“[T]he first step is the choice of story (lakon). The next is the drawing up of a list of scenes through which the particular lakon wil be played out. Scenes in standard locations and marked by particular kinds of interaction form a kind of grid through which every lakon is interpreted” (Hately 2008, p.40)
“The scenes and their interactions show clear parallels with other forms of Javanese theatre, particularly wayang. However, each ketoprak performance contains a slightly different mix of scenes, their order determined by the events of the particular story as well as concern for dramatic effect, rather than by fixed rules as in the wayang tradition. A minimal group of scenes appears in every performance – two types of palace audience, referred to on the scene list as “refined court” ([kra]ton alus) and “strong court” (‘ton gagah), or by the names of specific kingdoms identified with these qualities; fight scenes; designated battle (perang) or forest battle (alas perang) scenes; clowning interludes, referred to as dalan gecul (literally ‘impudent, cheeky [scene on the] road’); and garden (taman) scenes, the site of love scenes and other male-female encounters.” (Hately 2008, p.41)
The clowning on display in Opera Van Java traces its lineage back to the similar clowning found in Javanese folk theatre traditions such as ketoprak and ludruk, and before this to the dalan gecul of the wayang kulit performance – the comedic interludes performed by the traditional Javanese clowns, the punakawan, in between acts. In each of these three theatrical forms, the dalan gecul functions dramatically as a carnivalesque interlude that briefly reverses status roles and subverts the dominant values prevailing with a play, particularly those of the satria, the warriors – both heroic and demonic – whose words and deeds otherwise populate a play’s narrative. Describing the dalan gecul within the ketoprak tradition Babara Hatley recounts that:
“Very frequently the clowns stage some kind of show, such as a competition, an excerpt from another dramatic genre or role-play. […]The dramatic excerpt presented is often a fragment of wayang wong dance drama. […] Favourite scenes are the formal court audience and the battle between the refined knight and his demon opponent. […] In each case the farcical humour derives from the incongruity of the casting. Bumbling clowns in their humble village attire act out the parts of king and courtier; in the battle fragment a hugely fat female clown may dance the part of the delicate and refined satria, Arjuna, while a skinny, woebegone actor plays the crude and volatile fanged monster, Cakil. The characteristics of performers clash bizarrely with the codes of physical appearance, gesture, movement and speech by which these dramatic figures are usually portrayed.” (Hately 2008: 55)
This parodic, carnivalesque function of the dalan gecul is noted also in James Peacock’s study of ludruk in the 1960s. Describing the figure of the clown as it manifests in ludruk. “He [the clown] […] mocks his master’s external signs – sounds and motions. The clown’s favorite game is to imitate gestures and words of somebody other than himself – a creditor when he is actually a debtor, a master when his is a servant, a girl, when he is a man, a policeman when he is a thief.” (Peacock 1968: 73) In ludruk as in wayang kulit and ketoprak, the figure of the clown is afforded a level of frankness and honesty in speech and gesture not enjoyed by heroines and villains. The greater emotional spontaneity and communicative freedom permitted the punakawan derives from their utter dependency on their masters and complete lack of personal social status. Clowns lack all potency save for their capacity to speak truths others dare not.
In many respects an episode of Opera Van Java takes the form of dalan gecul, a comic excerpt of the sort described above without the dramatic structure would bracket similar comic interludes in earlier theatrical traditions such as ketoprak and wayang kulit. Clearly many of the comic devices employed in OVJ are derived from the techniques deployed in the dalan gecul of earlier dramatic traditions such ketoprak and ludruk. The “incongruous casting” of an actor against type for comic effect, for instance, is a recurring source of humour in OVJ. In the following exchange dalang Parto Patrio interrupts the opening scene in the story of Kresna Gugah to confront comedienne Nunung, playing the part of the warrior Setyaki, on her choice of footwear for the role.
