The Fugue of Tjebolang: We're here, we're queer, we're eco-erotic and we're fabulous

Daily Maverick

2 days ago

It's been described as 'a mystical journey exploring Sufi culture' and as a 'sacred tale' about young 'gender fluid people' journeying 'into themselves and the world'. Its creator and director, Rehane Abrahams, says The Fugue of Tjebolang is also full of sex — and possesses the potential to heal.
'I'm very much done excavating my pain for audiences,' says actor and theatre-maker Rehane Abrahams.
Despite an extensive three-decade theatre career, Abrahams is perhaps best known for playing the villain, Wendy Newman, in the popular Showmax telenovela, Arendsvlei. Earlier this year she won a Fleur du Cap for her dual role as Mercutio and Lady Montague in last year's Maynardville production of Romeo and Juliet.
Her extensive career as a creator of new work has tended to focus on theatre that is ritualistic and decolonial in nature; there is inevitably an element of transformation, a desire to shift and heal. She does not make work purely for the sake of entertainment. Abrahams says she's intentionally searching for other ways of telling stories, creating theatre that lands differently.
'I want to find a way of infusing more life and more joy into the experience,' she says.
There are even more curious clues as to her interests in her Instagram bio, where she describes herself as a 'Somatic Decoloniser, Eco-Erotic liberator, Performance-Maker'. While it's no simple thing to pin her down, what's clear from talking to her is that, when she makes work, she puts her heart and soul on the line.
And she wants to create work that nourishes the audience, that adds to their experience of life rather than subtracting from it.
This objective has led to her latest stage creation, The Fugue of Tjebolang, which is premiering at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda on 26 June 2025. It will also travel to Stellenbosch for Woordfees later this year.
It's a new play that's been centuries in the making. Conceived as an immersive, multivalent experience, it's the theatricalisation of 'Cebolang Minggat' (the Exile of Cebolang), a tale excerpted from the Serat Centhini, the great encyclopaedic Javanese literary epic written in the form of suluk, verses intended for chanting.
Abrahams calls the story a 'queer Islamic epic that is erotic'; she has incorporated dance, music and visual projections to create something she hopes will jolt audiences — 'bring them to their senses' — and help liberate and heal.
Serat Centhini
Completed in written form in 1815, the Serat Centhini comprises 12 volumes, 4,200 pages, 722 verses, and more than 200,000 stanzas. It includes expressions, verses and allusions in Sanskrit, Arabic and the ancient Javanese language, Kawi. It forms part of the Javanese babads, an encyclopaedic literary genre dealing with historic events and covering everything from art, religion and mysticism to erotic knowledge.
While it describes virtues that originate in Islam, it portrays Javanese people as sexually open and recognises eroticism as part of life, rather than as taboo. Some contemporary scholars find its explicit references to and descriptions of sexual intercourse pornographic and some of the language vulgar.
Reportedly, the 'pornographic' parts were written by Pakubuwono V, crown prince and then king of Surakarta, who is said to have conducted such extensive research that he died of acute syphilis after only three years on the throne.
The manuscript was kept locked away in the palace and in the state's archive for almost two centuries for fear of stirring public controversy, but Serat Centhini is now in the public domain, and was popularised by the French poet-cum-journalist Elizabeth D Inandiak, after she found Sunaryati Sutanto's French translation of the work and published it as a 466-page book in 2002.
Abrahams, who lived in Bali for six years, discovered the tale of Cebolang/Tjebolang by accident.
'I walked into a theatre in Central Java and the room was dripping with sex — the audience was so turned on,' she says.
'I was like, 'Oh my god, what is happening?' On the stage was a small, grey-haired French woman, reading.' Alongside the narrator Slamet Gundono, a very large, very famous and quite avant-garde dalang, or shadow puppeteer, was performing.
I was like, how in the hell is everybody so sexed up?
'I was like, how in the hell is everybody so sexed up? It was the story of Tjebolang and all of the sex in the room was the result of the words. The audience was so turned on by what they were hearing that they were almost melting from the heat of it.'
Her initial encounter with the story made a huge impression, but when Abrahams read it the tale simply seemed too vast, and also 'way too ridiculous' to take on as a performance. And so it sat around for many years.
'I always felt like I had to do it,' she says, 'but I didn't know when I'd be ready — or when the world would be ready for it.'
Abrahams recently completed her PhD, the focus of which was 'eco-erotic decolonisation', and in the wake of all that research she says felt ready to tackle Tjebolang.
