---------------------------------------------------------- FREE for JOIN Indonesia Daily News Online via EMAIL: go to: http://www.indo-news.com/subscribe.html - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - FREE - Dengan mengClick banner sponsor anda menyumbang Rp. 1000,- untuk HomePage IndoNews. ---------------------------------------------------------- KOLOM SUPANGKAT: FWD: Subj: A different view of Today's Jakarta Date: 3/9/99 12:07:35 AM Eastern Standard Time From: Amidjaya To: HSUPANGKAT Newsweek International, March 8, 1999 INDONESIA The Back Beat of Hard Times >From jazz to street theater, the economic slump has seeded a recession-era renaissance of the arts By Ron Moreau Tin Pan Alley has come to Jakarta. Each day, a ragged army of troubadours fans out across Indonesia's capital, singing out their bitterness at the collapsed economy and the politicians they blame for their woes. Husky-voiced transvestites, ukulele players, drummers banging the bottoms of large water bottles and children playing tambourines made out of bottle caps, they are a motley chorus, overflowing sidewalks and surrounding motorists at traffic lights. At the high end, accomplished musicians pass the hat on crowded public buses and sing songs that echo the protests of student demonstrators on the streets outside: the dictator Suharto is gone, but the misery remains. "The people get injustice, Suharto gets diamonds and houses," sings Agus, a guitar man on a downtown bus. "Where's the money?" croons his companion, Edy. "Common criminals go to jail, real criminals like Suharto go free." The street musicians are the vanguard of a recession-era renaissance in Indonesia. When the economy collapsed a year ago, the government of President Suharto soon followed�along with the censorship and puritanism of Suharto's militaristic New Order. Suddenly, music and media tycoons no longer had the budgets to import foreign superstars, and local audiences began demanding a harder look at their own lives. What's left, Indonesians have discovered, is themselves: a nation in which writers, rappers, filmmakers�anybody with something to say�now has a free voice and a lot to complain about. "Social realism is our new art form," says filmmaker, composer and tabloid publisher Eros Djarot. Suharto's successor, President B. J. Habibie, has been forced by popular demand to allow full voice to the Jakarta blues. He has lifted restrictions on the press, allowing the number of publications to mushroom from 200 to 800. He plans to issue new broadcast licenses, increasing the TV options that are now limited to one state-owned channel and five increasingly candid private channels. Even soap-opera producers have changed with the hard times. Executives of Multivision, Indonesia's largest television production studio, say that stations fearing social unrest now want plots that struggling people can relate to. One popular new series, "A Mother's Tears," follows a family's trials as it moves from a remote Sumatran village to the chaos and anonymity of Jakarta. "We don't want programs that increase people's anger at being poor or that emphasize to viewers the gap between the rich and the poor," says Riza Primadi, an executive at SCTV, a private channel. "Nowadays poor people can easily explode." The soaps are pale reflections of more daring shows. Station RCTI has signed Rendra, a renowned poet once exiled from the public stage for criticizing the repression under Suharto. Rendra will appear on a TV special, presenting poems like "For MG," in which he writes of pulling a lover "into my predicament/my revulsion toward hunger/my philosophy of rebellion/and doubt." Rendra will read to the accompaniment of blues guitarist Kiboud Maulana, whose burgeoning career shows how bad times have been good for many Indonesian artists. He worked as a consultant to a jazz club until mid-1997, when the collapse of the rupiah made it impossible for club owners to keep paying top American and European musicians in dollars. That opened the door for locals like Kiboud, who quit consulting and stepped to the microphone. "I'm not making that much more money but I'm getting more work, more opportunities," says Kiboud. At 58, he is about to record his first compact disc, and his quintet plays to packed clubs nightly. This vibrant new scene emerged from faint beginnings. In the early days of the economic crisis, television stations stopped buying programs, opting instead to broadcast reruns, mainly from their libraries of American imports like "Melrose Place" and "The X-Files." At Multivision, president Raam Punjabi kept churning out new shows, which he supplied to stations free of charge to defend his market share. His bet has paid off. Multivision now produces 16 prime-time shows a week, including eight of Indonesia's 10 most-watched programs. The stations are paying again, and popular tastes are moving in the direction of local shows. The same forces helped launch one of Indonesia's hottest new artists, filmmaker Garin Nugroho. His feature "Leaf on a Pillow" explores the lives of homeless street youths in a way that never would have reached the big screen in the years when Suharto was hailed as "the father of development." The ex-dictator's cousin Sudwikatmono controls the company that owns almost all cinemas, which tended to reject any social criticism when Suharto was at the height of his power. But with street protests push-ing Suharto to resign last spring, cinemas agreed to show Garin's movie. It was an instant hit. After a three-month run in Jakarta "Leaf" went on tour in the provinces and later won its star, Christine Hakim, a best-actress award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Taipei. Thus encouraged, Garin says his next film will be an equally provocative portrait of a Muslim family. "I want to make films that make people think," says Garin, 36. "I'm a Muslim but within Islam I want to have an open discussion of all ideas, including sex." That discussion has already begun. First published one month before the dictator's fall, the most explicitly erotic novel to appear since at least the start of the Suharto era in 1966 is now also one of the best selling. "Saman" includes sex scenes involving the title character, a Roman Catholic priest, and members of an underground political campaign to free oppressed plantation and factory workers. Author Ayu Utami even questions such sensitive "myths" about women as the traditional value of virginity and motherhood. "I'm frankly surprised by my success," says Utami, a former journalist who is already at work on the sequel. The theater is also reawakening. Last year, when writer Ratna Sarumpaet tried to stage her play "Marsinah," about a young woman labor activist slain allegedly by the military, the Army surrounded the theater with tanks and took Ratna into custody. She spent four months in jail, but is now free to take "Marsinah" on a five-city, three-month tour beginning in March. Ratna also plans to produce "The King," her jailhouse reflections on the Indonesian tendency to "champion big personalities." She wonders, in an interview, if the old cult of Suharto could be transposed to Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's magnetic first president and herself a top candidate in presidential elections later this year. "We have to inspire people to think about what happened to Marsinah and about the other political crimes of the Suharto era," says Ratna. "What happened can't be forgotten." Suharto's successor seems eager to distance himself from the past. Rather than repress the new voices, Habibie's government is sponsoring a conference next month for theater and dance troupes from around the country�with Ratna as a featured speaker. Despite security concerns and the financial crisis in Jakarta, neither the authorities nor the sponsors, a cigarette company, have moved to block a series of free Friday-night concerts headlining acts like Kiboud, the blues guitarist. It is an atmosphere in which just about anything goes, particularly if it sells. Consider the recession-era fate of metal sculptor Dolarosa Sinaga. Her latest work is a piece of steel welded into a smooth human form, wrapped in barbed wire and trapped between steel walls. "For me it represents repressive governments like Suharto's, which use development to enrich themselves and accumulate political power at the expense of their people's freedom and talents," says Sinaga. But is there a market for such sculpture? Indonesian collectors have stopped buying, she says, but several galleries have survived the economic crisis by turning to exports. "With the financial crisis, our works are real bargains. So, incredibly, the art market is still here." Thriving, as it were, in the rubble of a dictatorship. With Maggie Ford in Jakarta ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Didistribusikan tgl. 9 Mar 1999 jam 12:58:37 GMT+1 oleh: Indonesia Daily News Online <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.Indo-News.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
