Monday was scheduled with part two of the improvisation sessions, with a second group of Jogja actors. We worked with four actors, again using as the starting point the question \u201cWhat makes you who you are.\u201d Several times, I asked the actors to write their responses on post-it notes that we stuck up on the walls. Once we had accumulated a good selection, I asked them to pick one random post-it, or a combination of two, to use as the basis for their character in an improvisation.
\nThe first improvisation was set in a warung, a small family owned shop, on a rainy day. There was one shop owner and several \u201ccustomers\u201d who came in either to buy things or simply to get protection from the weather. This impro developed quite nicely \u2013 you could see how people were making subtle judgements about each other based on small details, like how they looked, what they were wearing, or behavioral traits.
\nIn previous sessions, I had become aware that one of the important factors in Indonesian culture in determining identity was family. Many people introduced themselves by saying how many brothers and sisters they had, and what number they were in the family order. After further discussion on this topic, we based the next impro on family dynamics.
\nA son, who lived with his mother, calls his three sisters home after their mother dies, and they arrive on the day of the funeral. They all have a strange and strained relationship. The mother has left a will that the brother must open and share with his sisters. But there is a secret in the family. The one sister who had left Jogja (the youngest) always felt like an outsider and always felt resentment from the mother. And she recently found out why. In fact, she is not her mother\u2019s true daughter, but the daughter of a woman with whom the father had an affair. Because of this, the mother never bonded with her.
\nNow the mother has left the youngest daughter out of her will, and the the siblings need to decide what to do: disregard the mother\u2019s will and share equally between them, or respect her wish and give nothing to the youngest sister?
\nI had asked the actors to speak as little as possible and try to convey the scene through silence and body language. We filmed the scene on video, and even when they were speaking in Indonesian, I could feel the dynamics and relationships within the family unit. I felt that this scene was quite powerful and one I would be interested in revisiting.
\nBut no time for that, because the next day I started working with a new group of artists \u2013 the residents at PSBK, who had been working together for the previous 6 months at the centre. The group included visual artists, set designers, performance artists, Javanese dancers, and actors. We didn\u2019t have a tight brief, just an open space and we knew that whatever work we did together was going to inform the exhibition they were going to create, their final project as a group, which was to take place after I finished my residency.
\nI again started by posing them the question \u201cWhat makes you who you are\u201d, and posting their responses around the room. But they were not very forthcoming. Part of the challenge was the language. Part of the challenge was that the question itself was very simple, so in a way it was very difficult to answer. They were also shy.
\nI was told that due to the education system they come from, people are more responsive to complicated systems. Also, they said that in Indonesian culture it is more important what other people think about you, than what you think about yourself (the latter is not common to talk about). There was ongoing disagreement about the precise translation of the question \u2013 this became a running theme during my entire residency (not to mention when we tried to translate it into Javanese and Indonesian Sign Language\/Bisundo).<\/p>\n