Opera Batak Si Mardan between Kitsch and Merchantilism

Globalization affects every line of human cultural life, including theater arts. As an important subsystem in culture, art is a manifestation of the complexity of human culture which is embedded coherently in its cultural identity. The city of Medan is a city with relatively dynamic theater development which has various groups with various theater genres. This tendency has also given rise to a trend to use traditional culture as the basic material for creating theatrical works, for example the Bandar Peran group. The group staged the work "Opera Batak Si Mardan" which involved Batak Toba and Malay culture simultaneously. So in this article the results were found that the group used a dual orientation imagination in the creation process and the traditional idiom used led to postmodern aesthetic tendencies. This research uses qualitative research methods to understand in depth the conditions and phenomena in the field. Apart from that, this article is also directed as a form of inventive criticism so that the content of the article will use the critical framework explained by Benny Yohanes.