The Role of Visual Art in Indonesian Stage and Artistic Design: Perspective, Expressionism, Constructivism, and the Readymade

Abstract

Scenography has been theorised almost entirely from European and North American practice, while Indonesian writing on tata panggung has remained largely a practical literature of stagecraft; as a result, the traffic between movements in the history of visual art and Indonesian stage practice has seldom been examined as a historical problem in its own right. This article examines how four visual art movements — Renaissance linear and atmospheric perspective, German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, and the Dadaist readymade — entered the practice of stage design (tata panggung) and artistic design (tata artistik), and asks how far each can be traced within Indonesian theatre. The study is a qualitative, historical-comparative literature study. Its corpus comprises art-historical and scenographic scholarship on the four movements, together with documentation of four Indonesian cases: the painted backdrops of Komedi Stamboel and the commercial troupes that followed it, Indonesian stage practice during the Expressionist period, the bamboo constructions of Nandang Aradea and Teater Studio Indonesia, and object-based staging in the play texts of Afrizal Malna and in Teater Sae's Proyek Hamlet. Each Indonesian case was tested against a three-level scale of evidence before any connection was asserted. The principal finding is that the relationship is not uniform but takes four distinct evidentiary forms — commercial transmission, non-transmission, documented training-based influence, and comparative resemblance — and that the familiar claim that Indonesian theatre actively adapted these movements holds, on the evidence assembled here, for one case only. The article contributes a procedure for distinguishing influence from analogy in the comparative history of local scenography.