2018 was a special year for Nanik Indarti, a woman with a short stature (disproportionate dwarfism), in performing arts which she has been involved in since graduating from college in 2011. She, who is Bachelor of Theater Arts graduated from Indonesian Art Institute of Yogyakarta (ISI Yogyakarta), founded the Unique Project Community and made her first theater performance entitled “Sepatu yang Sama, Kisah Jiwa dan Angka (The Same Shoes, The Story of the Soul and Numerals)”, after her proposal passed as one of the grant recipients.
However, making an independent work was not as easy as she imagined. Nanik then explored what is inside of her as Achondroplasia, the scientific name for people with short stature like her. Nanik herself knows and understands that Achondroplasia is a variety of physical disabilities. In the same year, she arranged a theatrical performance together with other short stature friends. The term of differently able Achondroplasia has become a problem, even now, because some of her friends who have short stature do not feel that they are differently able (diffable).
Not only theater, in her first debut, Nanik also wrote a book entitled Aku Perempuan Unique (I am a Unique Woman). This book raises 7 life stories of short stature women who have experienced bullying, harassment, and personal experiences of how they came into the world as achondroplasia. Nanik said that his friends had doubts at the beginning of writing their respective life stories. But when the words were arranged into sentences, the stories they wrote were like a kind of release of feelings that had been hidden for so long.
“Many people who are have short stature are not ready and don't even want to talk about their past in public. For me, past experiences were past and now is the future. So past experiences are okay to tell so people know who we are.” said Nanik.
In 2019, Nanik created a theatrical work entitled “Kahanan (Situation)”. This second theater show further deepened the various problems faced by differently able Achondroplasia people such as bullying in the educational realm, marriage issues, for example, the couple's parents are about marrying to a woman with short stature will have short-stature offspring, including work problems where physical size becomes an obstacle and other gender issues.
Nanik also recalls that when she worked at several art institutions, she also often received bad attitudes from colleagues who underestimated her. A person with a disability needs to prove many times over to show that s/he is capable, then other people will believe, so that Nanik can't help but follow the community's perspective by becoming a facilitator and meeting officials, just to show her abilities.
Pinning the word ‘Unique’ as the name of her community, this 36-year-old woman doesn't mean that she wants to accept the stigma of society that considers them unique in a negative connotation, but she realizes that she and her friends are indeed unique. People are familiar with those who have unique characteristics, not only physically, but also works in performing arts that are different from the roles of short-stature people in the entertainment world who tend to objectify through roles, for example as tuyul (an imp; small, like a child; but would never grow larger and usually is used by human beings to make money through invisible theft of money). From this phenomenon, Nanik wants to show short-stature people who prioritize their work rather than being constantly physically exploited.
