BY Barbara
Hatley
University of
Tasmania, Australia
blhatley@postoffice.newnham.utas.edu.au
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| Ketoprak di Jawa (www.antaranews.com) |
This paper arises
out of 25 years of theatre-watching in Indonesia, particularly in the city of
Yogyakarta. Here I studied the popular melodrama ketoprak in the late 1970s, and have continued to observe ketoprak,
modern Indonesian language theatre, teater,
and other varieties of performance ever since. Yogya as the acknowledged
heartland of ketoprak activity in the 1970s, the site of the greatest number of
troupes, was my choice for the initial study. Later explorations of the social
meanings of various forms of theatre for their Javanese-Indonesian participants
have likewise been based mainly in Yogyakarta. But not exclusively so - where
Yogya performance practice compares significantly with developments elsewhere,
or where a wider perspective has been needed to encompass a particular topic,
my gaze has been broader.




