Modern musical revives ancient tale of love

Once she sang of joyful morning birds; no longer. As she throws herself at the feet of her beloved husband, Sri Tanjung releases the primal scream of a woman betrayed.

This is a song of exquisite pain -- the kind of pain a woman feels when her faithful adoration, love and innocence are shattered by her loved one's senseless distrust.

"My love, you choose to believe the winds and hearsay, and doubt my devotion, the woman, who through the longest of days, the darkest of nights, has prayed for your safe return, has longed for nothing but your love," she says, sobbing in desperation.

Her plea is in vain; her husband's heart has been poisoned by jealousy. His ears hear nothing but the sound of his own hatred screaming for retribution. His eyes see nothing but the images of his wife succumbing to another man's desire.

At that moment, Sida Paksa, a passionate lover and a fierce warrior, realizes there is only one thing left to say, something that cannot be said with words.

As he turns his back on Sri Tanjung, the only love of his life, Sida Paksa understands that now he will not need love any longer. His heart turns to stone.

And at that moment, Sri Tanjung realizes that the end is near and only her demise will prove her chastity.

There are no tears when the princess clasps her hands and prays. There is no hesitation when Sida Paksa draws his kris and drives it silently through his wife's heart.

There is no sound when the earth embraces her fallen daughter. Her blood, crimson red as any blood would be, exudes a fragrance like no other blood could.

This is a fragrance that forces Sida Paksa to kneel and cry in anguish, realizing that he has just committed the most foolish and tragic mistake of his life.

This was the most touching and powerful scene in Sri Tanjung: The Scent of Innocence, a contemporary musical performed at the newly renovated Ksirarnawa theater in Denpasar's Art Center in late December.

The musical is the ongoing project of the Denpasar-based Arti Foundation, a cultural group that for years has sought to construct contemporary interpretations and forms of traditional and classical Balinese performing arts.

"Tonight we are performing only eight scenes out of the total 14 scenes we are currently working on," Sri Tanjung's director and Arti's founder Kadek Suardana said on the night.

Suardana, an award-winning director and composer, has the aesthetic penchant of a chemist. He loves to combine elements from different cultures or from different periods of history to create dramatic works that are refreshingly new and disturbingly familiar all at the same time.

His various takes on Shakespeare's Macbeth -- one in the 1980s that incorporated the traditional Balinese masked dance drama Topeng and one in the late 1990s that fully dissolved the European story into the realm of the classical and refined Balinese opera Gambuh -- breathed a new energy into the island's theater as well as earning Suardana national and international praise.

Sri Tanjung is his most recent obsession and the most-consuming one, finance-wise.

Suardana has already ploughed more than Rp 100 million (US$9,500) of his own money into the play's planning and initial stages, which included a field trip and literary research into various areas in East Java, where locals believe Sri Tanjung is a historical figure and not merely a fictitious character in ancient literature.

"The story has long and strong roots in the local cultures, so we want to get to know the forms of the local performing arts, the sounds of their music and their spirituality," he said.

Mari Nabeshima, Suardana's Japanese-born wife and one of Sri Tanjung's main scriptwriters, traveled to various historical sites in Java to gain firsthand knowledge about the story.

She looked at the relief of the story in Candi Panataran, Blitar, and Candi Surawana, Kediri, which gave her a glimpse of how the story was depicted visually in times long gone.

"I believe that we must at least understand the original context of a literary text before we began constructing a new interpretation of that text," she said.

Suardana's Sri Tanjung is based on the 17th century tale Kidung Sri Tanjung originating from Banyuwangi, East Java. In Bali, the story once gained popularity as the theme of a traditional Arja dance-drama, but has since been forgotten by modern Balinese.

Suardana's meticulous efforts have not been in vain. The trial performance on that Tuesday night drew a demanding crowd, which included some of the island's most prominent scholars, performers and critics -- not to mention the island's vice governor, AA Ngurah Puspayoga, an avid art lover who also served as the play's artistic consultant.

This tough audience's warm reception of the musical was more than enough to have Suardana grinning with joy.

"The performance is deep and touching," prominent scholar I Made Bandem said. "Kadek (Suardana) has succeeded in creating a musical in which the music, dance and dialogue have achieved an aesthetic fusion so complete that they amplified each other in delivering the philosophical message of the story."

The full version of the musical will be performed in Denpasar on Feb. 27 and 28 and in Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (GKJ) in early March. Sri Tanjung will then tour Europe.