Your Tail Is Red

This is a place

Where the sharpest fangs are in chain

This is a place

Where the light shines on people bid

This is a market

For people with guts

People come for the 3 super rare items, a vitality recipe from the past, a tiger statue from a thug, and a ring with blue sapphire stone. They will bid the best price to get that rare item they wanted to have. There are so many rumors about these items that all that stuff reflecting powers and tragedy simultaneously. Who would get those items?

This visual theatre brings about the performativity of political othering that remains the central form of how human being operates in everyday life either in a high level politics or in a high tensed grass root intrigue. The othering—in that sense—manifest in the body of representation, narrative, and myth that often being nurtured through political power.  Through othering, one group is represented as the conveyor of good virtue, while the other is the evil. Yet, at a certain degree, the subject of othering embodies a picture of ambiguity and ambivalence: half evil and half angel. The grand narratives, however, are created through power relations, often times, the imbalanced ones.

We explore that kind of power relation through diverse signification that symbolise either clear-cut picture of othering or rather blurred ones.  Tiger in this performance is depicted as ‘a living form that being told as tacky with power, symbol of fear, tragedy, myth as well as mysterious.’ Their existences have always been contingent and depend upon the regime of knowledge they are defined by throughout centuries. Meanwhile, the nature of plurality in Indonesia entails the politics of othering to the discriminated ones. We represent one ethnic that has always been in ambiguous political position. They, in this archipelago, are sometime deemed the tiger of the civilisation; yet looked down as the symbol of tragedy. We pack these narratives into video mapping, script, theatrical act, music, shadows, and puppet.