What an honour to be invited to present in the Australia Indonesia Forum on Arts Culture and The Creative Economy on August 27 2025, which was organised by Creative Australia and the Indonesian Consulate of Sydney. I have never presented in this context before and was both nervous and excited to share my personal experience, which in a sense feels quite vulnerable, as my experience has not been straightforward. But also it felt important to share honestly, to advocate for honesty, true connection and healing in the context of ‘cultural diplomacy’. It was an honour to present amongst many esteemed people. I am sharing my powerpoint here, with a few tweaks to adjust it to a blog format.

Hi, my name is Sandra Fiona Long, thank you for having me here to talk about my experiences collaborating with Indonesian artists. I am delivering this from the land of the Dja Dja Warung people in regional Victoria where I am currently staying most of the time with a fair bit of travel to and from Melbourne.  I am a writer and director who works very closely with sound, voice and music in my theatre works, and I have collaborated with artists from Indonesia since my very formative years as a practicing artist.

I was invited to speak on this panel in the context of my project The Mud Goddess, which was a collaboration with Deden Bulqini and Mainteater in Indonesia. However I want to share a bit about the history of my work in the lead up to this project as I think it’s relevant to the topics of this forum.

My experience working with Indonesian theatre artists is perhaps unusual, as before I studied theatre making and writing for performance at the Victorian College of the Arts, I studied Indonesian language and have a BA majoring in Indonesian language and drama. How I ended up studying Indonesian in itself is quite a story, as my upbringing was unusual, and challenging, and I didn’t actually finish high school, partly because they decided not to offer drama in year 12. I was a pretty wayward neurodivergent youngster for a number of years, till I went to Indonesia on a musical odyssey and ended up learning Indonesian on the streets, jamming with musicians, sometimes very poor people, and being invited to their houses. I threw myself into learning the language as I found communicating about music, spirituality and mysticism in a different language opened my mind, and as someone who always thought I was not good at language, suddenly I found that talking about something I am passionate about, I was actually quite good.

This then opened up a pathway to me to go to La Trobe university through their special admissions program, where I studied Indonesian language, drama, and music, while involving myself very heavily in student theatre. I was so delighted that I had made my way back to theatre after feeling very disillusioned from high school. My very early formative experiences in writing and directing my own work came through student theatre, and  when I received a language scholarship to study at the University of Indonesia in Depok, my lecturer, Harry Aveling who is a well known translator of Indonesian theatre texts, was very understanding. As I was frequently not attending class for student theatre rehearsals, he sent me off to stay with Bengkel Teater Rendra, the theatre community of  WS  Rendra, a great Indonesian poet and theatre maker.

This really was a dream for me. During this time I attended 2 classes at the University of Indonesia just to meet the official requirements of the scholarship. They were Indonesian literature and Indonesian drama, where I studied a number of classic and contemporary theatre texts, even studying one of Rendra’s plays in class. The rest of the time I trained and performed with the community, a group of around 15 students.

But it was when I returned to Australia that my real peer to peer collaboration with Indonesian artists began. My university hosted the Australian student theatre festival, and the head of student theatre asked me if I was interested in inviting Indonesian universities to participate.

That is how I met Wawan Sofwan, a now well known theatre director and actor based in Bandung. He participated in the festival at our invitation, and then later returned with a proposal to make a bi-lingual version of Sumur Tanpa Dasar by Arifin C Noer, which we toured in Indonesia. It was the first work of many together, and the beginning of an enduring collaboration which has seen us both develop over years as professional theatre artists. I want to highlight this because student theatre no longer exists at La Trobe University, and in fact many universities have cut student theatre which is an important and often overlooked pathway for artists, especially those marginalised or sidelined. It’s worth noting that the Indonesian language department was very nearly closed down also at my La Trobe University.

The next work I did with Wawan, I was at the Victorian College of the Arts drama school, which was another dream for me, studying Animateuring, which was basically the same as the directing course with a focus on autership, and Wawan participated in my final project, Happy 1000 1000 Bahagia, a trilingual work (Auslan, Indonesian and English), adapted from a work by Peter Turini, about a journalist’s final countdown to his suicide, along with Jodee Mundy and Tiffany Ball. 

I not only learnt a lot about theatre making from this experience, but also about fundraising.  Actually I was not good at this, and every time I went to pitch our project I would say the wrong thing, which is a problem still for me sometimes hehe. But I managed to raise enough to get him to Melbourne. A couple of years later we redeveloped this work, and I experienced my first ever grant from what was then called Arts Victoria to make the work in Melbourne, and then later we received a grant from the Besen Foundation (I think) to take it to Indonesia, supported by producer Lauren Bain.

 This work went on to receive the innovation of form award at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, and Innovative New Form Green Room Awards nomination. At the time, most people presumed that as I was working with Indonesian collaborators, I must be working with shadow puppetry or dance. In fact, we were making contemporary text based theatre, and had no choice but to explore the multilingual form if we were going to work together. The bringing together of languages is something we have continued to do in various forms, as Wawan and I have continued to make work together since then.

 Sometimes it takes a number of years to pull together a project, some projects are self funded, sometimes just an exploration or development, while others have been supported by Creative Victoria, DFAT (AII), Creative Australia, philanthropic orgs and sponsors from Indonesia and Australia.

All the while developing our work in our own countries and raising our families, some who now as young adults work with us. Wawan once said our collaboration is like a house, which is always growing, with new collaborators.

I first started collaborating with visual and new media artist Deden Bulqini through Wawan, working together in 2015, and in 2019 we made the work Hades Fading (Hades Memudar).

