PERFORMANCE, FROM FESTIVAL TO FILM
Public performance, we have seen in earlier chapters, was the Southeast Asian social activity par excellence, playing the cohesive role for palace, temple, village occupied by the written word in China and parts of Europe. Print had little impact in popular culture until the twentieth century, and we should look rather to the world of theater, recitation, procession, and display for the trans- mission of shared knowledge and values. Patronizing such spectacles had central concern of palaces until they made their own exit in the nineteenth century, or withdrew to less centra Prabang, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta. cultural capitals" like Hue, Luang In rural areas the festivals, pilgrimage sites, and larger weddings and funerals provided the patronage to sustain both peripatetic full-time performers and villagers who would turn their hand to the arts in the post-harvest dry season. The traditions of theater, dance, puppetry, and recitation continued and developed, even though peasantization and poverty reduced the scale of such patronage
Meanwhile, a different cultural space developed in the polyglot coastal cities, where quite new forms developed out of cultural interaction and techni cal innovation. The years around 1900 seem again to have been decisive in creating indigenous or hybrid majorities in most of these cities, who became only consumers but sponsors and creators of new forms of performance Public urban spaces had long been the venue for Chinese big Chinese festivals and weddings. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were sometimes rendered in Malay or Thai and included local-born female singers, many of them not Chinese by any definition. Nevertheless, Chinese opera changed little in form and content no matter how hybrid the audiences Like European theater, it became more torok (China-born or pure) in the late nineteenth century as steamships allowed troupes from south China to try their luck among the wealthy Chinese diaspora. The Vietnamese variant at tuong or hat bot) made the transition to a kind of secular national theater e nineteenth century, as King Tu Duc (1847-83) had theaters built for it in the central region he best controlled.
In contrast to the open-air style of most Southeast Asian performance, European theater developed in enclosed theaters with paying patrons in the nineteenth century port-capitals, the new bourgeois model. The British and French colonial authorities invested much in theater both as solidarity-make ers for the colonial elite and symbols of the mission civilisatrice. Raffles already had a theater opened in Batavia during his governorship there, and Singapor in turn had its early venues. Singapore's classical Town Hall was built in the 1850s to accommodate performances, which moved to the Victoria Theatre in 1901. The Opera Houses of Saigon (901) and Hanoi (1910) were (and are) the grandest buildings of the two cities, able to accommodate 1,800 and 900 people respectively. Private initiative was more important in Dutch and Spanish colonies. Handsome neo-classical theaters (schouwburg) were erected in Batavia (182), opening with a local production of Shakespeare's Othello and in Surabaya (1854).In Manila a circus-like wooden building was upgraded to become first theTeatro Nacional in 1890, and then the Manila Grand Opera House under the Americans in time to receive a touring Italian opera troupe in 1902
With the advent of regular steam-shipping routes, international tourin companies and performers became ever more frequent. Some would stop only with the steamers at Rangoon, Singapore, Batavia, and Surabaya on their w to Australia, or at Singapore and Saigon on their way to Hong Kong and Japan others toured the provincial centers, spending weeks or months in the region before moving on. It may have been touring French players who so popularized the term comédie for indoor paying theater that it passed into urban Malay.The schouwburg of Batavia and other centers became known as the gedung komedi theater house), while komedi tents and arenas sprouted throughout the Archipelago covering every type of show. opera may have been the most prestigious, but Russian circuses, Indian magicians, American vaudeville, Chinese jugglers, and Japanese acrobats were more popular in urban societies of diverse languages and taste
A bewildering variety ofshows passed through the urban space of Southeast Asia around the turn of the century, offering precious opportunities for its plural populations to wonder and laugh at each other. "Komedi culture was transregional, brash, and unapologetically oriented to all that was ephemeral and novel. It was the culture of the (urbanl masses, volatile and sensitive to public taste and opinion" (Cohen 2006, 21). It also had profound effects on older and purer theatrical traditions. Dance drama performed by human actors was best able to adapt to polyglot urban audiences, especially when the role of clowns was extended to provide slapstick interludes making playful use of different languages. The Bama zat pwe, Khmer lakhon khol, Thai lakhon nai, Vietnamese hat boi, East Java ludruk, and palace-derived central Java toayang l responded to the demands of urban audiences for more spectacula effects and costumes, male and female actor/dancers, comedic interludes that crossed cultures, and an often boisterous paying public inside an enclosed rather than court or festival patronage The most phenomenal success attended new commercial romance genres born of the early twentieth century using an innovative mix of Vietnamese cai luong literally "reformd theatre," mostly derived from har bo),Thai likay, a popularized court drama and Javanese ketoprak, a hybrid form with dance, spoken Javanese dialogue and Western instruments as well as gamelan. In the 1920s,viet Nam and Siam were each supporting several hundred professional troupes and Java about Local Sino-Southeast Asian mediation was often essential in providing the capital and commercial know-how to support the innovative methods of indigenous actors and directors.
