 New York performance. At times the language is of “East” versus “West,” and at others it is not clear which performing “tradition” or “people” from the Indonesian archipelago he is referring to: In a way, I see I La Galigo as a certain affirmation of my work [...] In this tradition [sic] acting begins with the body, not the voice, which is in some ways closer to what my work is about than working with actors in the West. (in Smith 2005:10) And in another phone interview with a reporter: These people [sic] have a theatrical language of gesture and movement that is pretty much lost in Western theatre [...] Many of them don’t speak English, but that was never a problem. Some of them work in rice fields or whatever, but they dance in the evenings. It’s second nature to them. (in Dollar 2005).

Jennifer Lindsay 12. Translated from the Indonesian by the author.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 Behind the scenes in Indonesia, too, even as the production took shape, debate had raged about who was and was not involved with the production. This was not necessarily expressed in nationalistic terms of Indonesians versus “others,” but in terms of who from South Sulawesi had been invited to join the project—and more importantly, who had not. Insider/outsider lines were drawn in terms of “insiders from South Sulawesi involved with the production” versus “outsiders from South Sulawesi not involved with the production,” just as much as “people from South Sulawesi” versus “other Indonesians” or “others.” But this polemic raged in “private” letters and emails with long lists of cc’d readers, rather than as a public discussion in the media. In summary, reactions to the I La Galigo performance, both in Singapore and Indonesia, followed the intercultural pre-text. Thus, we find attention paid to the length of the performance, its epic grandeur, and the grandeur of the actual performance event, and (dashed) expectations of Mahabharata-like narrative complexity. And behind these reactions was the search to reveal and identify the cultural elements negotiated (“inter”-ed) in and by the performance, with this ultimately expressed in terms of insiders and outsiders, whether this be Bugis/non-Bugis; Sulawesi/non-Sulawesi; Indonesian/non-Indonesian; the Malay world/rest of the world; Asia/the world; or East/West. Other Interculturalisms This simplification of culture, though, obscures other cultures of “inter-cultural” dialogue, exchange, and translation in and around the I La Galigo production. I will mention three and focus on one of them. First, there is the inter-cultural makeup of South Sulawesi. Naming the La Galigo as a “Bugis epic from South Sulawesi,” unless one has extensive knowledge of Indonesia, obscures the fact that Bugis culture is one of many from South Sulawesi, a place that is not culturally homogeneous. The La Galigo, as a sung narrative that exists partially in written form, is significant in South Sulawesi precisely as a marker of Bugisness (in its language and script, as well as its ceremonies and its telling of origins), against other people living side by side and nearby in South and Central Sulawesi. While some of these other peoples and places have storytelling traditions of Sawérigading tales, the written La Galigo is solely Bugis.13 Thus, claiming the La Galigo in South Sulawesi marks one as not Mandar, or Makassar, or Toraja, the other cultural groups there. Furthermore, the La Galigo has also always been contested, even among the Bugis, and remains so today. In the late 17th century, for instance, the Bissu priests were drawn into dif- fering camps during the long warfare between the Bugis kingdoms of Bone and Gowa. This long history of contestation—between more or less adherence to Islam, between kingdoms, and nowadays between scholars and institutions—is one of the most constant features of the La Galigo epic in the Bugis world. This vibrant and volatile inter-cultural identity of South Sulawesi became blurred in the coverage of the I La Galigo production. Thus, in the universal praise for Supanggah’s music—while his use of instruments and music from outside of Sulawesi was noted—often his mixing and juxtaposition of music and instruments from different cultures within Sulawesi was ignored. Indonesian reviewers, for instance, praised Supanggah’s music without any discussion of the different musical elements it contained, other than occasional mention of musicians from Java, Bali, and West Sumatra (see for example, Yuliandini 2004:18; Expectations Intercultural Mulyadi 2004a:11; and Suyono 2004:77). Yet Supanggah himself, in an essay printed in the Esplanade’s I La Galigo press kit, pointed out that the sources of the music and instruments in the production were from all over Sulawesi—including those associated with Makassar, Soppeng, Selayar, and Toraja—

