Ketoprak

Ketoprak is another traditional theatre perform in Javanese language. The main feature is the dialogue between the player character preceded by Javanese song.

Ketoprak (also spelled Kethoprak) is a form of popular theatre accompanied by Gamelan music, from Java, Indonesia.

It is generally believed that it originated in south central Java as a rural folk form, involving singing and possibly dancing and clowning, during harvest time.

The name is said to be onomatopoeic – from the rhythmic prak, prak pounding sounds of wood against wood as rice is pounded in wooden troughs by harvesters. The form underwent radical change around 1925, developing into a full-blown theatrical genre, in which a variety of story types (Javanese legend and history, Roman toga dramas, Biblical sagas and the like) were performed by costumed actors on stage, with improvised dialogue in Javanese.

Ketoprak enjoyed enormous popularity from the start, so much so that the Dutch colonial authorities sent spies to observe performances, suspicious that it contained nationalist and Communist hidden political messages. Initially accompanied by European musical instruments, Gamelan became the customary musical accompaniment in the 1930’s, borrowing many musical items and conventions from the Wayang Kulit (shadow puppet) repertoire, but retaining the prak, prak wood-against-wood sound to introduce musical pieces and accentuate movement.

Over the years, Ketoprak has been known as the ‘drama of the little people’, with more accessible language and a greater accentuation on romantic themes than the more austere and classical Wayang Kulit of Central Java. Most plays are pseudo-historical, with little or no actual grounding in historical events, but with lavish attention to imagined customs and traditions of the historical imagination. In the 1990s, Ketoprak underwent a further evolution as it entered into the domain of television and Video Compact Disks.

Ketoprak became Ketoprak Humor (Humourous Ketoprak), with much of the flowery Javanese replaced by lingua franca Indonesian, and a great emphasis on clowning and tomfoolery. Many Ketoprak actors (particularly clowns) are contemporary Indonesian cultural icons, appearing in television ads and imitated by Indonesians around the archipelago.

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