Fredrik deBoer

Kathy Foley

Fredrik de Boer was a professor of Theatre at Wesleyan University who was a central figure in research on Balinese dance drama and shadow puppetry (wayang parwa). His teaching and articles shed new light on Southeast Asian theatre in its historical specificity and changing cultural framework. Kathy Foley is a professor of theatre arts at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz and editor of Asian Theatre Journal.

Fredrik (Fritz) Eugene deBoer (19371997) established Asian performance as a discipline in the Theatre Department of Wesleyan University, where he taught from 1963 to 1997, creating a cadre of students who would go on to contribute to the field. In terms of performance he was a dalang (puppet master) of Balinese wayang parwa shadow theatre, and he became a central force in the study of Balinese dance and drama through his writing. He was also known for his service: editing Bali Arts and Culture News from 1980 until his death and founding the Society for Balinese Studies in 1985 with Hildred Geertz, A. A. Djelantik, and Heidi Hinzler. In 1993 he was awarded the Dharma Kusuma (Flower of Duty), Balis highest civilian honor. While his study embraced all Balinese culture, he was most devoted to the wayang of Bali (Fig. 1). After graduating in 1954 from University High School in Urbana, Illinois, deBoer went to Antioch College (BA in Theatre, 1959). He received an MA in directing from Sarah Lawrence, studied directing with Gene Frankl, and earned a PhD (1965, University of Wisconsin) with the dissertation George Lillo. A. C. Scott was developing a pro-

Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 28, no. 2 (Fall 2011). 2011 by University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.

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gram in Asian theatre at the University of Wisconsin as deBoer was finishing, so it is possible that deBoer was impacted by that departments movement toward Asian work (for more information on Scott, see the article on Liu in this issue). As deBoer began at Wesleyan in 1963, he was exposed to a music department helping invent American ethnomusicology under the name world music. Robert E. Brown had

Figure 1. Fredrik deBoer performs Balinese wayang. (Photo: John Emigh)

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come to Wesleyan in 1961 from UCLA, bringing the bimusicality training model of practice of non-Western music, and he brought in master artists like Prawotosaputro ( Javanese gamelan) and Dalang Oemartopo. DeBoer studied with the latter in Browns summer program for ASEA/Center for World Music (for more information see the article on John Emigh in this issue, including note 1 [462]). DeBoer would eventually begin studying gamelan at Wesleyan with Pak Sumarsam in 1973 (Sumarsam 2010). DeBoers interests included Artauds ideas of theatre and the use of improvisation (he studied with Viola Spolin in 19651967). Both these influences prepared him to appreciate Balinese wayang where the dalang uses ritual, music, light, song, and movement as well as words as he improvises within a set structure. DeBoer worked professionally with Joseph Chaikins Open Theatre in New York (19671970), and he invited Chaikin to Wesleyan to help put students in contact with the groups ideals of political engagement, ritual, and intensity of audience-performance interaction. DeBoer created Genesis I (1970) and Genesis II (1971) with Chaikin at Wesleyan. Stephen Policoff, who now teaches writing at New York University, was a student in the early years who later collaborated with deBoer on four major projects: I met Fritz deBoer my first week of classes [1966] at Wesleyan University. By chance, I had been placed in a humanities workshop on contemporary theater that he was teaching. That first day, I lay on the floor of Wesleyans 92 Theater, as the young, somewhat wild-eyed Fritz exhorted us. Artaud says we must be as victims at the stake, signaling to each other through the flames! he declaimed. This is a workshop in transformation. And you will be transformed. And I was (Policoff 2010). DeBoers directing choices throughout his long career (more than fifty productions) show his taste for the new, the politically charged, and the experimental (Gertrude Stein, Genet, Brecht, van Itallie, Policoff, Fornes, Beckett, etc.). Few productions were directly focused on Balinese themes, but the Balinese intertwining of the comic and the exorcistic power of performance surely impacted his creative work. Two works that used Balinese material were Conquest of Bali (Policoff and deBoer, 1979), about the fall of the island to the Dutch, and Jayaprana (1988), a story of doomed lovers. Policoff describes The Conquest of Bali as a multimedia spectacle. He continues: We collaborated with I Made Bandem and various others. It was an extraordinary production. . . . Fritz was one of the most gifted directors I ever knew. . . . I still miss him. Now and then, he shows up in my dreams, exhorting me as he did on that first day (Policoff 2010). DeBoer, who could be a demanding director and teacher, was signaling through the flames. Even deBoers early papers at confer-

