Word: epical
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...After its debut at Singapore's flash new Esplanade performing-arts center, the production will embark upon an epic journey of its own?a series of shows in Europe and America that will culminate at New York City's Lincoln Center in 2005. This will be the most high-profile presentation of Indonesian performing arts abroad since the founding of the republic more than half a century...
...fine Javanese batik. Yet for Wilson, the key to any successful production lies not in its music or props but in the structure of the show, whether it be an opera starring Jessye Norman, an evening of rock theater with Lou Reed?or the staging of an ancient Bugis epic. "Paris is a beautiful city because it has a beautiful structure," he says, explaining that a harmonious overall pattern is more important than any of the individual elements that fill it. "Here in Bali we begin by creating the bones of the piece, and put on the flesh. Finally...
...germination of the show dates to 1995, when New York City-based filmmaker Rhoda Grauer was traveling in Sulawesi to research a documentary about the Bugis and learned about the epic poem. Dazzled by its dramatic potential, Grauer decided to bring the work to the stage, and recruited her friend Restu Kusumaningrum, a dancer and the creative director of Bali Purnati. Both women had previously worked with Wilson and they wanted him to stage their discovery. After their presentation at his summer workshop in Water Mill, New York, Wilson agreed to take on the project...
...Nonetheless, the production has already provoked controversy in Indonesia. One scholar objected to Grauer's abridgment of the epic's plot, although the show's four-hour running time will strike few theatergoers as scandalously brief. Some Indonesian artists are worried that the work's cultural identity, its "Indonesianness," is at risk simply because the show is directed by a Westerner. Kusumaningrum, the principal Indonesian member of the creative team, sees the controversy as evidence of Indonesia's inferiority complex: of a self-deprecating belief that the country's traditional arts are somehow not as worthy as foreign culture...
...wealth of cultures that are virtually unknown around the world," he says, and he is determined to introduce them to a wider audience. Instead of being undermined, the country's heritage can only be enriched when one of the most vitally creative men in theater revitalizes an epic tale that might otherwise have been forgotten...