Two Decades of UNAIR Dramaturgy: The Stage Keeps Lighting Up, the Archives Are Forgotten

Every performance always ends the same way. The lights go out, the props are dismantled, the costumes are returned to storage, and the audience goes home carrying their own impressions. What remains are only photographs, recordings, or stories passed from mouth to mouth. Sadly, not every show has documentation that is properly stored in archives to be remembered by.

That awareness emerged when I tried to trace the journey of Dramaturgi in the Indonesian Language and Literature Study Programme at Universitas Airlangga. This course, running since 2005, has produced dozens of performances with diverse scripts. Yet when tracing its footsteps to be pieced together into a history, many fragments turned out to have been lost. The whereabouts of some performance recordings are no longer known. Documentation is scattered across private storage. Even the sequence of performances in the early years can no longer be confirmed except through interviewed sources. Ironically, performances have continued every year.

Dramaturgi was not born merely to fulfil curriculum requirements. From interviews with the lecturers in charge, the course emerged as an answer to Indonesian Language and Literature students’ need to experience the theatre production process directly. Not all students joined campus theatre communities such as Teater Mata Angin or Teater Gapus. Dramaturgi then became a learning space that brought them into contact with the creative process of a production, from reading scripts, managing a production, to standing and performing before an audience.

Over two decades, many important plays have been staged. Malam Jahanam by Motinggo Boesje, RT 0 RW 0 by Iwan Simatupang, Kapai-Kapai by Arifin C. Noer, Konglomerat Burisrawa by N. Riantiarno, and a number of other scripts have been brought back to life through these performances. Some scripts were staged more than once at different times. Each cohort read the same script in different ways. Unfortunately, the documentation of Dramaturgi at UNAIR is incomplete or has vanished without a trace. Yet, for history, documentation is precisely the most important part of an event. Without archives, we only have memory. And human memory always has its limits.

This situation shows that the campus still has homework to do in caring for its own artistic history. Attention has mostly been directed towards the success of staging performances, while efforts to archive the creative process have often proceeded haphazardly. As a result, when someone wants to trace the development of Dramaturgi over time, they must assemble fragments of information from interviews, internet uploads, or the private collections of alumni.

In fact, a university is not merely a place for producing knowledge. Every performance that is born is part of the journey of its students’ intellectual experience. The choice of script, the themes raised, and the form of the staging all show how a generation viewed the social issues of its time. If those traces disappear, what vanishes is not merely the history of a single course, but also the campus’s cultural record.

Twenty years is not a short time. Dramaturgi at Universitas Airlangga has passed through various generations, changed curriculums, changed directors, changed performers, and kept finding new ways to speak through the stage. That tradition deserves appreciation. However, this is not enough to do only every time the curtain rises. It also needs to be safeguarded and archived. For history does not always disappear because the events never happened. Often, history vanishes simply because no one took the time to store it.