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.