Willibrordus S. Rendra

Willibrordus S. Rendra in the 1990s

Willibrordus Surendra Broto Rendra (born November 7, 1935 in Solo ; † August 6, 2009 in Depok ), widely known as WS Rendra , was an Indonesian playwright, poet, performer, actor and director.

Life

WS Rendra was born in Solo on Java in 1935. His father was a Catholic English teacher, his mother a palace dancer from the Sultan's court of Solo. After the Marsudirini Primary School of the Kanisius Foundation, Rendra graduated from the Senior High School in Solo until 1955, after which he studied English literature and culture at the Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta (Central Java), which he never completed because his first theater projects were already too much for him busy. In 1963 he staged a play for the first time ("Dead Voices"). Since then, he has fascinated the audience as an actor with his performative style, trained in traditional religious rituals as well as western avant-garde experiments, and with his powerful suggestive expression. Because of this he was nicknamed Burung Merak ( The Peacock ) by the press and supporters .

With his “Minimal Word Theater” or with the “Yoyga Theater Workshop” he first caused a sensation as a director in Indonesia in the 1960s. In the seventies and eighties he became one of the most important critical voices of multi-ethnic culture in the largest island state in the world (2009 approx. 240 million inhabitants): His socially critical plays based on Shakespeare , Brecht and the ancient Greeks ("The Battle of the Naga Tribe", "The Secretary of the Governors", "Mastodon", "Sekda" and "Kondor" etc.) were arguments about the social effects of the political system of dictator Suharto and were temporarily banned despite - or perhaps because of - their great popularity; later Rendra also translated works of world literature (including Aristophanes , Sophocles and Brecht) for the first time into Indonesian and staged them; thus he consolidated his role as a pioneer and leading spirit of contemporary Indonesian literature. After studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York , Rendra founded the Bengkel Theater in 1967 in order to fuse his western experiences with traditional Indonesian theater forms into something of his own. His novel productions were then intellectual provocations, the enormous artistic influence of which on the diverse Indonesian art continues to this day. Arrested by Suharto's secret police, the poet finally spent nine months in the legendary Guntur prison on the island of Buru, after which he was banned from performing, including for his experimental Bengkel theater.

From the seventies onwards, Rendra became increasingly important as a poet, his performances and poetry readings became mass events that revolutionized traditional Indonesian poetry and began to attract international attention. In 1977 an attack by a police spy (using an ammonia bomb) triggered a mass panic during a crowded event in the cultural center of the capital Jakarta , which was also attended by the vice-president and governor. Nevertheless, his novel poetry made him a world-famous poet. During the Suharto era, Rendra lived for a long time in a poor district of Jakarta, where artists from all over the world (including Günter Grass ) visited him. As the only Indonesian poet at all (next to the prose author Pramoedya Ananta Toer ) Rendra was on the list of candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times . International publications of his texts as well as numerous appearances at literary festivals around the world consolidated his fame and made his poetry one of the rare significant contributions of Indonesia to the world literature of the 20th century.

After the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 and the beginning of democratization, WS Rendra became a formative figure in the flourishing modern Indonesian literature and theater. As the patron of a spiritually open, free and socially committed Indonesian art, he inspired numerous literary and cultural projects. In 2003 Rendra hosted Indonesia's first international poetry festival (in Makassar, Solo, Bandung and Jakarta). Until his death he worked continuously on books, literary projects and productions as well as occasionally as a film actor. Although raised and raised as a Catholic, his religious interests changed from Javanese animism to the liberal tropical Islam of Indonesia. Few are known that he changed his name to Wahyu Sulaiman Rendra in 1970 and that he married three times according to the Islamic customs of Java; he leaves eleven children of three wives.

His later domicile in Depok south of Jakarta on a farm was until the end the seat of the Bengkel Theater, where Rendra lived and worked with his actors and artists and also ran ecologically and socially oriented agriculture. Many of the artists who learned their literary or acting craft here now work for famous ensembles around the world. After his seventieth birthday, increasingly affected by heart disease, Rendra, who always saw himself as a spiritual leader and political activist for spiritual tolerance and social justice, died of heart failure in a hospital in Depok in August 2009. Indonesian and international experts call him the most important poet and theater innovator of modern Indonesia.

Awards

• 1954: First Prize from the Sayembara Writing Arts Drama Section of the Faculty of Education and Culture, Gajah Mada University, Yogyakarta
• 1956: BMKN National Literature Prize
• 1970: Indonesian Government Art Prize
• 1975: Awards from the Jakarta Academy
• 1976: Main Book Prize of the Ministry of Education and Culture
• 1989: Adam Malik Award
• 1996: The SEA Writers Award
• 2006: Achmad Bakri Award

Works in German

• Secular chants and pamphlets. Horlemann 1991, ISBN 3-927905-34-8 .

In anthologies

• Give me back Indonesia. Poems. Horlemann 1994
• Jakarta Berlin. Poems. Horlemann 2002

literature

• Rainer Carle: Rendras collection of poems (1957–1972) , Reimer, Berlin 1977
• Martin Jankowski : Just having good ideas is not enough for us - conversation with WS Renda , in: Panorama 5/2004, Musta'In Verlag Berlin.
• Reading Indonesia - Notes on Literature and Society . Essays and Talks, Regiospectra Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-940132-66-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Willibrordus S. Rendra in the catalog of the German National Library
• WS Rendra in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Poet Rendra died at age 73 , Der Standard , Aug. 9, 2009

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Poet, Playwright WS Rendra Dies  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   , The Jakarta Globe, August 7, 2009 (English)