Workshop inspires new ideas in stage design for local theater

Christina Schott, Contributor, Yogyakarta

A gray stonewall presents the writing Heroes. Beneath are hanging pictures: Soekarno, Kurt Cobain, Slank, Che Guevara and Munir, together with a newborn baby, a Japanese comic figure and a wayang kulit (shadow play) puppet. "Everybody can be a hero" is scribbled on a piece of paper among other definitions.

The "hero wall" is one of the elements providing new life to an empty factory hall, on the edge of the Kraton area in Yogyakarta. There is also a "Made in Indonesia" wall and a "Sensations by the Way" wall, showing daily life items that have been seen or collected on the streets. All of these figures and materials are meant to inspire ideas about real life and how this can be reflected on a theater stage.

For two weeks, 13 theater directors and designers from all over Indonesia have gathered to hold a workshop organized by Goethe Institute Jakarta, Kelola Foundation and Teater Garasi. The concept for this cooperation was carried out by Bert Neumann, stage designer of perhaps the most experimental theater in Berlin, the Volksbuehne (people's stage), and his wife Lenore

"Neumann was our very first choice," says Noviami Dewi, theater manager at the Goethe Institute. "I knew the Volksbuehne and its democratic structure and I thought it would be an important lesson for Indonesian theater creators to learn more about it."

While stage design has not yet established itself as a profession in Indonesia, most theaters in Germany give great importance to this part of theater work. Especially at the Volksbuehne, where everyone from actor to director fulfills an autonomous part in the creative process, the stage and costume design of Bert Neumann plays an important role. "To get a good result, every artistic work needs its free space, where it radically can develop its own subjectivity. That's not possible by working to the order of somebody else," says Neumann.

In contrast to Indonesia, German stage designers get the technical and financial resources to equally take their place beside the directors. However, this does not automatically mean that a good design always needs to be high-tech and have loads of money. Neumann proved this with many of his very realistic settings, where he uses secondhand cloths or materials like carton or corrugated iron. In his workshop he made this habit a virtue by showing his Indonesian colleagues how he works with simple constructions and items that seem so normal, that one sometimes forgets about their existence and importance like a plastic chair for example.

"In Indonesia, sometimes it's very difficult to find financial or technological support for a theater project. That means we have to get along with very few things. Therefore, I really enjoy seeing Bert not searching all the time for a highly technological solution, but working quite manually with very cheap material he just collected in the streets. This fact increases my self- confidence a lot and calms my fear, that humanity wouldn't have a place in modern theater anymore."

In fact, Neumann loves to explore the harsh reality of daily life, the life of suburbs and backyards. While walking around Yogyakarta, he took shots of food stalls and brickworks, souvenir shops and bamboo scaffoldings -- objects that for many people here seem too normal to be interesting, but that can develop their own meaning in the right setting.

"In Indonesia we often put things on the stage without too much thinking about the impact they carry. Bert, however, gives every item a sense," says Ignatius Sugiarto, lightning designer for Teater Garasi. And Noviami adds: "Art spaces in Indonesia usually are very artificial and do not touch at all the real life outside. To get people interested in modern theater, we have to bring their reality onto the stage. I hope that Bert can bring a bit of this feeling to us."

As free as Neumann sees his professional role, is as free as the structure of his workshop. Since he has never been to Indonesia before, he did not want to come with a fixed concept, but rather to discover the new situation first. He encouraged the participants to see their working processes as learning by doing, while sharing new ideas with each other - something which was warmly welcomed.

"I actually enjoy the freedom of not having a fixed schedule and working together in a workshop which is definitely not standard," says Shinta Febriany, director of the Sanggar Merahputih in Makassar. "For me it's not important to carry a final model with me in the end, but to spend time together as intensively as possible, to share all our ideas and experiences."

Nevertheless the workshop keeps a focus on practical work, the tables and walls are full of sketches and figures, collected working materials and scribbled concepts. One result of these shared ideas is the "hero wall". Following the drama Hamlet Machine by German writer Heiner Mueller, the group discusses the role of a hero -- or in this case, an anti-hero. Mueller's piece leaves only a destructed little piece of Shakespeare's original, showing fragments of a dilapidated, violent world of chaos. Proceeding from the protagonist, the participants start developing their ideas about a possible setting with the construction of a wayang puppet: Hamlet as punk, or scare crow, as machine or snake.

"It seems very unusual to me to start a stage design not from the whole drama, but from a single character. But I enjoy this new perspective," says Cecil Mariani, an independent graphic designer from Jakarta, who has yet to work in theater.

The atmosphere during the days is relaxed, but concentrated. In the evenings, everyone brings their favorite movie that are watched together -- another way to get to know each other better.

"This workshop could become a kind of model for further projects in Indonesia: to develop a creative space without any limitation by specialization in - for example - only techniques or only costumes," says Noviami Dewi. "I really hope that with Bert's input, the Volksbuehne's ideas, that Indonesian theater can develop."