After a presentation about her work -- entitled “Fury, Beauty and Society” -- last weekend, the dramatist Ratna Sarumpaet took questions from the audience. Iranian playwright and screenwriter Naghmeh Samini, who had delivered a talk on “History, Myths and Society” immediately before -- and perhaps curious as to the analogies between Ratna’s theatrical motivations and her own -- had a query that, in its halting English, appeared to ask: “Is there any link between contemporary Indonesian theatre and Indonesian mythology?”

“I’m not sure whether I understand,” Ratna said, “But I’ll try to answer.” The narrative that emerged was somewhat oblique. It involved the independence movements of places like Papua and Bali: Ratna cited the fact that the bombing of the latter was connected to extremists’ ire over the practice of un-Islamic art on that island -- and that this reaction was, essentially, a failure in certain groups to separate religious belief and culture. “I am against this,” Ratna said. “I ask: ‘Why?’ Many were angry with me. But, actually, there are several imams who support me.”

This confusion -- on the last day of “A Playwrights Exchange”, a fete of performances, forums and workshops, jointly organised by Instant Café Theatre, Kualiworks and Sisters in Islam -- nevertheless served, for me, as an illustration of the driving force behind the Indonesian actor and playwright’s work: a pressing and outspoken social awareness. “I always need anger to write,” Ratna would say, in response to a later question about motivation. It is injustice, she admitted, that inspires her.

Ratna is most famous for her 1997 monologue, “Marsinah Menggugat”, about a factory labour activist whose murder, in 1993, was almost certainly carried out by a military squad under the orders of oligarchs; its performance in Surabaya was shut down with three tanks and truckloads of armed soldiers. In 1998, she was detained for organising a political meeting, protesting the re-election of President Suharto; in 2006, she was forced to leave Jakarta after speaking out against Islamic militants and politicians. Satu Merah Panggung, the company Ratna founded in 1974, has one overbearing prerequisite for membership: its practitioners must be willing to take risks. “They must believe in the vision of the group,” Ratna said, “That is, to tell the truth.”

This confrontational streak is characteristic of Indonesian theatre; by contrast, the Iranian tendency, evident in Naghmeh’s revealing stories about making theatre in Tehran, to overcome censoring regulations through creative means -- whether to critically examine socio-political issues, or to plainly tell a beautiful story -- seems tame. Yet both are, ultimately, two different expressions of empowered rebellion: in the former, one faces the monolithic powers of conservatism and the state head-on; in the latter, one accepts the changing limitations, subverting and outsmarting them where necessary. Naghmeh, when asked why her biography in the exchange’s programme notes described her as controversial and “not an ‘official’ playwright,” reacted with some surprise. “There is no such thing as an official playwright in Iran,” she said, laughing. “All playwrights are controversial and ‘unofficial’.”

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What Do We Do?

As the weekend progressed and one issue -- the place and function of Malaysian theatre in its social context -- increasingly became the focus of discussion, spectators realised that, in comparison to this vitality, we were somewhat lacking in both diligence and fortitude. During one particularly whingy session, the Saturday mid-morning “Panel Exchange with Writers, Theatre Makers and Activists”, which featured practitioners describing concessions made with Dewan Bandaraya personnel, and asking themselves, almost rhetorically, how to overcome the avenging arm of authority, Ratna could not restrain her annoyance. “Hearing this makes me sad,” she said, her large earrings tinkling along with her agitation. “Why are you making deals with the government? You should be kicking the table!”

”Maybe the table is nailed to the floor,” someone said, sardonic. Still, Ratna’s rebuke echoed through subsequent sessions -- and perhaps this was what made “A Playwrights Exchange” worth it: hearing stories of creative dissent elsewhere, we started thinking about ways to move ahead, ourselves.

Perhaps least dour was the long-time theatre director and educationist Normah Nordin, who described growing up in the 1970s -- and, unshackled with the fear of transgression or official retribution, just kept doing what she wanted to do. “I just wanted to work,” she said. Normah has since unofficially retired from active practice -- she now teaches acting to young people in Kedah -- but her current refrain is not very different: “I just want to help my students develop their potential.”

