Young talents conquer stage with powerful plays

Young talents conquer stage with powerful plays

I Wayan Juniartha, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar

At the end of the performance, Cok Sawitri, the driving force
behind the All-Bali Theater Festival, was so overwhelmed with joy
that she jumped up from her chair and began yelling, betraying
her usual calm.

A few meters away, another leading dramatist, Mas Ruscitadewi,
sat quietly, trying to hide her teary eyes.

The rest of the spectators broke into wave after wave of
thunderous applause. Some of them stormed the stage, trying to be
the first to congratulate the actors and director.

The message was unanimous; this was a great performance.

"I am deeply touched. They managed to present an excellent
performance. Considering their ages and the various obstacles
they had to face in producing the play, it is quite an astounding
achievement," Mas Ruscitadewi said.

The play she was referring to was Harga Vagina (The price
of the vagina), one of six plays performed during the seven-day
All-Bali Theater Festival.

"It is arguably the best performance of the festival," theater
buff Agus Sedana said.

Harga Vagina was written and directed by 16-year-old Maliana.
An 11th grader at private high school St. Joseph in Denpasar,
Maliana is a shy girl with a rebellious heart.

"At first I wanted to write about child abuse, but somehow I
ended up writing a play about a prostitute," she said with a
grin.

"The word for prostitute in Bahasa (Indonesia) is pelacur. The
word lacur in the Balinese language means poor. Initially, I
assumed that a prostitute was someone who was poor in moral and
ethical values," she said.

After weeks of research, reading books on the psychology of
street prostitutes and gathering first-hand stories from her male
friends, Maliana discarded this initial assumption.

"They are the victims of either poverty or social injustices.
From the moral and ethical perspective, prostitutes are far
richer than politicians and bureaucrats who have not only sold
their country and constituents, but also their consciences.

"Prostitutes, at least the one I wrote about, still
have their consciences intact," Maliana said.

This transformation of thought and image -- from prostitutes
as women with poor morals to prostitutes as women with strong
consciences -- is clearly reflected in Maimunah, the streetwise
protagonist of Harga Vagina.

Maimunah transforms from a sensual, pleasure-seeking
individual into an intelligent woman who courageously questions
the injustices the male-dominated world has inflicted upon her.

Promising actress Rika Puspasari vividly portrays this
transformation. In what can only be described as a compelling
tour de force, Rika seduces the spectators into a darkly sensuous
realm of quick sex and mind-blowing pleasure. She demonstrates
various positions from the Kama Sutra and hilarious penis
resuscitation and enlargement techniques, repeatedly proclaiming
she is nothing but a professional service provider with no
emotional attachment.

Then, in a sudden transformation, Rika shows the other side of
Maimunah. In a moving narration, she discloses the hypocrisy of
her customers-- soldiers, government officials, students and
laborers -- who literally fight for her services but vehemently
deny her any official acknowledgement for her contributions to
society.

Toward the end of the performance, Rika convincingly portrays
Maimunah as an activist who puts her vagina up for auction. It is
an effort to show how a prostitute's vagina, an item deeply
loathed by society, is the very thing that males in that society
yearn for.

In the end, the vagina commands a very high price and Maimunah
is sent to jail for the murder of a high-ranking government
official. She did not kill the official. In fact, the official
was killed by a fellow official in a fight over Maimunah's
vagina.

In this age of whimsical soap operas and glamorous teenage
starlets, it is rare to find a teenage girl who is not only brave
enough but also intelligent enough to write a dark play about
prostitution, poverty and a vagina auction.

Maliana, however, is not a singular anomaly in Bali's
contemporary theater realm. Thanks to the hard work of Cok
Sawitri and her Kelompok Tulus Ngayah group, the island can boast
a new generation of dramatists and actors who are not only
intelligent but also sensitive to the various social issues
around them.

A few nights before the performance of Harga Vagina, 18-year-
old Anak Agung Eka Putri, in her directorial debut, amazed the
audience with an intelligent interpretation of Nyunyan...Nyunyen,
a complex and difficult script on domestic violence, single-
parenthood and lesbianism, written by an equally young woman
writer, Luh Arik Sariadi.

"Eka Putri's interpretation helped me to fully understand my
own script. Previously, I had no idea what my play was all about.
I wrote it almost unconsciously. Now I know that it reflects my
personal suffering, physical and otherwise," Sariadi said.

Through its various activities, from holding workshops on
script writing and theater management, to providing generous
grants to young theater companies, Kelompok Tulus Ngayah has
helped bring about what might be Bali's golden age of modern
drama.