Sena Didi mime goes beyond the boundaries of movement
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
When the Romans invented mime, a play consisting of short, improvised burlesque acts, it was performed to depict current events and delved into themes like love, adultery and mockery of the gods.
Staying true to the time-honored tradition, the Jakarta-based Sena Didi mime company made effective use of the art form to serve a more mundane cause, mocking the country's leaders who allow common people to drown in misery.
But if the Romans were the first to disengage mime from dance and speech, Sena Didi, out of necessity, resorted to the two attributes to express a variety of emotions be it anger, disgust or despair.
In a two-hour-plus performance, staged at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (GKJ) as part of the Schouwburg Festival to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the playhouse, the mimes tackled headline issues like scarcity of fuel, bad debts, the slumping economy, Aceh peace, ethnic and racial division, and even a tacit rivalry between Vice President Jusuf Kalla and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Sena Didi, founded by the late Sena A. Utoyo and actor Didi Petet, is known for its socially commited performing art, which are frequently staged to make stinging criticisms of a variety of government policies.
The company's first production, Becak (Pedicab), staged in 1987 at the height of president Soeharto's authoritarian rule, touched on the issue of a purge of the three-wheeled pedicabs in Jakarta, a means of transportation that was very instrumental both for its driver or the capital's residents.
During Tuesday's performance, titled Tanah Air Tanah (Land Water Land), Sena Didi commissioned five of its consummate actors, who had full control of their seemingly rubberized bodies and expressions, to vent all manner of anger and apathy about anything amiss in the country, at times in a highly comical manner.
The five characters seemed to be created to give a voice to the powerless individual and in the course of the play, none were given a chance to escape their fate.
A sense of impending doom was felt from the time the curtain was drawn.
A sad-looking pregnant woman, symbolizing the motherland or, perhaps, mother nature, was seen watering a growing plant on the side of an oddly-shaped creature, which was chanting the name of product brands familiar to the country's millions, from food and modern gadgets to clothing and cars.
While mother nature was carrying her burden, we, the happy consumer, are busy buying things that are processed in such a way that is detrimental to nature.
The five characters, dressed in clown dresses, later turned up on stage and for the next half hour delivered mime in its original form.
Thirty minutes of stage antics and physical jokes was enough to dispel the gloomy ambience from the opening scene.
A band of live musicians, stationed at a corner of GKJ's spacious stage, deserves credit for bringing a fine-tuned score to the lengthy show, down from one note tip-toeing sounds to an instrumental cacophony that provided a background for frequent quarrels between the characters.
The characters went seriously verbal when they began to address the country's myriad of problems in their private `room'.
After juggling and dancing, the five clowns arranged one of two most important stage props, their wodden chair -- the other being white panels that could be modified into wheelchairs or public toilets! -- to build a row of windows from which each could read out open letters to whom it may concern.
"Once you are allowed to set up a political party, what color will you choose to represent your party. Will it be yellow, red or green? All have been used by other parties and I don't want this problem with colors to start a new conflict," Mimi said, apparently directed toward the Acehnese, who will be able to set up local parties in the near future.
Other posed questions to Susilo, Kalla and House speaker Agung Laksono who failed to handle problems from unemployment, rising fuel prices and only imaginary answers they would likely get.
Approaching the show's intermission, the mimes dabbled in the realm of post-modern theater -- of confounding the boundary between a spectacle and its spectators.
Many times, actors stepped down from the stage and teased spectators with silly questions or asked someone to partake in the show.
At one point, stage announcer and TV personality Jody of rock outfit Superbejo asked the audience to stand up in honor of something that turned out to be silly stage antics.
In his open letter, one of the characters, Birkud, uttered his disappointment by saying that the government is no Michael Jackson -- able to provide entertainment amid their destitution.
But for the audience at the GKJ, the Michael Jacksons were Birkud and his four friends.