Petta Puang, a S. Sulawesi phenomenon

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.