Gusmiati Suid pools talent with German

Gusmiati Suid pools talent with German

By Michael Dusche

JAKARTA (JP): Gusmiati Suid, chief of Gumarang Sakti Dance
Company, and Joachim Schlomer, chief choreographer of Tanz
Theater Basel, will reveal this weekend the fruit of four weeks
of intense intercultural collaboration.

It is expected that the premiere on Friday, followed by
performances on Saturday and Sunday, at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta
will be an exciting event since the collaboration of Gusmiati
Suid, born in 1942 in West Sumatra, and Joachim Schlomer, born in
1962 in West Germany, involves two internationally acclaimed
artists from nearly antagonistic schools.

Gusmiati Suid learned to dance in the Minangkabau style of
rural West Sumatra. Her family endowed her with the skills of the
traditional martial art pencak silat. She attended the Academy of
Traditional Music and Arts in Padang Panjang where she majored in
Minang traditional music.

At the heart of Minang culture lies silat whose many
variations she studied in years of field research, traveling from
village to village in West Sumatra.

In 1982 Gusmiati Suid founded the Gumarang Sakti Dance
Company. In 1987 she moved to Jakarta, and later to Depok on the
southern border of the city.

A major breakthrough in her career was her participation in
the Asian Festival of Theater, Dance and Martial Arts in India.
She also took part in the International Festival of Dance
Academies in Hong Kong in 1989 and was invited to the 1990
festival in LaBaulle, France.

During the 1990 through 1991 season, Gusmiati Suid performed
in New York and won the New York Dance Performance (Bessie)
Award.

In 1994 she participated in the International Festival of
Dance in Leverkusen, Germany, in the forum "Modern Dance -- from
Isadora to Pina". Gumarang Sakti performed as one of 10 selected
groups together with the ensembles of Isadora Duncan and Pina
Bausch, two of the most famous contemporary choreographers.

In 1998 Gusmiati Suid opened Art Summit Indonesia with Api
Dalam Sekam which literally translates into "fire in the rice
spray" or "secret desires".

Schlomer, by contrast, was trained at Germany's most
outstanding school for contemporary dance, the FolEwanghochschule
in Essen, a highly urban environment. At a very young age he
cooperated with Pina Bausch.

In 1991, Schlomer founded his own dance group, Company Josh,
and was appointed chief of ballet at the theater in the city of
Ulm in Germany.

In 1993, he choreographed two pieces for Mikhail Baryshnikov's
White Oak Dance Project.

From 1994 to 1996, Schlomer was director of the newly founded
Deutsches National Theater in Goethe-town Weimar. One of the most
outstanding creations from the period was Highlands or the
Repercussions of Stones, which was performed at the Art Summit
Indonesia of 1995.

Schlomer has been director of Tanz Theater Basel for the past
five years.

In accordance with the idea of pencak silat as a sublimated
form of ritualized fighting, Gusmiati Suid accents the
communication of the human body with its potentially threatening
environment. In fighting, movements are triggered by outside
sources. In contrast, Schlomer develops his choreography through
concentrating on energetic poles inherent in the human body. The
flow of movement is thus triggered and directed by inside sources
which in turn are stimulated by the flow of the music.

The structure in time is thus mainly given by the music,
whereas Gusmiati Suid's approach depends heavily on the
narrative. Stipulation of a naturalistic setting with the human
being exposed to imaginative threats from animals or fellow
humans implies the use of storytelling as an artistic means aside
from music. Such narrative elements are almost absent in
Schlomer's artistic framework. Orientation is provided by an
abstract scheme of elementary movements in space and some
fundamental human dispositions such as emptiness and plenty,
vulnerability and strength.

When artists of such different backgrounds meet, communication
either breaks down or they find a common language that transcends
the former limitations of both. With Joachim Schlomer and
Gusmiati Suid, the latter seems to be the case. Each arranged,
under the scrutiny of the other, a piece of choreography that
will be performed by a mixed group of dancers -- half of their
members European and the rest Indonesian -- and be accompanied by
an Indonesian group of musicians.

The encounter was organized by the Goethe Institut who brought
the two choreographers together back in 1997 when a first
workshop was arranged in Depok, the base of Gumarang Sakti.