This work was performed by Heliana Sinaga, Rinrin Candraresmi, Godi Suwarna, Dasep Sumardjani, Sisca Gunzeng Harp, Wawan Sofwan and Ria Soemarjdo, a team from Australia and Indonesia.

Collaborating with Designer Emily Barrie and composer Ria Soemardjo my close collaborators in Melbourne with Deden, we incorporated language through both the visual and aural senses.

The work is set in the realm of Hades in Post apocalyptic times, fading away with no one left to believe in it. It questions the nature of belief and the role of nature worship in preserving our environment.

Deden incorporated text into the visuals, exploring multiple ways to work across language. The sound world was largely created by voice, with sweeping vocal soundscapes and otherworldly voice compositions. We performed it in Bandung and then in Melbourne during the AsiaTOPA festival in 2020, with support from Creative Australia amongst others.  During the season, plans for touring were already starting to form.

Back in our separate countries and feeling quite lost after being on such a roll and everything stopping, we decided to make an online project.

‘Waktu adalah temanku -Time it is my friend’, was a community project which involved over 20 artists and community members across Melbourne and Bandung. We didn’t look for funding for it, we just made it, spending months together online developing the work with participants and their mobile phones in their bedrooms, gardens, kitchens and lounge rooms.

Deden’s idea was to explore animation and design on the zoom screens as if they were projection. We didn’t get too far with this as the logistics of this project were huge. Deden had over 20 zoom screens going across multiple computers.

Each participant creating their own segment about their life during lockdown. We had an extensive rehearsal schedule.

Even my two teenagers got involved.

Stories of parenting during lockdown in both countries, peoples aspirations and hopes.

Then, after this finished, still in lock down, Heliana Sinaga, Deden and I started to work with Deden’s robot Jack, who had had a role in Time it is my Friend as a motivational coach, exploring more deeply the possibilities of visuals with the zoom windows. We spent a great many more hours on zoom.

The idea of a robot who lamented the destruction of the earth, and who longed to become a sentient being, but then who couldn’t understand why when people have a heart, they destroy each other and the precious earth we live on.  We used our mobile phones from our different spaces across our two countries, incorporating animations and AV design to create worlds.

As we slowly came out of lockdown we worked towards presenting this at the Warak Banksia festival in 2022, expanding our team, with Sophia Constantine performing live next to Heliana Sinaga live streamed from Bandung. We called this the Mud Goddess

Through this process, Deden developed technologies and systems using mobile cameras and sensors and incorporating visual design with live captured footage to transform the footage.

Then, as travel opened up again, with support from Creative Australia, we expanded the work in Bandung, with Sophia live streamed from Melbourne.

After working with cameras on zoom screens we could now apply this to live performance. We explored many ideas during this time, and performed a showing at IFI in Bandung.

In 2023, we performed a new version of this work, JTDS – Or Jack’s True Dream Service at ArtJOG, Jogjakarta’s international festival. Lead by Deden as visual art project as well as a performance, this version focussed on the robots observations of the world, from the micro to the macro, with Deden incorporating further the technology we had explored using cameras and sensors. My exciting contribution to this performance was a vocal composition based on global currency I developed with the performers.

Then we performed another version at the community festival of New Media in Lombok, where we collaborated with a Hadrah, or Sufi collective who sang beautiful devotional songs in-between robot Jack’s observations of environmental destruction.

And this work still has reverberations, as Deden has taken his robot to collaborate with many different sound artists, writers and collaborators after I went on to focus on other projects in Australia. The support from Creative Australia lead to so much more than just the initial project. It really supported ongoing and ever evolving exchange and collaboration.

Which continues as Deden and I work towards a new collaboration next year in Melbourne called The Engineer in the Snow- a fantastical erotic fugue for Planet Earth. It is about environmental destruction, global economic disparity, a love song to the earth, and very definitely a borderless work.

This work also started on Zoom during lockdowns, and will take many of the techniques and skills utilising cameras we developed to a new level, collaborating with actor Emily Tomlins,  sound designer Darius Kedros and re-uniting with designer Emily Barrie and Ria Soemardjo. I am honoured that Deden was inspired apply to Hibah Indonesiana international funding to co-create this work with me. As Deden and I reflected on our aims in preparation for the Hibah Indonesiana application, we realised that to continue to develop our technical capacities as artists through all this experience is very important to us, as is expanding our collaboration with new artistic partnerships. And importantly, to keep telling stories which cross perceived borders, dissolve ideas of separation, and promote truth and peace.

My work with Wawan Sofwan also continues with a number of projects bubbling away. Surat-Suratnya is a collaboration also with Ria Soemardjo, co-written and directed by Wawan Sofwan, with myself as co-producer, dramaturg and translator and performed by Ellen Marning (Australia) and Eka Fajar (Indonesia). It is a true story about an Australian woman in Jakarta with her Indonesian husband and children during the so called ‘communist purges’ of the 1960s. This is a sensitive topic in Indonesia, but an important one, and after selling out our season with a waiting list as long as your arm in 2023, we are in the process of following up interest after pitching at Showcase Victoria this year. It is an amazing example of how our stories across Indonesia and Australia are entwined.

 I think it’s very important, thinking about intercultural exchange, and cultural diplomacy, that we are able to share the truth, to share our sad stories, as well as the beauty we create as artists. To heal is very important for world peace. It so important that we can express our humanity and not be afraid to speak truth. This is what the world needs right now.

All in all, I want to highlight, the importance of celebrating our humanity as artists collaborating across cultures. Humanity and truth must come first.

Thank you for listening to me today, please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to know any more about my work, or if you have a project you’d like to share with me.