Petta Puang, a S. Sulawesi phenomenon

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE, Australia (JP): Imagine a community being invited to a civic education meeting in the evening, say, about the importance of maintaining a clean living environment. If there are no threats of reprisals or promises of recompense, it would be fair to say that attendance would not be high.

Shortly before the 1999 general election however, civic education programs in South Sulawesi proved to be enjoyable evenings, with full-house attendance and filled with laughter which nearly brought the house down.

What? People openly laughing at the bureaucrats? Because the alternative would be less believable: people laughing during public meetings with bureaucrats.

Both assumptions were wrong. The voter-education evenings were carried out by a theater group, Petta Puang, sponsored by several non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Being a local theater group, Petta Puang was able to present what threatened to be boring, albeit important, modern abstract concepts of general elections, in a format easy to digest and funny, therefore very memorable.

It is no surprise that Petta Puang has also been invited to take part in other civic education programs, such as the importance of conservation of coral reef and health information regarding HIV/AIDS.

Despite its creative agility and its effectiveness in public communication exercise, the existence of this theater group may not have been known outside South Sulawesi for a long time, if not for a presentation at the Indonesian Council Open Conference in Melbourne on July 10-July 11. It was the engaging story of Sudirman Nasir of the Literature Committee of the Makassar Art Council, which fascinated and aroused the curiosity of the participants at the conference.

Petta Puang evolved from another theater group, Theater Mekarbuana, which began performing in 1985. The group then adopted a main character and named him Petta Puang. Eventually it also adopted the name for the group. Petta Puang is a kind of old fogey, very traditional and conventional in appearance as well as in attitudes. He is a nobleman by birth. In fact, both the words Petta and Puang are titles of nobility and the use of both together has a comical effect of exaggeration of nobility, such as Lord Earldom.

The character Petta Puang is always bemused at best and outraged at worst seeing changes in society as he knows it. To bring out his idiosyncrasies as well as his musings, this old aristocrat has four characters with whom he interacts. Two of these are his faithful and subservient valets, Conga and Gimpe. Interestingly, his valets often irritate him precisely because they are all too ready to agree with him. A stark contrast are the other two characters, his son Andi Adong and his daughter Andi Minah, who represent everything Petta Puang is not. They are modern and unfortunately for the old man's blood pressure, stubbornly so. Yet curiously, while the old man is annoyed by his children, he also finds them irresistible companions for lively conversations. Moreover, they bring out an interesting characteristic in him, that of an auto-critic.

Petta Puang the character, an incurable traditionalist and a fighter against anything modern, also comes across as a likable person, since he is not altogether self-righteous.

Using the comical interplay between Petta Puang the aristocrat, his two faithful valets and the two modernists, the group has been able to provide various civic education programs to the community, who absorb the information subliminally.

Sudirman Nasir came in contact with them in the early 1990s in Fort Rotterdam, a place where local and visiting artists alike, hang out. He became one of their ardent fans. Then in 1996 Sudirman asked them if they would like to take part in HIV/AIDS prevention programs and they agreed. That was the beginning of the cooperation between the group and local NGOs.

The group owes its success, among other reasons, to the way they use the local figures and local mores in their performances, which readily find a spot in everybody's heart.

The director-cum-scriptwriter is a poet called Bahar Merdhu. Unlike conventional theater, the scripts of Petta Puang are not set and rigid. They lend themselves to an enormous amount of improvisation, adjustments and improvements depending on the context and audience. Sudirman believes the closest comparison would be to Yogyakarta's Teater Gandrik.

To maintain mobility and all-time readiness, the group's theater properties are all portable. They have thus been able to perform anywhere at short notice. In fact they have performed to a wide range of audience, from members of the political elite like Vice-president Megawati Soekarnoputri and Agum Gumelar, to common villagers. They also present regularly on the local TVRI in an interactive TV program called Lensa Petta Puang.

In this new era of regional autonomy, cultural entities such as Petta Puang theater groups will no doubt play an important role in the necessary continuous civic education.