Surabaya festival will put city on national arts stage

By Sarah E. Murray

SURABAYA (JP): There's a story about Pak Amang Rachman, the painter, one of Surabaya's famous native sons. It goes like this: Pak Amang likes to go to Jakarta from time to time and takes his wife. They always stay at the guest house at Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) art center. Once, they went to Jakarta, checked into the TIM guest house and immediately went to eat at one of the many small food stalls that line the parking lot. They met a young arts journalist and critic who recognized Pak Amang and struck up a conversation with him and his wife. As it happens, this journalist was also a woman. As it happens, she was also beautiful. And smart. And a good conversationalist. The talk continued for a long time, and Pak Amang and the beautiful journalist became involved in a knotty technical discussion about painting. They left the stall together to go to the nearby gallery to continue the discussion in front of some paintings. Many hours later, Pak Amang suddenly remembered he had left his wife at the stall. Oh my! The problem was, there was only one key to their room at the guest house -- and it was in Pak Amang's pocket!

He immediately rushed back to the food stall to find his wife no longer there. He went to the guest house, and found her there, sitting outside crying and sniffling. "Oh my! You're so cruel! You've gone off with that beautiful woman and left me here alone!" his wife sobbed. "After so many years, how could you just abandon our marriage like that?" "Well, you're right," Pak Amang said, "she is young, and beautiful, and smart." His wife sobbed even harder. "And rich," he added. "Any man would be happy to have her." Her sobbing reached new peaks. "I would certainly be happy with her," he said. He stroked his white mustache meditatively. "But, the question is, would she be happy with me? I don't know. I'm not young. Allah knows, I'm not handsome. I'm not very smart either. And I'm certainly not rich. Who, after all, would take me? Who could I make happy?" He thought for a moment while looking at his wife. "I don't think anyone but you." His wife tried to hide the smile that came through the tears, but she wasn't entirely successful. "Yes, after all," Pak Amang repeated, "who else would have me?"

Surabaya is a bit like Pak Amang: a bit disheveled, a bit naughty, a wicked sense of humor, drawn to Jakarta by its glamor and promise as the center, hoping and needing to be recognized and accepted just as it is. But Surabaya feels it is not attractive or interesting enough to be accepted by her bigger, richer, more beautiful and more cosmopolitan cousin. In the world of art alone, Pak Amang's world, Surabaya has given birth to talented painters, writers and dancers but is rarely included on the arts map of Indonesia.

Ready

The recent exhibition of 11 painters from Surabaya at Bentara Budaya in Jakarta was a small effort to overcome this neglect. But Surabaya, the perpetual also-ran of Indonesian cities, the number two with a lot to prove, is ready to emerge into the national and international spotlight in a big way. And it isn't depending on Jakarta to do it, either.

On May 31, the Surabaya Arts Festival, a month-long festival offering theater performances, music, poetry, fine art, video, and seminars on art from local, national and international figures will open at the Gedung Negara Grahadi. It is as ambitious in scope as the Jakarta Arts Festival that ran last year at TIM, but the difference is that it is entirely a private effort -- the first such arts festival in the country.

Seeded by a grant of Rp 150 million (US$64,000) from the regional media power, the Jawa Pos publishing group, the festival is also expecting support in cash and in kind from other local businesses and private individuals. The organizing committee is also promoting the idea of festival memberships at various levels, a concept common in Western art worlds but rarely encountered in Indonesia where the commercialization of art is still a new and sometimes uncomfortable phenomenon.

This fact of private sponsorship alone was enough to attract attention from Australia. Last year, after the first year of the festival (under a different name), members of the organizing committee, including the head Kadaruslan, were invited to Perth to observe the ArtRage festival there. In Perth, they signed a memorandum of understanding about future exchanges between Perth and the Surabaya Arts Festival.

One result of that exchange is that this year, two Australian groups are confirmed as participants in the festival: Black Swan theater group, and Mike Burns and his wayang (shadow puppetry) Kelly group. (see sidebar)

Another and perhaps more significant result is the shape of this year's organizing committee. Learning from the organization of the ArtRage festival and discussions with Perth artists and arts administrators, the Surabaya Arts Festival organizers decided to split the administrative and curatorial functions in two. The administrative committee is responsible for all financial and administrative matters, including arranging venues, handling correspondence with invited artists, and making arrangements for the accommodation of out-of-town participants. The artistic board, headed by noted Surakarta choreographer and dancer Sardono W. Kusumo, has only one job: to develop the criteria for selecting participants and choosing who will be invited.