13. Narrative versions are told also in the Malay world, as Andaya discussed in his presentation at the forum in Singapore (2004).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 and these were combined with instruments from Central Java, Bali, and West Sumatra (Supanggah 2004; Esplanade 2004a:18–19). In public discussion at the forum in Singapore, Supanggah also mentioned that audiences often confused sections of traditional song and music with sections of his own composition (and vice versa). In other words, as far as the music was concerned, audiences knew that there was something intercultural going on there, but often defined this in broad strokes (traditional music and Supanggah’s own composition; music of Sulawesi and other Indonesian music; Eastern and Western musical elements, etc.), as they were unable to distinguish the different musics of Sulawesi, and unaware of Supanggah’s genius in combining them to create the inter-cultural “Sulawesi element.” A second inter-cultural element of La Galigo obscured by the pre-text of the I La Galigo production is the dialogue between the cultures of Islam and non- or pre-Islam found within and around the La Galigo in South Sulawesi. The I La Galigo production stressed the pre- Islamic antiquity of the text, which meant stressing its non-syncreticism with Islam as a factor of Bugis authenticity. The production was careful to avoid Islamic elements in the staging and stated this explicitly, for instance, in Supanggah’s choice of musical instruments. Yet the La Galigo, its priests, and its ceremonies, have lived tenuously alongside Islam in Sulawesi since at least the early 17th century. At times, the tension between religious ortho- doxy and the world of “pre-Islam” has exploded into violence, with “pre-Islam”ness defined as heresy or superstition. In recent history, this happened most forcefully during the Darul Islam separatist rebellion of the 1950s, which declared South Sulawesi an Islamic state (join- ing the same movement in Aceh and West Java). La Galigo manuscripts, considered heresy, were burned. Bissu priests were killed or were forced to change their names and modes of dress. Within South Sulawesi, then, Bissu have learned to negotiate between the two cultures, with some Bissu even going on the hajj and using the title that demonstrates this, “Haji.” Furthermore, the epic itself also negotiates these two worlds. There is no single version or text of the La Galigo. It exists as fragments that are rewritten, reworked, and recopied, and there is no existing manuscript older than the 18th century (Koolhof [1999] 2003:25 fn 12). The writing of it from an earlier, fully oral tradition took place later than the epic’s presumed 14th-century origins, and the continuous writing out over time integrated later elements, including Islam.14 As Salim, the renowned translator of La Galigo into Indonesian, points out, some versions of the epic even contain episodes that tell of the hero Sawérigading’s journey to Mecca (in Suyono 2003c).15 While this was mentioned in the I La Galigo preperformance publicity material, it was not highlighted—or rather, these facts were overshadowed by the trope of the “cultural purity” of the Bugis epic as “pre-Islamic.” Similarly, an appreciation of the Bissu priests’ survival skills in negotiating their place between the cultures of Islam and non-Islam was not by extension applied to the theatrical production. For after all, the Wilson I La Galigo was shaped within the political reality of contemporary Indonesia, where society and politics are increasingly framed in terms of reli- gion, and the Islamic right is a force to contend with. In contemporary Indonesia, the search for a secure position as non-Islamic, or non-orthodox, or “pre-Islamic” is certainly aided

14. Sirtjo Koolhof ([1999] 2003) surmises that the whole episode on the origin of rice (included in the Wilson production) is a later addition to the La Galigo corpus, though this not related to Islam. However, episodes depicting burial of the dead, rather than cremation, indicate a post-Islam reworking (24). 15. Koolhof also writes: The conversion to Islam also brought about an extra story at the end of the work. [...] There exist a considerable number of manuscripts that describe how Sawérigading, after having descended to the Underworld, became ruler over the realm. He then predicts that as soon as he has finished writing the Kitaq Porokani (Al-Furquan—the Qur’an), he will travel to Labuq Tikkaq, “the land of the setting sun,” and land there together with his five servants. He will have undergone a metamorphosis and the people will not recognize him, but they must accept his teaching, laid down in the Kitaq Porokoni. Although his name is not mentioned, it is clear that Sawérigading foretells his reincarnation as the

Jennifer Lindsay prophet Muhammad, and in fact sanctions “the conversion of ‘his’ people to Islam.” (2003:24–25)

