Time is Transient. We are Eternal is Teater Garasi’s newest production, which departs from the investigation and reflection of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’.

The production, directed by Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, is a further exploration of Teater Garasi’s collective art projects since 2008 that include Je.ja.l.an (The Streets) and Tubuh Ketiga (Third Body), which are an attempt to investigate how the explosion of voices and narratives (ideology, religion, and identity) in post-1998 Indonesia has created and unveiled tension and violence—both new and latent.

Synopsis

A former migrant worker, Rosnah, is an aspiring artist busking to survive in Jakarta, a city full of noises ―voices, colors, smells, bodies, buildings, machines, bus stops, and endless traffic jam. She looks for pauses in between so she can dance. Her time is marked by the annual Lebaran (Eid el-Fitr), when she returns home to her family. Celebrating the festivities, she faces the inevitable, all the slipping moments that persistently try to sneak into the annual family portrait: the departure of his older brother to Afghanistan, her younger brother’s obsession with reciting the call to prayers, her mother’s kitchen sink, the lost of the family’s pet, her abandoned son, her father’s penchant for shooting birds to kill time.

Meanwhile, there is a cat killer out there.

This is a cacophonic tour to the street level of the 21st century Indonesia. The chaos of the politics at the higher places –the global war, economic inequalities, state politics, religious tensions– populates the everyday as competing noises and contesting narratives, while traumatic historical violence continue to haunt in the background.

And we dance while we are in the cacophony.