The traditional Betawi theater known as lenong is facing a difficult time surviving in the present era, which has forced native Jakartan performance artists to make adjustments to appeal to modern society.

Renowned Betawi artist Yahya Andi Saputra said recently that lenong performers were trying to keep their art form alive by learning the preferences of modern society and applying numerous adjustments because recently people were showing less and less interest toward it.

'€œModern people, especially those who live in the city, are not interested when lenong is performed in its original form, including in its duration of performance,'€ Yahya said during a discussion.

Lenong is believed to have been introduced in the 19th century and was influenced greatly by Chinese culture. It is accompanied by a traditional Betawi music ensemble, gambang kromong. A typical lenong performance has about 25 actors, but fewer than 12 music players.

Like other theater traditions, the players never use a script and, rather, make improvisations during the play, while any dialogue is often presented in a humorous manner to entertain the audience.

Lenong can be classified into two types: lenong denes (formal), which focuses on stories about royalty, the rich and the powerful, and lenong preman (common), which focuses on the folks heroes and contains more fighting scenes.

According to Yahya, the original lenong was performed over a whole night, but in modern times it has been reduced to a few hours, or even less than one hour, explaining that this was one of the adjustments made to maintain its existence.

'€œThe lenong that we see today is a result of compromise in order to make people in the city able to enjoy it in their leisure time,'€ Yahya continued.

However, some people beg to differ.

An anthropologist from the University of Indonesia, Yasmine Z. Shahab, disagreed, saying that Betawi artists should not sacrifice the roots of lenong in exchange for modern society'€™s acceptance, as she believed that there were still a lot of people who could appreciate the true identity of lenong.

Yasmine said, for example, that there were TV programs that claimed to be lenong, but all they did was converse using the native Betawi language, including the words lu (you), gue (me), kenape (why).

'€œI agree that this performing art is facing a challenging time, but compromise was not the answer. Betawinese artists and groups should work harder to present it,'€ she said. '€œYou can modify the package, but not the foundation.'€

Yasmin went on to say that Betawinese people have a growing number of organizations, which can be taken advantage of to spread their culture and art. Based on her data, the 20 Betawi organizations that existed in the 1990s have expanded to more than 200 organizations today.

Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University recently published a book entitled Eksistensi Lenong dalam Modernitas Ibu Kota (Lenong'€™s Existence in the Modern Capital City) in a bid to document the history of lenong, its current condition and the challenges it faces in the future from the performers'€™ view.

The head of the university'€™s publication center, Harno Dwi Pranowo, said he found there were a lot of positive things that could be learned by the modern generation from lenong, emphasizing that the book could help to record some of them.

'€œLenong is presented through performing arts and verbal communications. It needed written documentation as it is a part of Indonesian culture,'€ he said. The book was written by a team of 10 people consisting of academics and Betawi artists.

Commenting on the decreasing popularity of lenong, Harno said he was optimist that as long as there were people who keep performing and passing down the culture to the younger generations, it would survive the test of the time.

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