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.