ABSTRACT
Opera Jawa, Garin Nugroho's film inspired by the Ramayana and combining traditional and contemporary Javanese music and dance in an opera setting, was a feted commission by the New Crowned Hope festival held in Vienna in 2006, as part of the commemorations of the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. In this chapter we examine how Opera Jawa operates on two different levels: On one level the film invites the national audience to challenge the historical construction of national culture through the reconstruction of the Ramayana story. On another level, as a work produced by, and circulating in, transnational space, Opera Jawa attempts to challenge the essentialized notion of "tradition" by proposing a framework of a "multicultural Java" for audiences abroad. We argue that the national and transnational stages in which Opera Jawa is situated produce tensions in the representation of such multicultural space in the film.