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 through alignment with the “international” world of “intercultural performance.” And this fact was surely not lost on the Bissu. The third interculturalism I want to mention (and one that I believe that all the hype about intercultural performance obscured) is one specific to the “Robert Wilson I La Galigo.” I refer to the movement between, or translation from, a textual and aural-oral culture to one of visualized performance. As the preperformance texts told us, the La Galigo is an epic dating from around the 14th century, which existed first in oral form and later came to be written down, copied, and recopied, never as a single whole, but as episodes. The only performance element of this epic was—and is—its chanting, nowadays sometimes by Bissu priests, but formerly by “official” reader-chanters called passureq or pallontarag who were not Bissu. The La Galigo is a sung narrative tradition and has no other performance manifestation in Sulawesi. As the renowned scholar Fachruddin Ambo Enre points out, the La Galigo was handed down in three forms: as literary text, as royal genealogy in chronicles, and as oral tradition associated with features in the landscape (in Esplanade 2004a:3). The characters of the La Galigo epic, then, have no performed visualized form in Sulawesi, nor do they have established individual voices. The only movement or voice associated with them is imagined. Unlike the Mahabharata or Ramayana, which are widely known throughout all Southeast Asia, (including Java and Bali in Indonesia) primarily through performance and only secondarily as texts, the La Galigo is primarily known as a chanted text or as sung narrative. And when chanted or sung, the narration and all characters’ voices sound the same. The sameness is emphasized by the strict five-syllable meter and the homogenous antiquity of the language. This is totally different from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, whose characters are rendered visually in performance and have become localized in dress, movement, and speech, and have entered visual and aural memory. To a Javanese, for instance, an Indian Arjuna or a Thai Rama looks and sounds quite foreign. People already have localized visual and aural expectations of these characters. The La Galigo however, does not have this kind of visual performance tradition. The Bugis or the people of South Sulawesi might build statues of Sawérigading in “Bugis dress” to place in town squares and the like, but there is no dance or dramatic form that shows him in movement, or in different costumes, or has him uttering. People have imagined what he looks like, how he moves, and how he sounds—as they have for all the other characters in the epic. The real innovation of the “Robert Wilson I La Galigo,” then, was to translate the epic outline (conceived as a totality) into a visual performance form, and this is as new for people in South Sulawesi as it is for audiences in Singapore and beyond. Elements of movement, music, and costume in the production were taken from or inspired by Bugis (and other Sulawesi) movement, dance, music, and dress, but these did not in themselves relate to any “performance tradition” of La Galigo. They were rather a vocabulary assembled to create that performance. This fact seems to have been ignored even by Indonesian commentators on the production, who, as I mentioned earlier, found its visual elements related to character (dance gestures, costume) lacking, but nowhere mentioned that the use of these elements to depict a visually rendered La Galigo was something new.16 The musical elements of the production, too, had no direct relationship to traditions of La Galigo performance—and in fact, even the chanting in the production of the (real) Bissu priest, Puang Matoa Siddi, was not a chanting of the La Galigo at all, but of ceremonial prayers. Expectations Intercultural The fact that Wilson’s I La Galigo was the first visual rendering of (an interpretation of) the whole Bugis epic into performance, shifts discussion about representation in terms of insiders and outsiders of intercultural performance—or at least it should qualify this discussion.

16. An exception is the brief comment made by Nirwan Ahmad Arsuka, writing in Kompas about a different performance, Waktu Batu by the Yogyakarta-based theatre group, Garasi. In comparing this with Wilson’s I La Galigo, Arsuka mentions Wilson’s “visualization of the myth onstage” (2004:18).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.60 by guest on 23 September 2021 As the production was not a representation of an epic that was already locally rendered visually in performance, there was less ground for accusation that the production had not “got it right,” or that it had “appropriated” a “La Galigo tradition.” Or at least, this discussion could really only move into the area of general debate about the treatment of sacred texts by outsiders, and whether or not the production had got this right. This was largely where Sarumpaet’s criticism was directed. As noted earlier, some Indonesian commentators expressed disappointment in the movement and costumes, and in the “flatness” of the performance, yet they were making comparisons based on familiarity with other Indonesian performing arts as visualized narrative traditions, since the La Galigo has none of its own. Perhaps the most interesting test, then, of how the Wilson production is accepted or rejected as an intercultural production must take place when audiences in South Sulawesi see the performance. For unlike audiences elsewhere, they do have some imaginative frame of reference for their epic, but unlike audiences elsewhere, they are aware that they do not have a visual performance frame of reference. Their reaction to this performed representation of something that has hitherto existed visually and kinetically only in their imagination might highlight the success (or not) of the interaction between an oral/textual culture and a visual one. But then again, the intercultural referencing of the performance has preceded it, through all the Indonesian publicity and reviews of previous performances elsewhere. The intercultural framing is already in place. Furthermore, sadly, the audience there will never see the same Wilson production that audiences in Singapore, New York, Jakarta, and elsewhere did: Plans are afoot for a performance in Makassar, but it will be a modified one, as there are no venues that can meet the technical demands of Wilson’s lighting. Nevertheless, reception there to this modified performance might reveal other aspects of interculturalism that are illuminated when audiences are not quite so blinded by Wilson’s light and by intercultural discourse.

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