After three centuries of colonial oppression and exploitation, it is now pay-back time. However, we, the progeny of the navy that came to get nutmeg there, are not so good at it. Because we come back to Indonesia with mass tourism, cheap clothing dyers and multinationals like Unilever. We do little else but drain the place further. Economically, but also culturally.
This could be subject for an opera. Turns out. Ine Aya premiered at the Holland Festival. An occasional collaboration between director Miranda Lakerveld and Indonesian composer Nursalim Yadi Anugerah.
Turandot
Miranda Lakerveld is from the cross-cultural department. She mixes Western traditions with those of other ancient cultures and tries to add value to them. I saw her Iranian version of Turandot (Turan Dokht) in a previous life and was moderately enthralled, especially as there was no real harmonic fusion. Iranian music and Puccini's Western were too much for different ears to yield more in consonance.
Ine Aya suffers from another artificiality. Starting from the cultural-anthropological wisdom that stories in different cultures often share similar characteristics, Lakerveld, as librettist, connected Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen with the Kayan epic Takna' Lawe'. Thus we witness how Wodan, the Germanic chief god of Wagner's created northern mythology, settles, to everyone's chagrin, in the Tree of Life that has been central to Kalimantan's nature religion for millennia. The tree dies a slow death, as might be expected, yet the play ends hopeful, as nature trumps Wodan.
Mondorgels
Nursalim Yadi Anugerah's music is firmly rooted in local traditions. Less Gamelan than you might expect, but Gamelan is also more Java than Kalimantan, he told me afterwards during a meet-and-greet. Kayan music has more horns (curious-sounding mouth organs) and there were also stringed instruments, some of them electrically amplified. The singers were a mix of classical European-trained and traditional voices, the language occasionally suddenly German. Especially when Wodan sang.
However beautiful at times, the opera was still stuck in a kind of touristy beauty. That was also a bit in the explaining news ticker in the backdrop of digital batik motifs, which mentioned the destruction of the rainforest, especially since Unilever discovered palm oil as the basis of everything. Lakerveld's approach is also firmly political, while Anugerah almost timidly avoided that word. He is particularly concerned with preserving the cultural heritage of the peoples of Kalimantan. A heritage that is so closely intertwined with the nature they live in that damage to it brings the inevitable end of culture. If he needs a flirtation with Wodan for that, so be it.
Politics
Such differences in approach were palpable, and it produced difficult thoughts on the way home: to what extent does Lakerveld, with her network, her sponsors, her certain programming in festivals, impose her will on the innovators of the local art scene, in this case Anugerah? While the latter mainly wants its music to be heard nationwide by its own people, and of course the people who once left?
What does he have to do with Wagner, a very European composer who again did draw enormously on Eastern mysticism, but of the Romantic kind? Is this cultural colonialism, or is it an outside chance to get to know the culture of such a fraught part of the world in a different, more sensitive way?
I haven't figured it out yet.
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