Roy Julian Is Holding Back One Work for a Performance Next Year
Jakarta (ANTARA) - Theatre director and actor Roy Julian, of the theatre group “Kebun Hantu”, said he was holding back a surprise work after 10 months of preparation for a performance at the Wahyu Sihombing Theatre, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), Central Jakarta, on Monday and Tuesday nights (13 October).
Roy said one play had to be put aside because of changes to the cast during the 10-month preparation period. Kantor Teater decided to focus solely on presenting “Kebun Hantu” for the Jakarta Arts Council’s Theatre Channel.
“Over 10 months, we had two short plays. The other one was called ‘Kaktus dan Kuping Gajah’, but at the time we had 11 actors and, well, five withdrew. So I wrote a new play,” Roy Julian told ANTARA after the premiere of “Kebun Hantu” on Monday.
Roy said the decision to postpone staging “Kaktus dan Kuping Gajah” was made after five actors left the production.
As the Jakarta Arts Council Theatre Channel production was built around the theme of “body archives”, rooted in the performers’ own memories, the roles of those who left could not simply be filled by new actors.
Roy stressed, however, that the first play, now stored in the company’s production cupboard, had not been cancelled. It was being prepared carefully for another planned performance next year.
Roy said “Kebun Hantu” was written with the actors’ bodily experiences as a source of knowledge—not merely as material for creating characters or advancing a story, but as something with its own potential forms and logic.
He said such experiences did not always need to be translated into criticism, explained through cause and effect, or resolved into a meaning agreed upon by everyone.
Roy said that when the play considers the behaviour of browsing social media, criticism is an implication or consequence of the testimony of modern people who have encountered social media.
Their accounts, he said, describe experiencing a range of feelings: being led to watch a natural disaster, then seeing a couple dating a second later, and a second after that encountering a crime such as a street robbery.
All these experiences overlap randomly in the mind, without a logical cause-and-effect relationship.
“Between the body that experiences, the language that explains and the technology that records, there is always something that escapes notice, something unseen, like a ghost. So the ghost in ‘Kebun Hantu’ is not a being from another world, but something that is present, perhaps has already passed, yet has not finished leaving the body,” Roy said.
He hopes the performance will come close to the experiences that haunt people who have just seen something on social media but have not yet fully understood it.