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ences indicated his quest: black participation in American theatre in 1964, improvisation in 1967, and the Open Theatre in 1968. He was seeking new configurations for theatre. In 1973 he participated in a summer program sponsored by the American Society for Eastern Arts/Center for World Music. He encountered Balinese wayang parwa through I Nyoman Sumandhi and studied Javanese wayang with Oemartopo (he also studied Javanese wayang with Sutrisno). Sumandhi initiated him in Balinese wayang, and was later deBoers collaborator in research and his student, earning an MA from Wesleyan in 1979. But Sumandhis father, Dalang I Nyoman Rajeg, would become deBoers real guru for padalangan (art of the dalang). DeBoer returned to the Center for World Music in Berkeley in summer of 1974, and I shared two classes with him. We learned the Balinese lakon (play) Arjuna Wiwaha (Arjunas Wedding) from Sumandhi and Brajamusti (about the eponymous antagonist who tries to kill the young hero Gatotkaca) in wayang golek purwa sunda (rod puppetry style of West Java) with Dalang Rudjita Soehayapoetra. Soon thereafter, deBoer was in Bali with Pak Rajeg, studying in Tunjuk, Tabanan, and sometimes crossing paths with San Francisco dalang Larry Reed, who was also Rajegs student. At Wesleyan, deBoer was helping Pak Sumarsam with the Javanese wayang kulit performances as a musician and crafting synopses for program notes (Sumarsam 2010). By 1977 deBoer had established his own wayang parwa troupe, Shadow Theatre East, presenting for the Asia Society, the Theatre Project in Baltimore (in a joint program with I Wayan Suweca and John Emigh performing topeng mask dance), and various universities. He also facilitated both Balinese and Javanese artists Wesleyan performance presentations and, more crucially, scholarships for graduate study through grants from the JDR 3rd Fund, the Ford Foundation, Fulbright, and the Institute for International Education. He established a good relationship between the music department and theater department, serving as an adviser on music PhD committees (I Made Bandem); supporting dance dramas like Bagawan Ciptoning (19781979), which tells the story of Arjunas Wedding; and, near the end of his career, planning a co-taught course, Music and Theater of Indonesia. Though deBoers death in 1997 meant that music professor Pak Sumarsam taught the course alone, the outline and course description still remain largely what deBoer and he drafted (Sumarsam 2010). Most of the other classes deBoer taught remained largely the staples of American theatre departments (acting, directing, theatre history, the avant garde). But he also developed a new class, Theatre and Dance in Balinese Culture, in which students were exposed to puppet, mask, and improvisation structures of Balinese work. Cobina Gillitt,

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who teaches Southeast Asian theatre at New York University, took this course to fulfill a theatre requirement. She notes: I had been focusing on French drama and didnt even know where Indonesia was! His knowledge about and enthusiasm and love for Balinese culture and arts literally changed my life. As soon as I graduated from college, I went to Bali, studied topeng, . . . and my life since has been devoted to Indonesian performing arts (Gillitt 1997). Other students who found deBoers influence important include Mark Sussman at Concordia College in Montreal, who has worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and is artistic co-director of Great Small Works, a politically engaged New York puppet collective. Sussman credits deBoer with inspiring his career direction, which combines performance studies and work in professional puppetry (Sussman 2010). Claire Conceison (Duke University), an important scholar of contemporary Chinese theatre, is another of the BA students who deBoer inspired to study Asian forms. Bharatanatyam dancer Kay Poursine earned an MA under him. While deBoers early research and creative work mostly involved directing, as he transitioned into full professor he began publishing on Balinese theatre; he had found something about which he had to write. In Bali he saw many of the aspects of theatre that interested him as a performer-director come together: ritual intensity, improvisation, openness to political and social commentary, and perhaps an ability to bridge an American conundrum, how the performer could break the customary hierarchy of creation. Twentieth-century American theatres script-director-actor relationship was subverted in forms like wayang parwa, in which the performer was the director and author, but able to improvise his performance within well-understood artistic constraints that guaranteed a rich outcome. DeBoers research method combined practical doing with querying the major artists of each genre, the model espoused in ethnomusicology at UCLA and imported to Wesleyan and Center for World Music classes. In addition to learning wayang from Pak Rajeg and Sumandhi, who later led the High School of the Arts (SMKI) in Denpasar, deBoer studied dance with I Made Bandem, who earned his PhD from Wesleyan in 1980 and would head the Balinese College of Performing Arts (ASTI) and would hold other significant positions in Indonesia. Bandem became deBoers coauthor on the important book Kaja and Kelod: Balinese Dance in Transition (Bandem and deBoer 1981), articles (deBoer and Bandem 1978; 1983), and a translation (deBoer and Bandem 1992). I Nyoman Catra, a topeng dancer par excellence who came to Wesleyan as a Fulbright scholar, is someone deBoer also credits as a teacher. Sumandhi, Bandem, and Catra were already important figures

