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Translated and introduced by Matthew Isaac Cohen
Many of the rich theatrical cultures of Indonesia have yet to receive adequate attention by scholars. This translation of The Incantation of Semar Smiles provides an introduction to one of these genres-tarling, performed primarily in north-coastal West Java. This musical melodrama, with book, lyrics, and music by Pepen Effendi and released by the audiocassette company Prima in 1994, represents a new development in the history of the theatrical form. Dialogue for all previous live stage productions and recordings is largely improvised and songs are stock. In contrast, Fendi's operetta of jilted love and magical revenge is almost completely prescripted and musically throughcomposed.
Matthew Isaac Cohen is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork on theatrical cultures in Java, Indonesia. He is currently a postdoctoral
research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, the Netherlands, in the "Performing Arts of Asia: Tradition and Innovation " program and is working on a book on shadow puppet theatre in the Cirebon region. His "Balikan: A Ritual Drama for Shadow Puppet Theatre" is forthcoming from the Lontar Foundation.
Ajian Semar Mesem (The Incantation of Semar Smiles) is a musical-drama for tarling, a popular operetta or musical melodramatic form of the Cirebon region of north-coastal West Java, Indonesia. Tarling is a hybrid theatre amalgamating exogenous and endogenous cultural streams of influence. In its stories, music, acting styles, and dramaturgy, it draws directly and indirectly from Javanese folk clowning and social dancing traditions as well as nineteenth-century British melodrama, television, Java's classical tradition of gamelan (gongchime) music, Portuguese ballad singing, and Middle Eastern and Indian popular music. Tarling has much in common with other socalled syncretic theatres found around the postcolonial world, such as Concert Party in Ghana and natakam in Tamil Nadu. Although there are striking affinities among many of these forms, each has its own unique characteristics and autonomous history.1
The contemporary performance practice of tarling, as well as its history, is characterized by unusual juxtapositions and disjunctures. Johannes Fabian's comments regarding popular theatre in urbanindustrial Africa are apropos for Southeast Asia. Such forms, he says, owe their existence, not to a more or less predictable evolution following some general laws or patterns, but to specific constellations,...