cover
Contact Name
Farid Sathotho
Contact Email
journallocus@gmail.com
Phone
+62818462800
Journal Mail Official
journallocus@gmail.com
Editorial Address
Jl. Parangtritis km 6 Sewon, Bantul, Yogyakarta INDONESIA
Location
Kota yogyakarta,
Daerah istimewa yogyakarta
INDONESIA
Locus
ISSN : -     EISSN : 30264561     DOI : https://doi.org/10.33292/locus.v2i01
Core Subject :
Journal of Local Culture Studies is an international journal that promotes the study of art and local culture in various unique and specific aspects, covering art and cultural history, visual arts, performing arts, popular art and culture, culinary art, traditional culture, and traditional knowledge and skill systems. The journal publishes peer-reviewed research across all local arts and culture areas, drawing on various criteria such as originality, importance, or interdisciplinary relevance.
Arjuna Subject : -
Articles 20 Documents
The Role of Visual Art in Indonesian Stage and Artistic Design: Perspective, Expressionism, Constructivism, and the Readymade Nanang Arisona
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 01: June, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i01.10

Abstract

Scenography has been theorised almost entirely from European and North American practice, while Indonesian writing on tata panggung has remained largely a practical literature of stagecraft; as a result, the traffic between movements in the history of visual art and Indonesian stage practice has seldom been examined as a historical problem in its own right. This article examines how four visual art movements — Renaissance linear and atmospheric perspective, German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, and the Dadaist readymade — entered the practice of stage design (tata panggung) and artistic design (tata artistik), and asks how far each can be traced within Indonesian theatre. The study is a qualitative, historical-comparative literature study. Its corpus comprises art-historical and scenographic scholarship on the four movements, together with documentation of four Indonesian cases: the painted backdrops of Komedi Stamboel and the commercial troupes that followed it, Indonesian stage practice during the Expressionist period, the bamboo constructions of Nandang Aradea and Teater Studio Indonesia, and object-based staging in the play texts of Afrizal Malna and in Teater Sae's Proyek Hamlet. Each Indonesian case was tested against a three-level scale of evidence before any connection was asserted. The principal finding is that the relationship is not uniform but takes four distinct evidentiary forms — commercial transmission, non-transmission, documented training-based influence, and comparative resemblance — and that the familiar claim that Indonesian theatre actively adapted these movements holds, on the evidence assembled here, for one case only. The article contributes a procedure for distinguishing influence from analogy in the comparative history of local scenography.
Painting the Social Body of Balinese Youth Amid Simulacra: Ritual Space and the Digital Image Ida Bagus Made Duwipayana; I Wayan Sudiarta; I Nyoman Sila
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 01: June, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i01.11

Abstract

The circulation of Balinese ritual imagery through digital platforms has reached a scale at which the image increasingly precedes and conditions the practice it depicts. This study asks how that condition registers on the social body of Balinese youth, and whether painting can make it visible. Adopting a practice-led research design structured in four phases and closed by a documented expert-appraisal stage, the study produced and analysed a trilogy of mixed-media paintings: Dialektika Pikiran, Fun Run With Ida, and Arus Maya. The analytical framework combines Baudrillard’s second and third orders of simulacra with sociological accounts of the social body and the Balinese cosmological pairing of bhuana alit and bhuana agung. The chosen visual idiom, Wedha’s Pop Art Portrait, is treated not as decoration but as an argument: its constitutive procedure of replacing observed colour with colour judged better than the original reproduces, at the level of technique, the very logic of simulation the paintings interrogate. Analysis proceeds from described formal features to perceptual effects to theoretical claims. The findings show the trilogy staging three distinct conditions: contested consciousness, an undecidable ritual-or-screen space, and a body reconstituted as circulating data. The study concludes that the medium’s own procedures can function as a critical instrument rather than an illustration of theory, and offers this technique-as-argument approach as a transferable method for practice-led research on cultural mediation.
Liminality and Semiotic Meaning in the Brendung Rain Ritual of Sarwodadi Village, Pemalang Sabila Bahana Jagad
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 01: June, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i01.12

