Festival ’90 : CELEBRATING THE THE ART OF INDONESIA : A dozen performance companies, four major art exhibitions and film festivals signal a ‘coming-out party’

In a court yard studio, open on three sides and about the size of a small garage, Sujana Arja dances the final solo of a masked ritual that has made this city of 350,000 and its surrounding villages a magnet for ethnographers.

Accompanied by a forceful percussion ensemble, Arja boldly strides across the red tile floor, his movements reflecting the same curt pride as his carved wooden visage. His whole body shakes with mocking laughter--but it is the musicians who supply the actual sound of it. He gestures commandingly and the children huddled just outside the studio stare at him in awe.

Though his actions are familiar, this is a special performance of Topeng Cirebon (also known as Topeng Babakan): a new, 90-minute abridgement-for-export of a ceremony that normally can last up to eight hours. Afterward, Arja explains its symbolic meanings to his foreign guests while, nearby, company administrator E. Yusuf Dendabrata discusses with an American production manager the dangers of touring the U.S. during the winter.

What about the cold? Will there be rice? How will the dry air affect the musical instruments? (Will their wooden frames crack?) And, unspoken, but hovering at the edges of both Dendabrata’s and Arja’s conversations, the big question: Will Americans understand a dance-theater form from another world?

The same question is debated in Jogyakarta, Central Java, where court dances and puppetry from the Sultan’s Palace are in rehearsal for another tour--and on Bali, where children practice their Baris or Legong solos and speak about Disneyland.

All over Indonesia, performers and museums are preparing for an unprecedented invasion of America: an 18-month festival in which the fifth-largest nation in the world will attempt to establish its cultural identity with the U.S. public.

A dozen performing companies, traditional and contemporary, are scheduled to visit 36 cities in 22 states. Four major exhibitions have been organized for some of the country’s most prestigious museums. Film festivals and other media events will widen the festival’s scope. And, during all this, the 13,667-island archipelago will lure visitors with its official “Visit Indonesia Year,” 1991.

Budgeted at approximately $12 million, (two-thirds from private U.S. donors and the rest from Indonesian sources), the Festival of Indonesia came into being nearly four years ago, recalls Ted Tanen, head of its New York office and director of the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture.

“We were winding up Festival of India,” Tanen remembers, “and Dr. Mochtar Kasuma-Atmadja, then Indonesian foreign minister and head of a private Indonesian cultural foundation, called on us to see if we could do something similar. The idea was to build around exhibitions as many presentations of the country’s culture as possible.”

Tanen did a feasibility study and once Dr. Kasuma-Atmadja’s Nusantara Jaya Foundation decided to proceed, plans for 200 programs were initiated--everything from training 12 Indonesian museologists (working with the institutions hosting the festival exhibitions) through speakers, in-school projects, a planetarium show and events geared to increasing business investment in Indonesia.

“This is Indonesia’s coming-out party,” Tanen declares, echoing a phrase frequently heard in connection with the festival. “They’ve never done this in any other country.”

To date, Tanen says, the Indonesians have raised $3.5 million for the festival (some of it as in-kind donations) and the Americans $8 million. Tanen says that approximately half a million dollars came from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities--plus travel money from the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. But 20 institutions provided two-thirds of the American funding, particularly Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Arco, Boeing, Garuda, Inco, Unocal, the Luce Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

On July 1, “The Sculpture of Indonesia” opened at the National Gallery in Washington--the first festival event and the first time ancient Indonesian art from native museums has been assembled in a major exhibition together with artifacts from Europe and America. Museums in Houston, New York and San Francisco are also on the exhibition’s itinerary.

In September, “The Court Arts of Indonesia” opens in New York, displaying 150 examples of jewelry, musical instruments, puppets, masks, costumes, paintings and manuscripts. After visiting Dallas and Washington, the exhibition ends up in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History from October, 1991, to January, 1992.

Meanwhile, Houston, San Diego (Museum of Man, June 14 to Aug. 25, 1991), Oakland, Seattle and Honolulu will see “Modern Indonesian Art: Three Generations of Tradition and Change, 1945-1990,” the first major exhibition of its sort to be held in the United States.

Finally, Houston hosts the November opening of “Beyond the Java Sea,” a display of sculpture, textiles, book illustration, jewelry and household arts from Indonesia’s outer islands that is also scheduled for showings in Washington and San Francisco.

Tanen insists that Los Angeles could have had all these exhibitions instead of just one, but local sponsors fumbled the opportunity. “It’s up to some institutions out there to get with it,” he says, declining to be more specific. “There are still a lot of openings (on the schedule), a lot of leeway . . . . “

Indeed, many of the 12 announced performing companies in the festival are not yet completely booked, and Los Angeles thus far has engagements confirmed with only three: Topeng Cirebon (at Cal Tech on Jan. 25) and the two glittering ensembles scheduled for 13 kickoff performances during the Los Angeles Festival.

The most prestigious group is undoubtedly the Kraton of Jogyakarta, 62 performers from the Sultan’s Palace who will showcase four different traditional Javanese idioms in three programs beginning Friday at the L.A. State and County Arboretum. First up: a split bill featuring the ritualistic Bedhaya and Menak Golek, a relatively new dance form inspired by puppet motion.

On Saturday and Sept. 2, full evenings of Wayang Wong (masked dance drama), then on Sept. 4, one of Wayang Kulit (shadow puppets). Since the Javanese seem committed to the belief that the Western attention span is two hours, tops, all these programs have been shortened--though there will be one all-night Wayang Kulit marathon on Sept. 8.

Festival of Indonesia artistic director R. M. Soedarsono says that it was his idea to use versions of the same “Mahabharata” episode for every Kraton performances except the Menak Golek, which comes from a different tradition. In this way, he explains, American audiences can compare the different ways that Bedhaya, Wayang Wong and Wayang Kulit interpret “Arjuna Wiwaha” (Arjuna’s Enthronement) and thus get deeper into both the performance idioms and the story.

On Sept. 7, “The Children of Bali” has its American premiere on a Los Angeles Festival program at UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Recreation Center. The company is also scheduled to return to Southern California in the final days of its tour, appearing at UC Santa Barbara on Oct. 2.

A newly created entity, this 20-member group of 9- to 15-year-olds performs classic solos derived from ancient religious rituals, but also newly choreographed group pieces in traditional style.

Residency activities, workshops and in-school demonstrations will complement the “Children of Bali” performances--and some local fifth- and sixth-graders already have their own “Bali Corner” where they learn such arcane secrets-of-the-East as how to tie a sarong.

“There is a certain kind of movement that can only be (ideally) achieved by the body of a child,” says Javanese avant-garde choreographer Sardono W. Kusumo, sitting atop an emerald green terrace in the Balinese village of Kedewatan. “That art can occur when we let the children participate freely.”

Other cultures, he continues, “reduce the capacity of children, more and more, to make it more simple. Here, however, children make the life of the dance more human.”

“We censor ourselves too much,” he explains, “but they dance with all their souls. . . .”

Kusumo is negotiating to bring his Jakarta-based Sardono Dance Theatre to the New York International Festival of the Arts in 1991. But today he’s less committed to promoting his own work than speaking as the head of the Festival of Indonesia’s performing arts board and describing the event’s “panorama of dance.”

“For the festival, we want Americans to see the old masters of the traditional culture,” he says, “the art that is still part of the ecosystem of a community and the court art. But at the same time we will present the contemporary work that is sometimes influenced by Western art.”

“In this society, the spiritual life is strong, and art is a manifestation of it.” *