'LUKA' examines wounds in RI society

By Lauren Bain

JAKARTA (JP): Down a narrow street in Cikini, Central Jakarta, the rehearsal studio is nightclub-hot and gymnasium-sweaty. A huge white screen divides the space, a canvas for enormous shadows of serpentine bodies, climbing and crawling all over each other.

Colored lights flash around the room, deliberately disorientating and distorting; music, like a nightmare soundtrack, thumps out into the street and beyond. There are about 30 performers involved in Teater Mandiri's production of LUKA (Wound), and tonight, like most nights, they are working hard.

Teater Mandiri -- under the direction of internationally acclaimed writer and director Putu Wijaya -- will be commemorating its 30th anniversary with the presentation of LUKA in Jakarta, beginning on Friday until Sunday. LUKA is a loose adaptation of the script The Coffin Is Too Big for the Hole by Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun, and was first performed by Teater Mandiri late last year at the Festival of Asian Theater in Tokyo. The adaptation of Pao Kun's script represents a shift for Teater Mandiri, which prior to this work, had only ever performed works by Putu. LUKA will tour to Yugoslavia in September.

The Coffin Is Too Big For the Hole is a story about a child who is unable to bury his grandfather's coffin because it is too big for the grave. Conflict ensues. Eventually, it is agreed that the grandfather's coffin can be buried alongside a child's because, when combined, their plots are big enough for both coffins.

Putu explained that he chose to adapt The Coffin partly out of necessity -- in order to accept the invitation to present a work at the Festival of Asian Theater he had to work on one of Kuo Pao Kun's scripts. However, he says that he also recognized similarities between this work and some of his own works, especially Aduh and Gerr, produced in 1974 and 1981 respectively, which deal with the ritual of burial. He also felt that there was a close connection between the themes in The Coffin and the contemporary Indonesian political context.

"LUKA deals with the issue of difference and unity in Indonesia ... in the past, difference was forbidden, for the sake of national unity we had to ignore diversity. But difference should be seen as a source of strength, and not as something which needs to be suppressed," Putu said.

And diversity is something which is evident not only in the theme of LUKA but in the composition of Teater Mandiri itself. Members of the group include sinetron (teleseries) stars, buskers, laborers, former thieves, students and young executives. Their bodies are all sizes and shapes, and in rehearsal, each is challenged to explore his/her personal physical limits.

Although Putu did translate The Coffin into Indonesian as a starting point for creating LUKA, there is very little text or dialog remaining in the final adaptation. Teater Mandiri has always experimented with both text and nontext-based theatrical forms, but since the early 1990s has moved away from using written scripts. Its work combines elements of both traditional Indonesian performance -- the influence of wayang kulit (leather puppets) is obvious in its use of the shadow screen for example -- and Western contemporary theater. Teater Mandiri's work has variously been described as surreal, dreamlike, absurd, postmodern and fragmented. At the same time, it is accessible, deliberately left open for interpretation and politically critical without being didactic.

One frequent criticism of Teater Mandiri's work is that it always uses the same idioms, the same theatrical tricks. The giant white screen, the use of shadows and sound to "terrorize" audiences, have all become instantly recognizable trademarks of the group's work. Images of violence and conflict, pounding music, the sound of soldiers' running feet and the manipulation of mass crowds -- definitely terrifying, definitely real for many Indonesians -- but some critics argue that Teater Mandiri has been producing this kind of theater for a long time.

Putu Wijaya argues, however, that despite using these theatrical strategies in most of his works over the past 10 years he is yet to exhaust all the possibilities. He delights in manipulating images, testing and overstepping the boundaries of shadow and light, challenging notions of what constitutes "Indonesian theater".

In one fragment of LUKA, the shadows of 100 hands stretch upward, trying to reach something, grabbing desperately at the air. Do they want food? Water? A lift up into a boat? One might be reminded of refugees, the tragedy in Sampit, the displacement of thousands of Indonesians which has quietly slipped out of the newspapers. Whether Putu Wijaya had this particular crisis in mind when he made this image is not really the point: LUKA should serve as a reminder of the crises happening far from the walls of Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, and the impetus toward positive action.

LUKA will be performed at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, March 23 to March 25. Bookings and inquiries at tel. 3808283 or 3441982. Tickets are Rp 25,000 and Rp 20,000.