Abstract

Rain-invoking ritual performance in the agrarian villages of Java's north coast has been documented largely as an inventory of mystical content, with little attention to how its meanings are produced or why they take the form they do. This article examines Brendung, a ritual performance from Sarwodadi Village, Comal Subdistrict, Pemalang Regency, Central Java, built around a puppet of coconut shell and bamboo dressed as a woman and held to be entered by ancestral spirits while it dances. The study describes the form of the performance and analyses the meaning it carries for the community that sustains it. It combines Victor Turner's account of ritual process and liminality with Roland Barthes's semiotics of denotation, connotation, and myth, drawing on participant observation in Sarwodadi, interviews conducted in November 2020 with the fourth-generation ritual leader, two village officials, and a spectator from outside the village, and study of the village archive and photographic documentation. The performance is found to follow a threefold temporal structure: the lengthy preparation and purification of the puppet constitute separation, the trance dance constitutes liminality, and the closing invocation and the return of the puppet to storage constitute reaggregation. Read semiotically, the beliefs attached to the ritual, above all the rule restricting ritual leadership to one founding lineage, function less as supernatural claims than as the mechanism through which the community restores an ordinary social order that liminality had briefly suspended. Myth and ritual phase are therefore shown to be structurally interdependent rather than separable objects of study.
A Public Service Advertisement Response to Parental Phubbing: A Gramscian Hegemony and Good Eye Photography Approach Fransisca Sherly Taju; Febriyanti Pratiwi; Febi Arifianto
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 01: June, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i01.13

Abstract

Parental phubbing — a parent’s neglect of direct interaction with a child caused by absorption in a smartphone — has become a form of child neglect that has grown alongside the widening penetration of mobile devices over the past decade. A substantial psychological literature now documents its developmental consequences, yet the visual strategies through which public awareness campaigns represent and contest it remain largely unexamined. This article examines, visually and ideologically, how a photography-based public service campaign addresses parental phubbing. The corpus is the public awareness material of the “Talk to Me, Play with Me, Carry Me” campaign initiated by the Langley Infant Mental Health Collaborative in British Columbia, Canada, examined together with an earlier Indonesian campaign on child neglect arising from transferred caregiving. The design is descriptive qualitative: content, colour, and spatial organisation are analysed within Gillian Rose’s good eye framework, the result is read ideologically through Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between common sense and good sense, and the two campaigns are then compared. The analysis finds that documentary photography builds a realist impression critiquing the habit through the contrast between physical closeness and attentional distance, and that parental authority is eroded here not by an identifiable adversary but by a diffusely naturalised habit that a non-judgmental campaign works to make visible. The article contributes a visual-communication account of a phenomenon studied so far mainly in psychology, and specifies the evidentiary and reflexive limits within which such an account can be made.
Tilik and the Tradition of Visiting the Sick: Representation of Javanese Local Culture in a Semiotic Study of a Short Film Alexandri Luthfi
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 01: June, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.14

Abstract

The tradition of tilik, the collective visiting of a sick relative or neighbour, is a form of Javanese local wisdom still widely practised, and it functions as a social space in which collective values such as guyub (togetherness) and rukun (harmony) are sustained. This article examines how the short film Tilik (2018), directed by Wahyu Agung Prasetyo, represents that tradition while simultaneously exposing rasan-rasan (gossip) as a cultural practice that accompanies it. The study applies a descriptive qualitative design grounded in the triadic semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and in the orders of signification proposed by Roland Barthes. The corpus is the complete thirty-two-minute film, from which eighteen key scenes were selected against three explicit criteria and coded independently by the two authors before being synthesised into five narrative stages. The analysis finds that gossip in the film works in two directions at once: as a social adhesive that reinforces the solidarity of the group, and as an informal mechanism of control over women’s bodies and reputations that requires no formal authority. The escalation stage occupies the largest share of the analysed scenes, which indicates that the production of gossip, rather than the act of visiting, is the film’s principal narrative engine. The narrative irony of the closing scenes, in which the entire construction of gossip is shown to be false, operates as a reflexive critique of rasan-rasan culture that does not negate the value of guyub-rukun embedded in the visiting tradition. The article contributes a two-tiered reading model, moving from scene to narrative structure, and situates a culturally specific Javanese practice within the comparative literature on gossip as a near-universal social form.
The Aesthetics of Musical Integration in Wayang Kulit Purwa Performance Kasidi Kasidi
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 02: December, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.15

