Output details

Edited book 'The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama, Volume 1: Plays for the Popular Stage' (Jakarta: Lontar, 2010; ISBN 978-979-8083-70-9) and supporting journal article 'Anthologizing Indonesian Popular Theatre' (Asian Theatre Journal, vol.30, no.2 (Fall 2013), pp.508-521)

Anthologizing Indonesian Popular Theatre

The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama, Volume 1: Plays for the Popular Stage is the first volume of a series, edited by academics based in the UK, US and Canada, intended to provide access to a century of dramatic literature in the Indonesian language to world audiences through English-language translations. This annotated play anthology focuses thematically on plays from Indonesia’s popular urban theatre. Its research imperative is to trace the evolution of this type of theatre in its myriad genres, including komedi stambul, opera derma, tonil, sandiwara and lenong, from the 1890s to the 1960s, and investigate through representative texts how theatre historically responded to the needs of local audiences and shifts in local, national and global culture. The volume thus follows up on the investigator’s monograph, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903 (2006), which concerns the travels of Indonesia’s earliest trans-ethnic theatre. Though hugely popular in the past, little has been published on any of the later forms, and nothing substantial on their inter-relationships. None of the volume’s 8 plays had appeared before in translation, and 3 were previously unpublished. Considerable research was required to translate the plays due to their popular idioms, topical references and heteroglossia. In addition to contributing translations of 6 of the plays and editing the others, Cohen wrote approximately 20,000 words of introductory material outlining the history of popular theatre in Indonesia, the particulars of the genres represented and the production histories of the plays translated. Research on the plays, and popular theatre more generally, was conducted in archives and libraries in Indonesia, the UK, the US and the Netherlands between 1998 and 2005. To access the volume’s research dimensions, see the accompanying report: Cohen, ’Anthologizing Indonesian Popular Theatre,’ Asian Theatre Journal 30, no. 2 (2013): 508-521