Environmental Theatre in the Bakaba Performance of the Kacang Manoge Community, Pesisir Selatan, West Sumatra

Abstract

Bakaba is a solo-narrator performance tradition of the southern coast of West Sumatra, in which a storyteller delivers a spoken and sung tale to the accompaniment of a three-stringed spike fiddle. Scholarship on the tradition has concentrated on its musical dimension, documenting the sung repertoire while leaving the theatrical organisation of the performance, and the mechanisms by which particular troupes remain in demand, largely unexamined. This article examines the form of one such performance and the conditions of its persistence. It analyses a five-hour staging of the tale Darito Anak Jo Minantu given by the Kacang Manoge Community at a wedding celebration in Nagari Sungai Tunu, Ranah Pesisir, on 1 June 2021, observed and recorded during fieldwork carried out between 28 May and 1 June 2021 and supplemented by interviews with five members of the troupe: its founder, its current leader, its narrator, a singer, and a fiddle player. Richard Schechner’s axioms of environmental theatre supply the analytical frame, applied to a transcript of the performance and to the interview material. The performance realises four defining features of folk traditional theatre and follows a five-part dramatic structure marked by four named types of song, sustained throughout by improvisation operating at the level of dialogue and texture rather than of plot. Its persistence rests on continually new, personally sourced tales, the inscription of spectators into the narration, patterned improvisation, and a post-performance discussion that turns listeners into future patrons.