Dardanella: Perintis teater Indonesia modern, duta kesenian Indonesia melanglang buana, by Jaap Erkelens

The history of theater in Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s is dominated by two traveling companies, Orion and Dardanella.Both specialized in Malaylanguage spoken-word dramas, with cabaret numbers inserted after each act of the plays.They were self-consciously modern companies integrating and re-interpreting cosmopolitan culture for local Indonesian audiences.As such, they represented a break with the komedi stambul operatic style of performance, replacing stambul's stock characters, bombastic rhetoric, and plaintive melodies with the aesthetics values of Hollywood and the jazz age.Orion was directed by the Chinese intellectual Tio Tek Djien Jr., the son of an amusement park owner from Pekalongan who had previously worked in journalism.The company's great attraction was Tio's wife, the singer-comedienne Miss Riboet, the subject of a recent study by historian Peter Keppy (2019).Riboet, commonly likened to the American comic actress and singer Mae West, was a much-loved prima donna.She even had her own line of cosmetics and pocket watches.Her many records demonstrate her considerable versatility as a performer, as she shifts easily from classical gamelan pieces to tin pan alley standards.Many of Orion's plays were written by Tio and other Sino-Malay writers, while cabaret numbers were often performed by Filipino artists recruited from the Philippines' thriving bodabil circuit.Dardanella, the subject of a new book by the late kitlv librarian Jaap Erkelens, was launched in 1926 by two Russian ex-circus performers, A. Piëdro and his mother Alvira Klimanoff.The company was founded in East Java and toured the backwaters of East Java and eastern Indonesia for years, building up a repertoire of plays and a company of actors that rivalled and ultimately surpassed Orion.As Erkelens argues, Dardanella was a multi-ethnic repertoire company that recruited and nurtured a range of theatre artists, rather than being dependent on a single big star.Its flexibility in adapting to changing tastes and different audiences fueled its longevity.Tan Tjeng Bok, nicknamed si Item (Black), was an early discovery.Billed as Java's Douglas Fairbanks, Tan was Dardanella's dashing leading man, an excellent fencer and a talented keroncong singer who had earlier toured with komedi stambul troupes.Many of the plays that Dardanella performed in the 1920s, such as The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Ivanhoe, Mark of Zorro, Sheik of Arabia, and The Thief of Bagdad were adaptations Piëdro made from European literature and Hollywood films as vehicles for Tan's talents.