“I’m tired about people in theatre here saying that they can’t do this, or they can’t do that,” Instant Café Theatre director Jo Kukathas said. She, too, expressed an urgent desire to keeping on working. “That’s what this exchange is for: to find out ways of doing things -- because there are. If hitting our heads against the wall isn’t working, we should consider the possibility that it’s the wrong wall, or that there are not enough heads.”

No Single Reality

And what heads we do have.

Leow Puay Tin (who now runs the School of Performance + Media at Sunway University College) was the last of Sunday’s three playwrights; her slot, “Randomness, Telling Stories and Society”, had her describing three previous works: “3 Children”, an anthology of Puay Tin’s own Malaccan-childhood stories and experiences; “The Dakini Project”, a patchwork of readings related to the immigrant condition; and “Tikam-Tikam: Malaysian Roulette”, a collection of excerpts from texts like “An Introduction to the Malaysian Constitution” and K Das’s “The Tunku Tapes” to a recipe for chicken rice and Sang Kancil, performed in the order dictated by an audience’s arbitrary arrangement.

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Even her speech followed the playwright’s love of unpredictability, jumping between accounts of her three works in non-chronological order: beginning at Wild Rice’s performance of “Tikam-Tikam” at the 2005 Singapore Writers Festival, going back in time to discuss “3 Children”, her inspirations -- Sybil Kathigesu’s “No Dram of Mercy” was singled out -- and the pitfalls of a work becoming too personal, then letting us in on the etymological ironies of the word “dakini”.

“The Dakini Project” was, perhaps, Puay Tin’s first overt foray into the concepts that now obsess her: the cause-and-effect principles of karma; the posit that initial conditions may give rise to unpredictable results -- and that these reactions, in turn, begin to evolve fractal patterns of complex beauty. “I am very interested in chaos theory,” Puay Tin said.

Playwrights have dealt with such themes before, but -- unlike Tom Stoppard, say, whose “Arcadia” examined causality and higher mathematical principles in a carefully orchestrated plot -- Puay Tin has let these ideas inhabit her process of theatre-making, itself. “The Dakini Project” had one rule: all texts had to fit a page half-A4 in dimension. These flashcards were shuffled, and the resulting interplay of meaning and intertextuality was hit-and-miss. “It’s about putting oneself at risk,” the playwright said. “When I performed it in Manila it was a complete failure; I remember Ratna, who was part of the audience, pinching me and saying: ‘Why do you make me work so hard?’ ”

Puay Tin was in Manila as part of a playwright’s conference; a scholarly paper on feminine aesthetics, delivered on one of the following days, cited Puay Tin’s work as an example -- its previous, and disappointing, reception notwithstanding.

“I don’t think it is really a feminine aesthetic,” Puay Tin said, in conclusion. “It is just about how one person’s take on reality, onstage, is very boring. Space and time in a performance is very fluid. In my work, from “3 Children” onwards, I’ve tried reclaiming this sentiment from Western naturalism.” Writing, to the playwright, isn’t the domain of an exclusive group of people called “writers”; telling stories, for her, is about delivering a collection of miscellany, and finding connections in the delivery. “Who says it doesn’t matter,” Puay Tin said, “You just want to share it.”

Hearing that, at the tail of “A Playwrights Exchange”, helped me make sense of the past four days: of the grumbling and the sense of impotence, of the smiles and the hopefulness, of Ratna not really answering Naghmeh’s question. I realised it wasn’t about question-and-answer linearity, but just getting heads together. By the end of Sunday’s closing forum, the room was quivering with excitement. We were making connections -- in a way, we were already kicking tables. The challenge, now, was to keep kicking.

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Zedeck Siew writes for Kakiseni.

“A Playwrights Exchange”, jointly organised by Instant Café Theatre, Kualiworks and Sisters in Islam, ran from October 18th to 21st, 2007 at The Annexe @ Central Market. It featured discussions, forums, two playwriting workshops by Naghmeh Samini, and “Perempuan Di Titik Nol”, a stage adaptation of Nawal el Saadawi’s “Woman At Point Zero”, by the Lampung, Sumatra-based company Teater Satu.