Epic Feat; Staging an obscure Sulawesi tale.(Indonesian epic tale adapted for the stage)

Byline: Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop

It's hardly surprising that few people outside the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have ever heard of the epic tale of "Sureq Galigo." The story, about a pair of golden twins descended from the gods who possibly commit incest and ultimately destroy their world, is 6,000 pages long and written in the obscure Indonesian dialect of Old Bugis, a language few people understand today. These folio pages--written between the 14th and 17th centuries and believed by locals to be based on actual events--have never been translated into English or compiled into a single manuscript. They remain scattered around Indonesia, with a large chunk in Holland.

Now the story may finally reach a larger audience. This week Singapore's Esplanade Theatre will present the world premiere of "I La Galigo," a four-hour music and dance production based on the ancient tale and performed entirely without dialogue. The production will tour in Europe later this year, and end up at New York's Lincoln Center in 2005. Rhoda Grauer, a 59-year-old filmmaker and dramaturge, first got the idea for "I La Galigo" back in 1997, when she heard about the text while researching another project. She worked closely with a small group of "Galigo" scholars to shape a script. "'Sureq Galigo' is one of the great epics of the world, not because of its massive size, but first and foremost because of its poetic power and narrative genius," says Roger Tol, director of the Jakarta office of the Dutch Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology. "It is really first-class world literature."

The epic depicts the creation of the world and the battles, loves and adventures of the first six generations of Bugis. It centers on the relationship between a pair of twins, who are separated at birth and each grow up to marry and have children with someone else. Later in life, they meet, fall in love and vow that their children will marry. This decision--essentially promoting incest--provokes chaos, as the gods of the Upper and Under worlds call back their descendants. Eventually, the twins go back to the Middle World, but the gates connecting the three worlds are closed permanently.

Grauer enticed Robert Wilson, the Texas-born director famed for his avant-garde style and striking visual images, to bring the tale to the stage. Wilson says he decided to make the entire cast Indonesian because they would be ...