Miss Riboet's Orion

Miss Riboet's Orion, originally known as the Orion Opera, was a theatrical troupe active in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the 1920s and early 1930s. Established by the husband and wife team Tio Tek Djien and Miss Riboet, the company travelled throughout the Indies and performed various acts, particularly those with action scenes. It was disbanded in 1942, having lost much of its popularity due to competition with Dardanella.

In the late 19th century various forms of popular theatre, inspired by Western techniques and formats, began to develop in the Dutch East Indies, a colony of the Netherlands. The earliest were the Malayan bangsawan troupes, who traveled to Sumatra and Java beginning in the 1880s. The Komedi Stamboel developed in the Indies in the 1890s, inspired by these bangsawan troupes. By 1910 various organisations run by the ethnic Chinese had begun holding stage performances, which they termed "operas", as fundraisers; these troupes eventually developed into professional ones, acting for profit.

In 1925 Tio Tek Djien (1895–1975), an ethnic Chinese businessman from East Java, established Orion Opera together with his wife, Miss Riboet (c. 1900–1965), who took the lead role. Though Tio drew on the earlier bangsawan and komedi stamboel, as with his contemporaries such as Tengku Katan's Union Dahlia, he introduced several changes. Stories selected were shorter ones, with shorter scenes, which could be completed in a single night. No longer were the characters introduced before the performance, and the number of scenes with singing and dancing was drastically reduced, limited only to inter-act performances. Orion's repertoire was likewise different: instead of traditional tales, such as those based on the One Thousand and One Nights, Orion tended to perform original stories, though it also produced some adaptations of Western works.

Initially the troupe's original stories were written by Tio himself. By the late 1920s he had hired Njoo Cheong Seng, a journalist and writer, to help produce original scripts. Works by Njoo which the troupe performed included Kiamat (Apocalypse), Tengkorak (Skull), and Tueng Balah, while Tio wrote such works as R.A. Soemantri. These stories were most often filled with action, and, though written in detail, left room for improvisation. When Miss Riboet proved highly popular as a swordfighter in these plays, as well as a kroncong singer, the troupe was named after her.

...
Wikipedia