Workshop inspires new ideas in stage design for local theater
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."