Then, in a further assault on theatrical convention, the performers exchange roles.” (Hately 2008: 55)
“Competitions usually centre on language, tests of skill in language forms considered by village and kampung Javanese as prestigious but difficult to reproduce. These include high Javanese, the national language taught in schools, Indonesian, and the language of modernity and global outreach, English. One tricks the other by asking for high Javanese equivalents of low-level words for which no high form exists. The latter applies standard rules to concoct preposterous inventions. Javanese/Indonesian homonyms confuse both clowns hopelessly; English words are mispronounced in such a way as to resemble Javanese expressions and interpreted accordingly. The clowns’ foolish bungling evokes laughter. Yet there is also playful suggestion of the richness and breadth of ngoko Javanese, the familiar and comfortable everyday tongue of performers and the audience. High Javanese is revealed by comparison as limited in scope, stiff and artificial, while the newfangled languages of Indonesian and English have seemingly adopted much of their vocabulary from Javanese.” (Hately 2008: 55)
The wordplay and verbal sparring on display in OVJ differs in some important respects to that described in Hatley’s discussion of ketoprak. As Hately observes, the mother tongue of ketoprak’s clowning – it’s linguistic centre of gravity, if you will – is Javanese, particularly ngoko low-Javanese. In the context of ketoprak, Indonesian is employed to a large extent for the comic potential of its juxtaposition as an alien and “newfangled” language alongside the intimacy and familiarity of ngoko Javanese. The same cannot be said for Indonesian with the context of OVJ’s clowning. Performed by a multi-ethnic cast of comedians to a national television audience of a similarly diverse ethnic composition, OVJ does not share ketoprak‘s linguistic centre of gravity. Though regional languages – particularly Javanese – are employed frequently on the show, the natural language of OVJ is Indonesian.
While Indonesian lacks the formal speech levels of Javanese, the muddling and switching of which is the comic lifeblood of ketoprak, Indonesian does have its own registers of formality and intimacy which can be manipulated to great comedic effect. Goenwan Mohamad has analysed with considerably nuance the relationship between patterns of Javanese-language theatrical wordplay and their Indonesian analogues in his discussion of the long-running ketoprak troupe, Srimulat. The troupe, founded in Yogyakarta in the 1960s enjoyed growing success throughout the 1970s and 80s with a regular show on national television that continued in varying shapes and forms through to the late 1990s. Srimulat’s performances were performed for multi-ethnic audiences predominantly in Indonesian but with a significant percentage of its dialogue and humour in an untranslated Javanese. Even where dialogue was spoken explicity in Indonesian, Mohamad asserts, Javanese patterns of wordplay exerted a considerable infulence over both performers’ comic improvisation and audiences’ reception of these comedic routines.
Mohamed describes a Srimulat rendering of a conventional master-servant routine. Though the dialogue is delivered entirely in Indonesian, Mohamed argues that much of the comic tension in the scene relies on and assumes an audiences’ knowledge and understanding of Javanese wordplay in countless of similar master-servant routines in other Javanese theatrical traditions such as ketoprak, ludruk and wayang kulit. As a case in point he highlights the routine’s punchline which involves a master’s threat to “asphalt” his servant’s forehead. The line ends with the Indonesian word “jidakmu” or “your forehead”. While not explicitly offensive in Indonesian, Mohamed explains that few Javanese viewers would be able to hear the line without calling to mind the Javanese expletive “Ndhasmu”. Similarly Mohamad describes a routine centred around an actor’s use, within an domestic family scene, of the Indonesian word “namun” (“but” or “however”). The comic tension of the routine relies on what Mohamed calls the “double otherness” of the word “namun” and its employment in a scene of domesticity. “Namun” is doubly “othered”, in the first instance by its remove from Javanese – the language of hearth and home for both the actor speaking the line and much of the audience hearing it – and in the second instance by its remove from colloquial Indonesian. “Namun”, he explains, belongs”to the semantic field of the literati” or perhaps to what Anderson has identified as the “kramanized” newspeak of New Order-era Indonesian public discourse.