Administrative committee member Henri Nurcahyo, who is in charge of publications, explains that they thought this would solve the problem of nepotism that cropped up last year. "We learned from last year's experience. The organizing committee members were also the people who had the right to choose the artists to be invited. Lots of people who had personal relationships with the committee members asked to be invited. And of course, it was hard to refuse them. The result was that the festival didn't have a strong enough focus."

Clear

This year, the focus is clear (although it is only being communicated to artists after the selections have been made). First of all, the festival is eschewing established stars (which includes Pak Amang) in favor of highlighting younger promising artists. Secondly, it seeks to put forward artists who create in more than one field or medium. Thirdly, although it is being selective and wants to accept only high quality works, it is not forwarding any pretension of selecting "the best" or "the top" (which is partly why it is not including already established "stars" with recognized talent). Instead, the festival, although national in scope, aims to focus on Surabayan artists who are unique in some way and/or are particularly important figures in the Surabaya arts world. Some of these artists are indeed acclaimed as among the best in their fields while others are worthy of note and attention for other reasons.

For example, artist Nurzolis Koto is an artist who has received little attention from the mainstream Indonesian fine arts world. He has also not enjoyed the kind of commercial success many other painters have enjoyed in recent years -- both because he paints in a challenging abstract style and because he is reluctant to become caught up in the commercial carnival that he feels the current art world has become. A ceramicist and sculptor as well as a painter, Nurzolis is one of a small group of dedicated teachers trying to sustain the one serious fine arts school in Surabaya, the privately run Wilwaktikta School of Arts. He is also a dedicated documentarian of Indonesian fine art, with the most extensive and best organized fine arts clippings file in the country, dating back to the beginning of the New Order -- which he generously allows other artists and researchers to peruse. The festival will honor Nurzolis's contributions to the Surabaya art world, and his 50th birthday, with a one-man retrospective of his works in all media.

Henri and Pak Amang are two of the big motors behind the arts festival, and they, along with a devoted core of others in the Surabaya arts world, plan to ensure that the festival will not just make a big splash and then disappear, like so many activities and organizations in Indonesia. "We've already set up a foundation, the Surabaya Arts Foundation, to become the official supporting organization. My plan is that as soon as this year's festival is over, we'll already begin planning and raising money for next year's festival," explained Henri while sitting in the sparsely furnished office on Jl. Sumatra that serves as both his and the festival's home.

It's easy to believe Henri, because he is a man with a mission. He explains, "Surabayans have a reputation for being arrogant. And it's true, you know, someone like me who wants to organize a festival like this, with artists from all over Indonesia, not to mention overseas. Even though there aren't yet clear sources of funding other than the promise of the Java Pos to provide Rp 150 million, even though we've already calculated we'll need Rp 350 million. Yeah, that's arrogant. In such a short time too! We began only in January. From a technical point of view, yes, that's arrogant. From the point of view of art as well, it's arrogant -- to want Surabaya to emerge as a center of art and not wanting just Jakarta alone to become the center. But with the emergence of this festival, maybe the famed arrogance of Surabaya will become meaningful."

Even though it has not looked to them for funding, the festival has not eschewed cooperation with government-sponsored arts and culture agencies. Aribowo, the head of Dewan Kesenian Surabaya, the city-sponsored arts council, sits on the organizing committee as do members of the regional Ministry of Education and Culture. The governor of East Java himself will open the festival in a grand ceremony in the state building, Grahadi, on the evening of May 31.

The festival could in fact not be mounted without such cooperation, as the number of suitable spaces for arts events are few and they need to use them all, including the government-owned and run Balai Pemuda, home of Dewan Kesenian Surabaya, which will also serve as the center of the festival. They are scrounging up every space they can, including open spaces in the Surabaya and Tunjungan shopping plazas and public rooms in Surabaya hotels. The thinking of the organizers is the reverse of Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams: build the event, and the buildings will come. Indeed, eventually they hope that the on-going presence of the festival will both raise funds and consciousness towards the building of a real arts center that is worthy of Surabaya's 3 million-plus population and status as second-largest city in Indonesia.

Right now, the festival is nothing more than a large whiteboard calendar on the wall scrawled with the names of artists and groups already scheduled to appear and a gleam in the eye of the organizing committee. But come the end of May, the lights will go up and the show will go on: and Surabaya will have its chance to strut its stuff, to Indonesia, and, it hopes, the world. It may not want to "marry" the cosmopolitan wealth, polish and style of Jakarta. It may be content with its old ways, its rough-and-tumble nature. However, like Pak Amang and his Jakarta journalist, Surabaya will certainly not be unhappy to attract Jakarta's attention -- if only in the end to refuse her advances and reaffirm the old, comfortable values of home.