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in Balinese arts and education. But, in part because of the successful degrees and publication projects done with deBoer and others, they would advance more quickly in the Indonesian academic system and be stronger forces in molding the directions of late twentieth-century Balinese performance and scholarship. In writing, deBoer, unlike previous Westerners, was careful to recognize his Balinese counterparts as co-authors, not just informants. He made sure that I Made Bandem was listed as first author on Kaja and Kelod. The pair used, as organizing principles, the 1970 Balinese theorizations that categorized arts from the sacred (wali) to semi-ritual (bebali) to secular (balibalihan). The book shows how these terms reflect local cosmology of mountain (associated with the holy and kaja) to sea (associated with the demonic and/or secular and kelod). The text gives a 1970s snapshot of most of the major forms. It was an important update on the 1938 Beryl de Zoete and Walter Spies volume, but written in accessible language with clear organization, and it lifted Balinese performance out of the anthropological present and historicized it. This book, thirty years later, remains one of the major sources on Balinese dance and drama. DeBoer also co-authored with Bandem articles on the operadance genre arja (1983) and gambuh (1978), an old court genre that uses stories drawn from the tale of Panji, a prince of East Java. Gambuh was then in a moment of restoration (due largely to Bandems position at ASTI, the Denpasar academy of the arts). DeBoer also wrote solo on sendratari the post-1965 dance drama genre, showing its recent development into colossal productions in the context of the hugely popular Bali Arts Festival (deBoer 1989). But the writing closest to deBoers heart was probably his work on wayang. His article on Pak Rajeg (1979) honors his teacher. DeBoers translation of one of Rajegs pakem (written version of a standard story) documents this masters classic style (1987a). With Bandem, deBoer also translated Death of Kumbakanra (1992) by I Ketut Madra, the wildly popular Dalang Blue Jeans of the early 1970s. These translations display the specificity of each dalangs style as well as showing aspects of the relatively stable structure, which helps readers understand Balinese wayang. DeBoer also documented the importance of clown characters in wayang (1987b). Cumulatively, deBoers writings, both on his own and with others, are crucial documents to understanding Balinese drama and dance of the 1970s1990s. DeBoers legacy continues at Wesleyan. Ron Jenkins, who has followed his model of hosting Balinese artists as performers and students and has similarly co-authored work with Balinese authors (I Nyoman Catra), writes:

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In 1978 when I returned to America from a yearlong fieldwork in Bali my first introduction to the network of scholars and artists who shared my passion for Asia came from Fritz deBoer who invited me to Wesleyan to collaborate on a performance that displayed gamelan, shadow puppets, masks, and dance staged by Indonesians and Westerners in an inspired montage [Conquest of Bali]. When Fritz passed away almost twenty years later he bequeathed to me his prized collection of shadow puppets that played key roles in the productions I staged in Boston with western and Balinese performers. Eventually in 1999 I was invited to join the faculty at Wesleyan, a decision I attribute to the puppets wanting to return to the place where they were animated so artfully by Fritz. . . . Fritz collection of hand-carved Balinese shadow puppets are still at Wesleyan, presiding in spirit over the many classes, performances, and written works that might never have been created if Fritz had not breathed life into their leather forms with an inimitable voice that still echoes long after his departure. ( Jenkins 2010)

In object theatre deBoer found the genre he had dreamed of as an experimental performer and director. At Wesleyan he found an environment that welcomed collaboration between theatre and music. In Bali he found the kind of theatre he was working to create on American soil. On his death he wanted donations to go to the areas Notable Tree Fund, which he helped establish. He was planting the final kayon, the tree of life.
NOTE I thank Ron Jenkins, Stephen Policoff, Mark Sussman, Leslie Weinberg, John Emigh, Sumarsam, Valerie Gillispie and Olin Library, Christian Milik, Lois deBoer, Cobina Gillitt, Claire Conceison, and Kirstin McQweeney for help on this article. REFERENCES Bandem, I Made, and Fredrik deBoer. 1981. Kaja and Kelod: Balinese Dance in Transition. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. [Revised 1995 as Balinese Dance in Transition: Kaja and Kelod.] deBoer, Fredrik. 1979. Pak Rajegs Life in Art: Biography of a Balinese Dalang. The Drama Review 23 (2): 5762. , trans. 1987a. The Dimba and Dimbi of I Nyoman Rajeg: A Balinese Shadow Play in Translation. Asian Theatre Journal 4 (1): 76101.

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. 1987b. Functions of the Comic Attendants (Panasar) in Balinese Shadowplay. In Humor and Comedy in Puppetry: A Celebration of Popular Culture, ed. Joel and Dina Sherzer, 79105. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press. . 1989. Balinese Sendratari, A Modern Balinese Dramatic Dance Genre. Asian Theatre Journal 6 (2): 179193. deBoer, Fredrik, and I Made Bandem. 1978. Gambuh: Classical Dance-Drama. Asian Music 10 (1): 115127. . 1983. Notes on the Development of Arja Dance-drama. Indonesia Circle 30 (March): 2832. , trans. 1992. The Death of Kumbakarna of I Ketut Madra: A Balinese Wayang Ramayana Play, Asian Theatre Journal 9 (2): 141200. de Zoete, Beryl, and Walter Spies. 1938. Dance and Drama in Bali. London: Faber and Faber. Gillitt, Cobina. 1997. Gamelan Archives, Gamelan Listserv, 13 May, http://listserv.dartmouth .edu/scripts/wa.exe?A0=GAMELAN, accessed 16 December 2010. Jenkins, Ron. 2010. E-mail. 15 December. Policoff, Stephen. 2010. E-mail, 16 December. Sumarsam. 2010. E-mail, 20 December. Sussman, Mark. 2010. E-mails, 16 and 20 December.

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