Mohamad has described Srimulat’s performances as a “feast of orality” most potently manifest in troupe’s avoidance of scripted performance and completed reliance on comic improvisation. The transgressive pleasure of Srimulat, contends Mohamend, lay in the troupe’s “confusion between orality and literacy, between the “local” and the “universal”, and between the “vulgar” amd the “offical.” (Mohamed 2006: 79) Audiences were drawn to Srimulat by the spectacle of Javanese actors humoursouly, wrly, intentionally mangling the state-mandated national language. While not overtly politcal, Mohamad desrcibes the subversive pleasure derived by audiences of Srimulat in hearing the national language so mangled and reduced to comic tems within a Javanese cultural and linguistic system.
The complex cultural sensibilities around language in Indonesia that provided such fertile comic ground for Srimulat in the 1980s and 90s have not changed significantly since then. The longstanding sociocultural contestation between speakers of the national language, Indonesian, and speakes of regional languges such as Javanese continues. So to does the struggle for primacy between regional variations of the national language itself. The sociocultural fissures exploited by ludruk performers in Peacock’s study between “kuno” and “maju“, and those highlighted in Mohamed’s discussion of ketoprak between orality and literacy, the “local” and the “universal”, and the “vulgar” are still today potent sources of sociocultural tension and therefore comedy. Though speaking to post-New Order audiences, OVJ continues to mine these tensions for comic purposes with multiple strains of the national langauge displayed and often pitted against each another, alongside regional languages such as Javanese, and high-prestige foreign languages such as English.
Dialogue Analysis 1: Indonesian, Javanese and English in Opera Van Java’s “Dilema Cinta Gatotkaca”
(FN) Ben Anderson has discussed at length what he calls the “Javanization of Indonesian” – a general rubrik under which he groups a number subphenomena inclduing the “kramannization of public Indonesian” and the adoption of the Jakartan dialect of Indonesian as the “new ngoko” (Anderson 1990: 145-146).Under this process Indonesian, which Anderson argues was born or a modern, revolutionary, democratic and egalitarian cultural impulse, has gradually been forced to yield to counterevolutionary traditionalism and the imposition of what he calls “Javanese modalities”. Indonesian, which was adopted by the Indonesia’s founding father in part due to its egalitarian lingusitic structure, has, Anderson argues, in more recent times begun to exhibt a similar hierarchy of speech levels and registers to that found in Javanese. (FN? )
(FN) Mohamed speaks also of a second, more general, (though no more significant) subversive pleasure in seeing language reduced to banality and meaningless, in witnessing language fail at its tasks of representaion and so hinting at “a semantic void” Mohamed invokes Lacanian notion of jouissance to describe the pleasure we feel at witnessing the rupture of the symbolic order and the brief respite from the “prison house of language” that such a breakdown afforsds. Mohamed applies Julia Kristeva’s model of “the carnival” to a dialogic situation in which “language…parodies iteslf, repudiating its role in representation” which provokes laughter “but remains incapabcle of detaching iteslf form representation”. The laughter elicited by such a performance therefore, suggests Mohamed, is “not simply parodic” but simultaneously comic and tragic. (Kristeva cited in Mohamed 2006: 86)
(FN) Founded by Teguh, an adopted son of a father of Chinese desecent and a Javanese-born mother, the troupe took its name from Teguh’s wife, a famous singer and theatre peformer of the 1930s and 40s. Teguh’s primary theatrical tradition, according to Mohamad, was a reversal of the convential hierarchy that underpinned the “batur-and-bendoro” or master-and-servant comic routines of the dalan gecul found in ealier theatrical traditions. In Srimulat, argues Mohamad, the character of the servant, of the maid, of the average individual is placed front-and-centre in the narrative and invested with a greater sense nobility and dignity than they are in previous theatrical forms such as wayang kulit and ketoprak. (Mohamed 2006: 71-72)
Dialogue Analysis: 1: “Patih Sebab” dialogue in Opera Van Java: Kresna Gugah episode
Dalang (Parto): (Narrasi) Di istananya Prabu Baladewa sedang menantikan Adipati Karna yang diutus untuk membangunkan…yaitu Kresna. Langsung saja kita lihat di TKP[1].
