Rain swept gently across Ubud on Thursday evening, turning the festival grounds into a shimmer of umbrellas and reflections. Yet even as the drizzle persisted, the audience refused to disperse. They waited patiently under awnings and palm trees for one of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival’s most anticipated events — EMPIRE: Rooting for the Antihero — a haunting theatrical performance inspired by diary entries of an Indonesian observer in the 1930s.
The open-air venue at Honeymoon Garden glowed in soft lantern light as organizers delayed the start, allowing the rain to subside. The decision lent the evening a sense of suspended anticipation; conversations mingled with the sound of falling rain until, finally, the storm eased. When the performance began, just slightly behind schedule, the collective sigh of the audience felt like part of the show — an unplanned but poetic overture to a night devoted to reflection and reckoning.
EMPIRE: Rooting for the Antihero — presented as part of the 2025 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival program — reimagines fragments of colonial-era diaries and archives into a modern meditation on empire, complicity, and moral ambiguity. Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s, the piece follows an all-boys Austrian football team on a surreal journey through the tropics, exploring both fascination and discomfort in their encounters with Indonesia. The production is as much about what is seen as what is silenced — the gaze of the colonizer set against the quiet resistance of the observed.
When the rain finally stopped and the first lights dimmed, the garden transformed. Moist earth and the lingering scent of frangipani created a sensorial echo of the landscapes the performance evoked. Projected archival images, music, and narration brought the diaries to life, while the choreography’s subtle, almost ritual movements underscored themes of memory and complicity. The audience — damp but enthralled — leaned forward as if listening not only to the performers but to history itself speaking through them.
The phrase “rooting for the antihero” took on new resonance as the play unfolded. The performers invited spectators to question not only historical empires but also the human tendency to admire power, even when it oppresses. The diary fragments, drawn from an Indonesian perspective, revealed the unsettling intimacy of empire — admiration entwined with alienation, curiosity shadowed by control.
Among the audience was Diah Rahmawati, a scholar of colonial literature visiting from Yogyakarta. After the show, she reflected on the experience:
“We were all standing there, waiting for the rain to stop, and it felt symbolic — like waiting for history to quiet enough so we could finally listen. When the performance began, it wasn’t just theatre; it was an act of remembrance.”
In many ways, the rain itself became part of the narrative — a reminder that art, like memory, cannot be rushed. Despite the delay, or perhaps because of it, the performance unfolded with profound intimacy. The damp evening air carried not only the weight of history but the resilience of storytelling itself.
Within the broader theme of this year’s festival, “Aham Brahmasmi – I Am the Universe,” EMPIRE felt like a perfect embodiment. It asked each viewer to confront their place within systems of power — to see both the oppressor and the oppressed, the hero and the antihero, reflected within the self.
By the time the applause rose beneath the clearing sky, the night had become something larger than a performance. It was a conversation across time — one that began in the 1930s, was interrupted by rain, and was finally answered, decades later, in the heart of Ubud.