The period rise to hybrid genres more influenced by foreign local demand proprieties. Parsi troupes having already developed hybridized popular forms in India, were also a hit cities of Asia in the 1870s and 1880s. It was in Penang that local Indian and Arab entrepreneurs sought to replicate their style in Malay though adding actresses rather than the all-male Indian style. One leading group established in 1885 was named Indra Bangsawan after its most popu lar Malay tale, and the term bangsawan stuck for this genre. It developed a novel degree of professionalism and stagecraft, touring the cities of Malaya and Netherlands India with large troupes, Indian-style musicians elaborate costumes, and stage props. In contrast with its high Malay language and Indian inspiration, komedi stambul developed first in Surabaya with low Malay for its even more polyglot audience and European musical and theater models. Its early repertoire was taken from the Arabian Nights stories Baghdad, which may account for the exotically of that name was formed in 1891 with primarily Eurasian actors initially, but Chinese capital and management.The dominating figures were the high-school educated actor, director, and talented composer Auguste Mahieu (1865-1903) and multilingual impresario Yap Gwan Mahieu went on to direct a number of companies, touring Java, Sumatra and Malaya with a variety of musical romances. This genre of theater had many emulators over three decades, and prepared multilingual audiences for the advent of film. It well represented the excitement and scandal of crossing boundaries of race, gender, and class as these were becoming harder and more contested
The European model was most influential in the Philippines where Christian festivals were enlivened by popular vernacular theater, including Moro-Moro romances (also called komedya) climaxing with battles between Christians and Muslims, and the passion of Christ (pason or sinakulo) during Holy Week before Easter. A secular romantic light opera, zarzuela, was popularized in Spain in the 1850s and spread quickly to Manila. It was an immediate hit with music-loving Filipinos and companies were formed throughout the provinces. The same creative moment around 1900 that saw the creation of other popular stage genres in the region also witnessed the vernacularization of zarzuela to sarsuela, musical romances that also experimented with contemporary themes including the revolution against pain. Severino Reyes (1861-1942) in 1902 founded the most successful of the many professional companies that flourished in the new century, the Gran Compania de Zarzuela Tagala. Among its first hits was "Not Wounded" (Walang bout heroic guerrilla fighters and their loves.
All these popular new forms flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, and faded before the onslaught of in the 1930s. Even though steadily losing this battle, live theater held on in rural areas. James Brandon 01967, 172-3) could still document over 1,100 professional theater troupes in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, twenty times density to population of th United States. All combined music with the dancing puppets, but in a bewildering variety of forms. Performance, more than the written word, continued to create common meanings and values in this transition to commercial modernity.
The earliest experimental cinema spread quickly along the steamer routes of Asia within a few years of 1895, when the Lumiere Brothers showed the first commercial films in Paris. Short documentaries were shown in Manila, Singapore, Batavia, and Bangkok as early as 1897, and quickly fitted in to the komedi niche of commercial popular entertainment. The first short films, including clips shot locally as early as 1898 in Manila, were typically shown as part of a more extensive vaudeville routine.The first dedicated cinema