Adapting the script from Inandiak's translation, she says she pared down the original, edited out some of the 'inordinate amount' of sex. 'There is a lot of it,' she says. 'I salute him for it, but the crown prince really did a lot of research.'
The Fugue of Tjebolang is set to be at once hallucinatory and erotically charged, albeit with a strong spiritual core. Abrahams says it's been the kind of project that has enabled her to rediscover the 'older magic' of her childhood, when her fascination with storytelling included writing and performing puppet shows and plays for her classmates.
'There's always been like a kind of magical thread in my storytelling,' she says.
That magic pervades both the type of story Tjebolang tells and the manner of its telling.
'There is a plot,' Abrahams says. 'It's a really simple story about a young person who feels betrayed by his family and so goes on a kind of fool's journey, a quest for knowledge. Eventually, he returns to his family, and to their love. So it's like the prodigal child on a fool's quest.'
That journey has elsewhere been described as a 'carnal adventure' during which the 'seductive Tjebolang' (played by the artist/activist Cheshire V) encounters an array of characters — among them prostitutes, hermits, Sufi scholars and medicine men.
Narrative linearity
Despite the narrative linearity,'the actors create worlds upon worlds upon worlds', Abrahams says. 'There are lapses of reason, too, so the characters do in a sense penetrate a liminal space.'
The show includes choreography by Ina Wichterich, with classical Javanese dance elements. And it features not only large visual projections on three sides, but an immersive soundscape by Julia Theron and Denise Onen, whose 'epic score' does 'magical things'.
Audiences will be served red ginger tea upon arrival at the show, literal nourishment before their souls are fed a different sort of balm.
Abrahams says that part of the philosophical substrate of the text concerns our relationship with nature. 'There's a beautiful section in the play where one of the characters says that before you write even a single verse, you have to prostrate yourself to the forest, because in order to write trees have to be cut down. So, you have to prostrate yourself before the goddess of beauty and ask her to inhabit your poetry because you've taken from the forest in order to write.'
Abrahams calls this 'eco-erotic relationality' — a way of expressing our interconnectedness with the natural realm. She describes 'eco-eroticism' as an emergent way of thinking about the world in terms of the erotic relationship of storytelling with the natural world. It's an understanding of life as a kind of erotic force that permeates the entire universe.
What it boils down to is a kind of intimacy with nature, a kinship so profound that it would be impossible to consider exploiting the natural world because of an implicit respect for it.
That might seem like a lot to absorb, but Abrahams says she's aware that some elements of the play will only make sense in a space of reintegration.
'As with a dream, some of the things might only land later,' she says.
Besides, as you'd expect from a play about a carnal adventure, much of it is quite down to earth.
'There are moments of deep philosophical contemplation and meditation, but what is also delightful about the text is that it completely undercuts that earnestness with fart and poop jokes and ridiculousness, elements to keep reminding us that we are sacred in all our humanity. That we should not become too lost in our own mysticism and self-importance and the grandiosity of our big ideas.'
It is not at all lost on Abrahams nor on her creative team that the show is being created at a pivotal moment in history, amid a global conservative uprising and mainstream attacks on queer and trans identity. She says she wants this show to help heal, help liberate, provide a balm in a time of struggle.
Tragic moment
'We are in a tragic moment,' Abrahams says. 'But our response is to say, 'Look at us! We've always been queer. We've always been erotic. How many genders do mushrooms have? How many fungal genders are there? Nature is queer, it's alive, it's fucky… So please can we all just come to our senses.'
Abrahams emphasises that it would not have been possible to create work of this nature at such a level without the support of the Festival Enterprise Catalyst, which has helped fund it so that it can be shown in Makhanda and Stellenbosch.
'It's been a real boon for our production because we wouldn't have been able to produce this scale of work with this many artists involved without the Festival Enterprise Catalyst lending support to our particular creative vision. Without them, we'd not have been able to create the texture that is expressive of where we feel we're at right now.'
And what is the 'texture' that audiences can expect to experience?
'I want the audience to be thoroughly fed and deeply nourished. But our hope is for audiences to go on a journey with us, and discover that it is their journey too.'
It is, she says, a journey of healing. DM