Abstract

Music is a decisive structural element of theatrical performance, yet the mechanism by which musical structure and dramatic form become integrated remains under-theorised, particularly in traditions where music organises rather than merely accompanies the action. Indonesian pedalangan scholarship has developed a sophisticated emic vocabulary for this integration, while international ethnomusicology has documented Javanese gamelan from without; the two bodies of work have rarely been read together. This article examines the aesthetic composition of karawitan pakeliran in wayang kulit purwa performance, asking how melodic patterns and formal gending structures interact with narrative meaning to shape a unified performance. The study is conceptual and library-based, working from a corpus of Indonesian-language pedalangan and karawitan scholarship published between 1960 and 2023, English-language ethnomusicological and anthropological studies of Java, and documented performance material for a single lakon, Irawan Rabi, read through a standardised Javanese gending compendium alongside its published English translation. The analysis follows an emic–etic procedure in which Javanese categories — sanggit, garap, mungkus, nglambari, and nyawiji — are first described in their own terms and only then read against general aesthetic theory. The findings show that the aesthetic function of gending operates on three levels: framing the dramatic action, reinforcing its mood, and merging with the unfolding narrative; that these functions are institutionalised in training repertoire rather than merely descriptive of it; and that tonal choice carries cosmological as well as dramatic weight. The article contributes an integrated account in which music, narrative, ethics, and cosmology converge.
The Persistence of Islam Aboge Adherents in the Preservation of the Among Tebal Tobacco Ritual in Temanggung, Central Java: A Review of Memory and Performance Susi Ivvaty
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 02: December, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.16

Abstract

Tobacco farmers in Temanggung Regency, Central Java, perform a sequence of rituals every planting season, beginning with nyecel (preparing the land), among tebal (the first planting of tobacco seedlings), a series of minor rites that accompany the crop's growth, and tungguk (the main harvest). Most of these farmers adhere to Islam Aboge, a strand of Javanese Islam whose life-cycle practices, natural-cycle observances, and holy-day reckonings are organized around ritual as a channel for communicating with God and the ancestors, for offering prayer, and for sustaining traditions dense with moral instruction. These rituals, which have been practiced for well over a century since tobacco cultivation took root in Java, persist because their transmission across generations has proceeded smoothly through oral means. This article examines how tobacco farmers' memory sustains the practice of ritual, particularly among tebal, and how the ritual has developed from an individual observance into a communal ritual performance involving spectators. Using a qualitative method combining ethnography and performance studies, with in-depth interviews conducted across two planting seasons (2017 and 2018) with ritual practitioners ranging from the oldest to the youngest generation of farmers, the study finds that the collective memory of tobacco farmers regarding among tebal is psychologically formed and remains stable because the community lives within a culturally homogeneous world. The development of among tebal from an individual to a communal practice reflects a process of memory transfer aimed at preserving tradition, while its further development into a ritual performance functions to reaffirm the community's identity as tobacco farmers, as adherents of Islam Aboge, and as citizens invested in sustaining their tradition.
Analog to Digital in Teater Garasi’s Waktu Batu Cycle, Yogyakarta: Technology, Repetition, and Theatrical Presence Puti Ilalang Sunyi
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 02: December, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.17