Dalang (Parto): Meanwhile in his palace, Prabu Baladewa awaits the return of Adipati Karna who was sent to awaken Kresna. We straight to the scene to see what happens.
Camera cuts from the dalang’s stage to the performance stage. Sule playing the role of Prabu Baladewa sits disconsolate on the floor of his place thrown room, in front of his thrown.
1. Baladewa (Sule): Aduh. Ini Si Adipati “Sebab” ke mana lagi ya dia?
1. Baladewa (Sule): My word. Where has that Adipati “Sebab” gotten to?
2. Dalang: Siapa ‘le?
2. Dalang:(rapping impatiently on puppet box) Who, le?
3. Pa…Patih “Sebab”.
3. Pa…Patih “Sebab”.
4. Dalang: Kamu dengar narasi saya, nggak tadi barusan?
4. Dalang: (impatiently) Did you hear my narration just before or not?
5. Sule: Saya nungguin siapa di sini?
5. Baladewa/Sule: (no longer in character): Who is it I’m waiting for?
6. Dalang: Tadi saya narasi…Prabu Baladewa sedang menantikan Adipati Karna. Itu sudah ketahuan, kan?
6. Dalang: (with increasing irritation) Just now in my narration I explained that Prabu Baladewa was waiting for the arrival of Adipati “Karna”. Got it? Are we clear?
7. Sule: Sekarang saya tanya, kata lain dari “sebab” apa?
7. Sule: (somewhat defiantly)Wait just a second…what’s another word for “sebab” (because)?
8. Dalang: Karena.
8. Dalang: (confused) “Karena” (alternate Indonesian word for “because”).
9. Sule: Ya, udeh. Apa urusannya? Terserah saya, dong.
9. Sule: Well, there you go. What’s your problem? I can say it however I want.
The audience cheers and applauds the wordplay involved in Sule’s deliberate confusion of the character name “Karna” with the Indonesian word “karena” meaning “because”. They appreciate also the additional leap of imagination involved in Sule’s substitution of the word “karena” with its closeIndonesian synonym “sebab” by way of which Sule derives the comically erroneous character name, Adipati “Sebab”.
10. Dalang: Eh…Ini bukan masalah “udeh”, ‘le.
10. Dalang: (looking put out) What do you mean “there I go”…
11. Sule: Sekarang kalau misalkan kosa kata…
11. Sule: (adopting the manner of a school teacher) Now, in terms of vocabulary…
12. Dalang: Uh…
12. Dalang: (going along with Sule for now) Uh…
13. Sule: …”oleh sebab itu”…nah, kan…itu bisa digantikan “oleh karena itu”.
13. Sule: (growing in confidence) Now, take the the phrase “oleh sebab itu” (consequently, because of), this can be replaced by the phrase “oleh karena itu” (as a result of, due to).
Audience laughs
12. Sule: Sekarang, “Adipati Karna” diganti dengan “Adipati Sebab”…sama!
12. Sule: Now, if you take the name “Adipati Karna” and replace it “Adipati Sebab”…it means the same thing!
Audience applauds. Dalang looks taken aback and directs a hard glare towards Sule.
13. Dalang: Lain, lain…
13. Dalang: (angrily) No! No! It’s not the same at all…
14. Sule: Kok lain…
14. Sule: What do you mean its not the same…
15. Dalang: Di wayang-wayang nggak ada itu namanya “Adipati Sebab”. Nggak ada! Karna! Yang ada Karna!
15. Dalang: (still fuming) There’s no character called “Adipati Sebab” in wayang. Karna! There’s only Karna!
16. Sule: Ini cerita wayang?
16. Sule: Is this a wayang story?
17. Dalang: Wayang!
17. Dalang: (exasperated) Wayang!
18. Sule: Saya kirain judul Roma Irama tadi.
18. Sule: Oh…I thought we were discussing a Roma Irama song.
Audience applauds. Dalang slumps back against his puppet box, defeated.
[1] TKP = Tempat Kejadian Perkara roughly translates to ‘scene’ or in non-theatrical contexts ‘scene of the crime’.
All The Way With OVJ 