Courtesy of EKI Dance company
Polyglot artist Nanang Hape believes the art world is divided into three types of artists: the strict traditionalists – typically anti-modern art, the contemporary ones who despise the status quo and those in between, who believe the rules of the game can be modified to create a mix between traditional and modern art.
Nanang belongs to the last category.
A dalang (wayang puppet master), theater director, and fiction writer, Nanang mixes the traditional with the modern, something he does to bridge the cultural divide between generations.
Born and raised in Ponorogo, 34-year-old Nanang’s background is deeply rooted in traditional performance art, especially wayang (shadow puppet show). Despite being part of a generation of young artists, Nanang has immersed himself into contemporary performing arts, not afraid to explore and experiment with wayang.
During his university days, a few of his friends expressed an interest in the art of wayang, but stayed away from the shadow puppet shows, lamenting the fact that they could not understand Javanese (spoken during the shows) or could not stand having to stay up all night to watch the performance.
His most prominent works include the Sandosa performance, a wayang performed in Indonesian, played by a number of puppet masters and first developed by Bambang Murtiyoso in the early 1980s, and Urban, a two-hour wayang also in Indonesian — as opposed to Javanese. Both works addressed his friends’objections to wayang.
In fact, Nanang believes traditional art is in the blood of younger generations even though they have not had great exposure to it.
“In the blood of city children is the blood of their parents and grand parents. They have a history and that runs deep. Even though these children cannot understand the language, sometimes there are city kids who cannot explain what they feel when watching a wayang, but they are definitely touched by it,” he said.
“In my opinion, they have a right to understand wayang in their own particular way,” he said.
He was teaching acting lessons to middle school children when The Jakarta Post visited EKI dance company’s headquarters on Jl. Padang, Central Jakarta. Apart from being a dalang, Nanang has been working on EKI’s musical performances since 2002, collaborating with director and choreographer Rusdi Rukmarata.
Nanang is currently working with Rusdi to direct EKI’s latest musical Jakarta Love Riot, which will run from July 2 to 4 at the Jakarta Arts Building (Gedung Kesenian Jakarta). Actor and presenter Ully Herdinansyah, Bayu Oktara and senior model Ira Duaty will star in the musical alongside presenter Sarah Sechan, theater actor Yayu A.W. Unru and dancers Takako Leen, Felicia Citra and Prajanegara.
Wearing a dark T-shirt, he let his shoulder-length curly hair down. He told his students to imagine the balance bar in the dance studio was something else.
“You can turn this into anything. Without making any noise, make me know what it is,” he said. The students each took turns miming actions. One pretended the bar was a piano, another student pretended it was a clothing line, another imagined it a table.
After the class, Nanang said he first became involved with EKI in 2002. He teaches acting to EKI dancers and does not differentiate students by their age. Nanang said teaching acting for him was an act of sharing and that the pull toward theater came naturally to him.
Being a puppet master, he said, gave him the skills to be a theater director. He explained a dalang was an all-encompassing performer: a scriptwriter, a director, actor and musical conductor all in one performance.
“Being a dalang, one has to master many technical skills. One must know how to perform wayang, have good knowledge of the stories and traditional music,” he said. “A dalang is like a storyteller, he adapts a big epic into his own version by using puppets. He is the scriptwriter. He decides how the characters play out, how the string of events create a lively conflict, how the plot should unfold. He is the director,” he said.
“More than that, he is the voice of all the puppets. So he is the scriptwriter, the director and the actor all in one,” he said, adding that the dalang also controls how the music flows, making him the musical conductor as well.
“This really helped me when entering the world of theater,” he said. Theater reminds him of wayang performances, he went on. “The difference is that in theater the tasks are shared. The key is in the communication between all those involved. “And how to brief the actors so they can interpret the script correctly and, when it comes out, the words are theirs and they’re not memorizing anymore,” he said.
Nanang studied puppetry at the Surakarta Indonesian Art Institute (ISI), then STSI, and graduated top in his year. But even before enrolling in STSI, Nanang had already become a dalang, being the apprentice of a local dalang, Sugondo Suyatno, after graduating high school.
“I was his apprentice under the traditional nyantrik learning system,” he said.
The nyantrik system, he said, consists in a traditional transfer of knowledge. He said Suyatno never taught him the techniques. “I watched him, helped him set up the wayang, and did his housework,” Nanang said.
His performed for the first time in his fifth month under Suyatno’s tutelage. He had come earlier to set up the stage for Suyatno. “Pak Yatno usually arrived an hour before the performance, which was normally at 9 p.m. Around 8 [p.m.] he hadn’t come, around 9 [p.m.] he still hadn’t showed up,” he said.
“I felt like he had deliberately not showed up. The person who was holding the event was Pak Yatno’s distant relative and asked for the wayang performance to start. So I started the performance. I could not describe how I felt,” he said.
Suyatno arrived an hour into the show and took over, he said.
Nanang said Suyatno did not mention anything to him that night. “According to the Javanese philosophy of life, nothing comes easily. There is always something hidden. Even though something has been bestowed on one, it always takes time for it to be revealed,” he said.
“In the morning, I apologized to him,” Nanang said. Only then did Suyatno say it was all right and told Nanang he had had enough training by sitting behind Suyatno during his performances.
In the future, Nanang hopes to perform Wayang Urban after EKI’s musical, in Jakarta and London.
“I like to explore other performance arts. But wayang is my home,” he said.