Abstract

Indonesian theatre scholarship has concentrated on traditional genres and on the political sociology of the modern stage, leaving the specifically technological reconstitution of theatrical aesthetics largely unexamined, while the international literature on digital performance has been built almost entirely on European and North American material. This article examines how digital technology has reconfigured the aesthetic conditions of contemporary Indonesian theatre, and assesses how far European media theory can describe that reconfiguration. The study is a single-case interpretive analysis of Teater Garasi’s four-production Waktu Batu cycle, staged in Yogyakarta between 2002 and 2023, with the fourth production as the focal instance. Fieldwork consisted of attendance at two performances at Artjog in June and July 2023, supplemented by a three-tier documentary corpus of company materials, published criticism, and archival recordings held by the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. Performance analysis followed a descriptive procedure in which corporeality, spatiality, tonality, and temporality were described before being read for their relations, and the fit of each imported concept was tested rather than assumed. The analysis shows that the cycle’s movement toward the digital was gradual and uneven: mediation preceded programmability, and programmability preceded responsiveness by nearly two decades. The 2023 production does not dissolve theatrical presence into mediation but holds the two in unresolved tension. The study contributes a revised analytical question for the study of technology in local performance cultures: not whether aura survives reproduction, but what kind of repetition a given technology institutes, and how it differs from the trained and fallible repetition of ritual practice.
Dramatic Structure and Auditory Acting in Indonesian Radio Advertisements Radja Restu Hardiyan
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 02: December, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.18

Abstract

Radio advertising in Indonesia has grown alongside the steady expansion of broadcast radio itself, yet the dramatic form that underlies the genre has received little sustained analysis. Radio spots, like radio drama, are built from theme, characterisation, plot, setting, and dialogue, and it is from this structure that conflict, suspense, and foreshadowing emerge as the devices that hold a listener’s attention within a few seconds of airtime. This article examines how these dramatic elements are constructed in Indonesian national radio advertisements and considers what theatrical knowledge and training contribute to their production. Working from a structuralist framework drawn from dramatic theory, the study analyses a corpus of fifteen national radio advertisements broadcast in Indonesia in the mid-2000s, with two spots for Kartu As (Telkomsel) and Clear Man (Unilever) examined in detail as representative cases of dialogic and monologic construction respectively. The analysis shows that both advertisements follow Gustav Freytag’s dramatic plot scheme of exposition, complication, climax, resolution, and conclusion, that characterisation in the genre is necessarily flat and setting is only sketched rather than stated, and that the announcer functions, alongside dialogue and sound effect, as a structural device without an equivalent in conventional stage drama. The study further finds that theatrical competence, particularly playwriting and the vocal and breathing techniques associated with auditory acting, directly improves the craft of radio-advertisement production. The article contributes an explicit structural model for reading Indonesian radio advertising as a form of short radio drama and identifies a concrete point of connection between theatre training and the advertising industry.
Environmental Theatre in the Bakaba Performance of the Kacang Manoge Community, Pesisir Selatan, West Sumatra Rinasari Rinasari; Hirwan Kuardhani
Journal of Local Culture Study Vol. 2 No. 02: December, 2024
Publisher : Research And Social Study Institute

Show Abstract | Download Original | Original Source | Check in Google Scholar | DOI: 10.33292/locus.v2i02.19

Abstract

Bakaba is a solo-narrator performance tradition of the southern coast of West Sumatra, in which a storyteller delivers a spoken and sung tale to the accompaniment of a three-stringed spike fiddle. Scholarship on the tradition has concentrated on its musical dimension, documenting the sung repertoire while leaving the theatrical organisation of the performance, and the mechanisms by which particular troupes remain in demand, largely unexamined. This article examines the form of one such performance and the conditions of its persistence. It analyses a five-hour staging of the tale Darito Anak Jo Minantu given by the Kacang Manoge Community at a wedding celebration in Nagari Sungai Tunu, Ranah Pesisir, on 1 June 2021, observed and recorded during fieldwork carried out between 28 May and 1 June 2021 and supplemented by interviews with five members of the troupe: its founder, its current leader, its narrator, a singer, and a fiddle player. Richard Schechner’s axioms of environmental theatre supply the analytical frame, applied to a transcript of the performance and to the interview material. The performance realises four defining features of folk traditional theatre and follows a five-part dramatic structure marked by four named types of song, sustained throughout by improvisation operating at the level of dialogue and texture rather than of plot. Its persistence rests on continually new, personally sourced tales, the inscription of spectators into the narration, patterned improvisation, and a post-performance discussion that turns listeners into future patrons.

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