Multitalented Putu still a rebel with a cause

Multitalented Putu still a rebel with a cause

Christina Schott, Contributor, Jakarta

The huge animal twitches and writhes when it finds its master
with a whip. Then the white object changes into new forms:
soldiers going to war, a human being born in pain, another
swallowed by the constantly moving thing.

Seven people under a huge canvas fight a war with the world
and themselves, building the illusion of becoming one, just to
break this again with lighting of inside silhouettes.

It was already late at night at Gallery Langgeng in Magelang,
Central Java, when Teater Mandiri performed its newest production
Zero in the backyard of the cultural studio last week.

Several hundred visitors of the gallery's second anniversary
exhibition "Wings of Words, Wings of Colors" watched the play by
writer Putu Wijaya as the last of several performances by a
coterie of famous artists: Rendra, Budi Kristanto and Arahmaiani.

Zero expresses the beginning and the end of all beings, the
resulting nothingness.

"But a vacuum will never come without fullness, desperation
never without hope," said Putu. "People from Bali believe that
everything has two sides."

It's hard to picture Teater Mandiri without the name and the
ideas of its founder Putu. The director, who does not want to
tell his age, is one of the country's most important authors and
dramatists today.

Having already won around 20 national and international
awards, Putu has also penned about 1,000 short stories and 40
novels, numerous plays, poetry, newspaper articles, several
screenplays and about 200 episodes of TV serials. His works have
been translated into Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German,
Japanese, Russian and Thai.

The son of a noble from Tabanan, Bali, felt in his childhood
the need to break with social convention, which he felt was
unjust. But since he did not dare to speak out openly, he used
writing and theater to rebel indirectly since he was in middle
school.

"I asked myself why everything had to follow these stereotyped
forms? So very early on I had the wish to shape a new type of
expression in theater."

Fulfilling the wish of his parents, young Putu went to
Yogyakarta to study law. Although he got his degree, he never
practiced law. His profession became what he studied on the
sidelines: the arts. In 1967, the student joined the Bengkel
Theater of Rendra, located in Yogyakarta at the time, before
going to Jakarta.

He was a journalist working for the magazine Express and then
an editor for Tempo magazine for 20 years.

"I really liked Jakarta for its loud and tumultuous
atmosphere, because it is dynamic!" the Balinese said. "Bali, in
contrast, sometimes was so calm and lonely that I got afraid."

In 1971 Putu Wijaya founded Teater Mandiri, in the beginning
to shoot theater plays for television. His colleagues became
actors, and the rehearsals were held at the magazine office after
work. After coming back from a stay at the United States in 1975,
the director was encouraged to try new experimental ways.

"The concept was to leave behind what we had. We wanted to
create mental terror, to make the people hesitant and to think
over again what they took as certain in their lives," he said.

The first success was the piece Lho, staged at the Taman
Ismail Marzuki arts center in Cikini, Central Jakarta.

"The piece did not have any plot, it was just a spectacle,"
the creator said. Two other pieces of this kind followed, but in
the end, the audience was no longer interested.

"I learned that the audience needs a story and because I need
the audience, I started to look for storylines again."

In 1985, the writer left again to the United States, this time
invited as a lecturer for the Fulbright program for three years.
For a scholarship in Japan 1991, the journalist finally left his
job at Tempo and continued working as a freelance writer and film
director.

But Teater Mandiri continued.

"It was in 1988 that I started to deal with canvas," Putu
said.

Almost all his pieces since then play with elements
reminiscent of the shadow puppet play wayang kulit. Actors work
-- in a mental and physical sense -- hard behind and in front of
the canvas, supported by light and sound effects.

Putu's theater definitely does not offer any conventional
dialog to the viewer.

"People watching our performances cannot expect simple
entertainment. I want them not just to accept everything, but to
fight for their own way," the dramatist said. "It's same for my
actors: Mandiri means independent. They do not just act, but
become independent themselves."

Whoever wants to join the group is invited to do so. But after
two weeks of exhausting exercises, usually only a handful people
still come back. That is the time when the director introduces a
new piece to the members who are strong enough.

But Putu Wijaya's soft side is not only shown to his family,
but also in his screenplays and TV drama scripts. The newest one,
planned for this year, is a sitcom about a newly elected
president.

"In contrast to the tense situation at the moment, I want to
give the people simple, fresh entertainment," the father of two
said. "I confess that I might be an ambiguous person."