Analog to Digital in Teater Garasi’s Waktu Batu Cycle, Yogyakarta: Technology, Repetition, and Theatrical Presence

Abstract

Indonesian theatre scholarship has concentrated on traditional genres and on the political sociology of the modern stage, leaving the specifically technological reconstitution of theatrical aesthetics largely unexamined, while the international literature on digital performance has been built almost entirely on European and North American material. This article examines how digital technology has reconfigured the aesthetic conditions of contemporary Indonesian theatre, and assesses how far European media theory can describe that reconfiguration. The study is a single-case interpretive analysis of Teater Garasi’s four-production Waktu Batu cycle, staged in Yogyakarta between 2002 and 2023, with the fourth production as the focal instance. Fieldwork consisted of attendance at two performances at Artjog in June and July 2023, supplemented by a three-tier documentary corpus of company materials, published criticism, and archival recordings held by the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. Performance analysis followed a descriptive procedure in which corporeality, spatiality, tonality, and temporality were described before being read for their relations, and the fit of each imported concept was tested rather than assumed. The analysis shows that the cycle’s movement toward the digital was gradual and uneven: mediation preceded programmability, and programmability preceded responsiveness by nearly two decades. The 2023 production does not dissolve theatrical presence into mediation but holds the two in unresolved tension. The study contributes a revised analytical question for the study of technology in local performance cultures: not whether aura survives reproduction, but what kind of repetition a given technology institutes, and how it differs from the trained and fallible repetition of ritual practice.