Garasi gives subtle performance in 'Rain Repertoire'

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A woman is watering flowers on her front porch, as if putting out a fire that soon will burn down her house.

-- Gunawan Maryanto, in Rain Repertoire

Any loyal, Teater Garasi audience will already know it is fruitless to try to comprehend the literal meaning of the 12-year-old Yogyakarta-based theater group's plays.

The group has been around too long for fans to know that is a useless endeavor.

Any attempt to interpret the meaning and explain it to others will likely sound like a nice try to explain either God or love.

Nevertheless, the group rarely fails to move the audience's emotion with their performance, be it due to the props, lighting, music, dialog, acting, artistic achievement or a mixture of all of them.

In a new version of Repertoar Hujan (Rain Repertoire), Garasi moved the audience with deft and subtle physical theater, in which the actors presented a breathtaking display in which they used their bodies to great effect.

With astounding precision, three Garasi actors, Bernadeta Verry Handayani, Sri Qadariatin and Jamaluddin Latif, gave a much more mature and subtle portrayal since staging the same play four years ago.

The play is based on Gunawan Maryanto's poetry on rain and much else, like a family's cold dining room or the murder of a father by his son.

The 40-minute performance, comprising seven brief acts, was staged in Jakarta on Thursday and Friday at Bentara Budaya Jakarta, after the group had performed at the Physical Theater Festival at the Storehouse Building in Tokyo on Nov. 11 and Nov. 14.

Directed also by Gunawan Maryanto, the play, which had no dialog, was first staged in their hometown, Yogyakarta, in 2001.

For the Tokyo festival, Gunawan and artistic supervisor Yudi Ahmad Tadjudin made some changes to almost every element, including the script, rehearsals, the music and stage arrangements.

Thus, Sri and Jamaluddin became dogs, running around the stage with four legs, tickling each other's bellies, making animal copulation gestures, somersaulting high, and, with amazing precision, each landed at the side of a low table in a sitting position.

Both showed subtle, yet articulate movements when melancholic music accompanied the actors, staring at each other in a loving manner, extended their arms and gently caressing each other, only to act shortly after like dogs again.

Verry, who was very physical in 2001, took a smaller part in the recent performance.

"It is her comeback after a hiatus of a few years, so we adjusted her role to her current physical condition," said Gunawan, an author who has published a collection of short stories, Bon Suwung.

Both Jamaluddin, who once attended a Japanese butoh workshop, and Sri, who played Princess We Cudaiq in Robert Wilson's I La Galigo, produced stunning performances in their energetic and subtle stage movements.

All Garasi players, including these three, have been required to take Javanese dancing courses and silat (traditional martial arts) classes as part of their basic skills training.

Some took additional courses, like Sri, who studied Cirebon mask dancing under Wangi Indriya.

In June this year, Garasi staged Waktu Batu at the In Transit Festival at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Germany.