Overview of Rintrik

Long ago, there used to be a valley known for its beauty. A number of young couples and travellers visited the valley to witness the beauty in the past, but now it has turned into a place where young lovers come to throw away their new-born babies - even 20 or 30 babies a day. One day, an old, blind woman Rintrik appeared in the valley and started living there, and she kept burying the babies that had been thrown away even on rainy days and during a storm. Villagers, who at first were afraid of her, eventually learned to have respect for her.
One night, one young man comes to Rintrik with a baby in his arms, asking her to bury the baby. Later, there appear a young girl who is the mother of the baby and a hunter who is the father of the girl...

Danarto is a writer who deals with Mysticism, whose roots are in the spiritual ideology of Kejawen, the Javanese indigenous religion with mixed values from Hinduism, Animism, and Islam. Yano, Artistic Director of Theatre Company shelf started by interpreting/translating the text written by this author whose social, cultural, and religious contexts and values are completely different from his own. Yano endeavoured to explore the possibility of mutual understanding and the depictions of life and death, and women in Asian Literature through theatre production. This production was planned and shown as the first phase of a long-term international co-production project between Tokyo and Jakarta: The Crossing Text: Between “Mystery” and “Mystical” in Oct 2020. While Theatre Company shelf tackles Rintrik by Danarto, his creative partner Bambang Prihadi from the Lab Teater Ciputat has presented their production of Sotoba Komachi originally written by Yukio Mishima. This time, he used the knowledge and experience gained in the process of co-production over the past two years, add one more cast and will perform this as a recreation work. In the long-term international co-production project: The Crossing Text: Between “Mystery” and “Mystical”, the members of the Theatre Company shelf will stay in Jakarta after the performance in Jakarta this Dec and will collaborate with Lab Teater Ciputat for the first time face-to-face work. In the end, two theatre companies plan to co-direct and co-produce a brand-new work in October 2023, based on these two productions that each of them produced.

Direction Notes on Rintrik from Yasuhito Yano

I want to make a drastic change to the setting of Rintrik by bringing the story to a contemporary city. By contrasting the original novel’s vision of this unkempt land and field with the chaos of the city and its loneliness, In the new setting of highly disinfected contemporary city space, I want to highlight/exaggerate the old woman Rintrik’s body covered with dirt and soot, and the peculiar holiness and purity it has. It is very difficult for me to understand the ideology of Islam or that of Monotheism. However, I believe that the Animism elements of Kejawen can help me understand Danarto’s idea of God. I would like to present the story of this novel filled with the ideas of Mysticism, as an allegory for those living in this troublesome contemporary society to help them find how to survive these difficult times.