Fools rush in … and succeed: how an outsider's naivety effected an arts and reconciliation initiative in Indonesia's Sulawesi

ABSTRACT

Without knowing anything of the contentious history between Sulawesi's Chinese and Indonesian Moslem communities, Taiwanese director Peng Ya-ling went to Makassar to conduct a reconciliation workshop. As director of Uhan Shii Theatre, Peng creates performances from oral histories she collects in interviews. She applied this technique in Indonesia, first having to overcome deep-seated suspicion from both sides. The Moslem Indonesian actors performed symbolic re-enactments of the Chinese settlers’ stories for a mixed audience from both communities, thus effecting a moment of racial harmony.

KEYWORDS:

• Applied theatre
• Sulawesi
• performance as reconciliation
• Chinese communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Catherine Diamond is a professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan. She is the author of Communities of Imagination: Southeast Asian Contemporary Theatres and director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia. http://www.kinnarieco-theatre.org.

Notes

1. Dutch captain Jan Pieterszoon Coen was sent by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to develop the lucrative pepper trade in Indonesia and used Chinese migrants to build the colonial capital Batavia, which is now Jakarta. In 1644, at the beginning of the Qing Manchu dynasty, many Chinese fled from Fujian province to Indonesia as well as to Taiwan – becoming today's ‘Taiwanese’, to which Peng belongs. The Dutch privileged the Chinese traders over other Europeans but prevented them from mingling with the local population. When the Chinese, as sugar plantation owners, became powerful, the Dutch incited the Indonesian laborers against them, fomenting the first Chinese massacre in 1740 (Chow 2017).

2. Challis, Roland, interviewed in Lashmar and Oliver (1988).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology [grant number 106-2410-H-031-011].