The Fugue of Tjebolang, Theatre
Venue: Great Hall
Next performance: Saturday 28 June 10:00
Review
By Guest Writer Keith Bain
Rehane Abrahams’ extensive career as a creator of new work has tended to focus on theatre that is ritualistic and decolonial in nature; there is inevitably an element of transformation, a desire to shift and heal. She does not make work purely for the sake of entertainment, but is instead intentionally searching for new ways of telling stories, and of creating theatre that lands differently.
While it’s no simple thing to pin her down, what’s clear from talking to her is that she puts her heart and soul on the line in order to make work that is potent, important and truly original. And she wants to create work that nourishes the audience, that adds to their experience of life rather than subtracting from it.
This objective has led to her latest stage creation, The Fugue of Tjebolang. Conceived as an immersive, multivalent experience, it’s the theatricalisation of “Cebolang Minggat” (the Exile of Cebolang), a tale excerpted from the Serat Centhini, the great Javanese literary epic written in the form of suluk, verses intended for chanting.
Abrahams calls the story a “queer Islamic epic that is erotic”; she has incorporated dance, music and visual projections to create something she hopes will jolt audiences – “bring them to their senses” – and help liberate and heal.
Completed in 1815 and written in Sanskrit, Arabic and an ancient Javanese language, Kawi, the Serat Centhini comprises 12 volumes, 4200 pages, 722 verses, and over 200 000 stanzas. It forms part of the Javanese babads, an encyclopaedic literary genre dealing with historic events and covering everything from art, religion and mysticism to erotic knowledge. And some of it is pretty wild, much of it unexpected.
While it describes virtues that originate in Islam, it portrays Javanese people as sexually open and recognises eroticism as part of life, rather than as taboo. Some contemporary scholars find its explicit references to and descriptions of sexual intercourse pornographic and some of the language vulgar.
The manuscript was kept locked away in the palace and in the state’s archive for almost two centuries for fear of stirring public controversy, but Serat Centhini is now in the public domain, and was popularised by the French poet-cum-journalist Elizabeth D. Inandiak.
Abrahams, who lived in Bali for six years, discovered the tale of Cebolang/Tjebolang by accident. Her initial encounter with the story made a huge impression, but when Abrahams then read it, the tale simply seemed too vast, and also “way too ridiculous”, to take on as a performance. And so it sat around for many years.
“I always felt like I had to do it,” she says, “but I didn’t know when I’d be ready – or when the world would be ready for it.” Abrahams recently completed her PhD, the focus of which was “eco-erotic decolonisation”, and in the wake of all that research she says felt ready to tackle Tjebolang.
Adapting the script from Inandiak’s translation, she says she pared down the original, edited out some of the “inordinate amount” of sex.
The Fugue of Tjebolang is set to be at once hallucinatory and erotically charged, albeit with a strong spiritual core. Abrahams says it’s been the kind of project that has enabled her to rediscover the “older magic” of her childhood, when her fascination with storytelling included writing and performing puppet shows and plays for her classmates.
That magic pervades both the type of story Tjebolang tells and the manner of its telling. “There is a plot,” Abrahams says. “It’s a really simple story about a young person who feels betrayed his family and so goes on a kind of fool’s journey, a quest for knowledge. Eventually, he returns to his family, and to their love. So it’s like the prodigal child on a fool’s quest.”
Tjebolang is played by the artist/activist Cheshire V, aka CC Martinez and the show includes choreography by Ina Wichterich, with classical Javanese dance elements. It features not only large visual projections on three sides, but also an immersive soundscape by Julia Theron and Denise Onen, whose “epic score” does “magical things”.
Abrahams emphasises that it would not have been possible to create work of this nature at such a level without support from the Festival Enterprise Catalyst, which has helped fund it so that it can be shown in Makhanda and in Stellenbosch. “Without them, we’d not have been able to create the texture that is expressive of where we feel we’re at right now.”
And what is the “texture” that audiences can expect to experience?
“I want the audience to be thoroughly fed and deeply nourished by this production. Our hope is for audiences to go on a journey with us, and to discover that it is their journey too.”
For more of Keith Bain’s writing, https://keithcapetown.substack.com/
