Artists from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore Bring Shared Heritage to the Stage in Yogyakarta
Artists from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore will stage two new performances in Yogyakarta next week, marking the first public results of a UNESCO-backed regional collaboration to reinterpret Southeast Asia’s…
Source: UNESCO · October 7, 2026 at 1:32 PM · AI-assisted report
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YOGYAKARTA, 7 OCTOBER 2026 —
Artists from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore will stage two new performances in Yogyakarta next week, marking the first public results of a UNESCO-backed regional collaboration to reinterpret Southeast Asia’s overlapping cultural histories through theatre.
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The productions—Hutan (Forest) and Rumah dari Lidah (House of Tongue)—will premiere at the Pesta Boneka and Bedog Arts Festival, respectively, after four months of workshops and co-creation under UNESCO’s Embracing Shared Heritage through Performing Arts initiative, funded by Temasek Foundation. The project, launched in 2025, aims to challenge fixed national narratives by letting artists from the three countries explore heritage as a fluid, lived experience rather than a static tradition.
Hutan, developed by a collective including Malaysian and Indonesian performers, frames the forest as a shared cultural and ecological space, weaving together regional folklore, environmental beliefs and accessible staging techniques for neurodiverse audiences. “We didn’t start with a single story about ‘Malay’ or ‘Indonesian’ heritage,” said one of the Malaysian co-directors, who requested anonymity during rehearsals.
“The forest connects us—whether through the hutan hujan of Sabah or the hutan bakau of Java—and that’s where the common ground lies.”
The second work, Rumah dari Lidah, traces Peranakan identity across borders through fragmented memories of food, language and migration. “Peranakan heritage isn’t a monolith,” explained a Singaporean collaborator involved in the project. “It’s the nyonya lullaby sung in a Penang kampung, the babi guling recipe passed down in Semarang, the Hokkien phrases still spoken in Melaka. We wanted to make those invisible threads visible.”
The initiative reflects a broader push by UNESCO and regional funders to counter cultural fragmentation in Southeast Asia, where mobility restrictions and nationalist discourses often obscure shared histories. Temasek Foundation’s regional director noted that while artists’ movements are still constrained by visa policies, digital exchanges and in-person workshops like these “create the conditions for new narratives to emerge—ones that aren’t bound by passport lines.”
Both performances will run through October, with Hutan at Kampung Media (6–7 October) and Rumah dari Lidah at Studio Banjarmili (9–10 October). The project’s organizers said they plan to document the creative process and share it with cultural institutions in Malaysia, including the National Visual Arts Gallery (Galeri Seni Negara) and the Malaysian Heritage Centre, to spark further discussions on regional artistic collaborations.
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