Oz Asia Festival. Space Theatre. 24 Sep 2015
Teater Garasi has warned that its show will be raucous and chaotic. The audience should not feel too comfortable.
The first message is at the door to the theatre - a thin, rolled mattress, a pair of large feet protruding from one end. A welcome from the dead.
The Space is wide open with performers meandering about as the audience enters. There are some benches against the wall, some flat cushions for the floor and a row of tables with "VIP" reserved cards upon them. It turns out that the ushers very thoughtfully steer the older people to the tables. A bit of Eastern respect for age. How refreshing. There is a convivial, busy feel to the theatre. The show begins in an organic way with things just happening and then a marching band stomps through - and the world of a Jakarta night street comes alive.
The performance is physical theatre at its best. The performers exhibit the many disciplines of sophisticated stagecraft. Their bodies tell a thousand human stories as they dance and march, carry things to and fro, set up little trading stalls, dart from the shrill whistle of the policeman. Corrugated iron plays a large part in the play, depicting transience, enterprise, poverty, hope... Characters set it up as little building symbols in the changing shape of the city. They use it as shelter. They carry it about and wear it rolled up on their heads. They dance loudly upon it.
There is an MC of sorts who explains that the audience will be moved about, so expect surprises. He comments throughout the busy hour of the show while assorted others carry crude PA systems or megaphones and make announcements or revelations to the audience. A surtitle screen translates these commentaries which, often with dark themes, have a beautiful sense of poetry.
All Jakarta life throbs by, fast and busy, sad and hopeful. People scurry under umbrellas, ride bikes, jostle, roll, flee. There are raunchy sex workers, stern Muslims, hawkers, protestors, all colours and creeds overlapping in the seeming chaos of the vast Indonesian populace. There is even a wedding ceremony, a lively band and singer celebrating at one end and at the other, a groom sitting in solitary state. People dance with plastic bags over their heads. The bride, Nur, is not present. She has had to go and work as a domestic in Malaysia, the groom explains. So it is, these days. A hard life. This scene is followed by the most perfect moment of the show, an older woman in classic Indonesian garb, singing solo a song of philosophic fatalism. It segues into a death dance, a silent topeng duo.
Essentially, what award-winning director Yudi Ahmad Tajudin brings us is vivid and feisty agitprop theatre. From the well-observed people soup of Teater Garasi's Jakarta street comes the powerful message of an oppressive government agenda. People controlled to keep them poor, the play asserts.
And there, on the stage, beside the hubub of seething urban existence, lies that rolled mattress one first saw at the door with those huge brown feet protruding from the end. There lies the constant thing, the unifying common factor, death.
The Streets is a simply wonderful work of immersive theatre. It is a grittily aesthetic picture of the ordinary life of our near neighbours. It is a contemporary cultural experience, superbly wrought. A triumph of OzAsia 2015.
Samela Harris
When: 24 to 26 Sep
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
