Humanism on center stage at Indonesian Dance Festival '99

By Sal Murgiyanto

JAKARTA (JP): After some dazzling performances but with an unfortunate lack of promotion, the Fifth Indonesian Dance Festival officially closed on Sept. 21 at the Graha Bhakti Budaya hall of the Ismail Marzuki Arts Center (TIM), Jakarta.

The event, which began at the Indonesian College of the Arts (STSI) in Surakarta, was intended to foster creativity in dance, to promote partnership between dance artists of different cultural backgrounds and to improve public appreciation of the arts.

More than 135 dance works were presented in various Festival programs ranging from the main event (Sept. 16 to Sept. 21), showcase (Sept. 17 to Sept. 18), choreography competition (Sept. 12 to Sept. 14) and workshop (Aug. 18 to Sept. 10). More than 1,200 dancers, musicians, choreographers, visual artists, scholars and managers participated in the major event.

Among the individual achievements were the three solo works by guest choreographers from China, Korea and Japan in the opening night at Graha Bhakti Budaya, TIM.

Chinese choreographer Wen Hui performed her unique and original work One More Deep Breath to depict a woman in labor; she was accompanied by a woman vocalist, Harthuk, from the Indonesian College of the Arts STSI in Surakarta.

Continually changing beautiful video images were projected on the white-clad forms of Wen Hui and Harthuk and upon the white backdrop behind them. Sitting on two wooden chairs covered by white linen, Wen Hui danced with intricate details of hand and body movements accompanied by Harthuk's high falsetto.

In great emotional detail, Wen Hui expressed her personal womanly experience of life and death in giving birth, mostly overlooked by men except, perhaps, a newlywed husband who is awaiting the birth of his first child.

Lux Aeterna by San Hea Ha is impressive in a very different way. Ha creates a ritualistic atmosphere early in the beginning of her piece by simply sitting cross-legged in a meditative position, her white gown forming a circle on the floor.

Placing her palms together in front of her chest, she moved slowly in tranquil and clear movements. The piece was a contemplative process to discover calmness in oneself, in noisy daily life, to suppress ego in facing the complex hedonistic world.

Kota Yamazaki's Shakuri was another successful work. Unlike the previous two, Shakuri is more mundane. With a strong individual choreographic approach and preference for movement, Yamazaki moves as if an electric current is flowing in his body: continuously moving intricately, up and down, a brief stop, only to begin again with gusto.

Eight Indonesian choreographers presented their individual works to balance their foreign counterparts.

Chendra Effendy and Yudistira Syuman of Kreativitat dance group respectively choreographed Nurani and Miauww, which were presented along with Howard Lark's Summit and Seongjoo Joh's Second Name of that Woman at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on Sept. 17 and 18. Sulistyo S. Tirtokusumo of Deddy Dance Company created a classical Javanese dance piece Bedaya Suryasumirat and a contemporary work, Crisis which was performed at Graha Bhakti Budaya, TIM, along with Wen Hui's Dining with 1999, a collaborative work with dancers from STSI.

Meanwhile, the Jakarta Institute of the Arts presented five new works choreographed by the institute's faculty members, alumni and students. Most of the works were based on the Minang tradition of West Sumatra and were of varying quality.

Krisnawardi's Sumangaik, Zubir's Moment, and Usman's Anggau are promising works although they need final polishing. Others, especially Whispering, need to be reworked.

Collaborative project

The International Dance Festival '99 was designed as "a forum for intercultural interaction". Besides Wen Hui of China and Kota Yamazaki of Japan, two other choreographers -- Joh of Korea and Lark of the U.S. -- were invited for a residency to create a work with the Kreativitat dancers of the Farida Oetoyo Dance School.

A famous ballet master, teacher and choreographer who now teaches at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei, Lark choreographed a beautiful ballet for two male and three female dancers. With neatly designed South American dresses and to music from the continent, Summit properly set the tone of Kreativitat's performance at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on Sept. 17 and Sept. 18.

His challenge of technique and sensitivity was met by the Kreativitat dancers.

"The work is about two things that every man cannot flee," Lark said. "Love is the first, death is the second. Love and death at the Summit had taken me!" I found Summit the best ballet piece performed by Indonesian dancer.

Joh's Woman created in 1998 was originally a solo piece.

Applying for the UNESCO-ASCHBERG bursaries for artists, Joh planned to develop her work for a duet of two women. However, after her one-month residency in the village of Singapadu in Bali and Surakarta in Central Java, she changed her mind and developed the piece into a group piece for two male and four female dancers.

The piece, as the choreographer herself wrote, "is a sketch of an unconscious desire for going toward the outside, or for going out of the present state. It could be a desire for going out of the custom, out of the reason, out of the gender, out of the time, out of the space, out of oneself, out of anything ... "

Three girls and one man dressed as women in white bras and short black gowns. One man wearing a Javanese mask and dressed in black was tied by a long sash from the ceiling. For accompaniment, Joh used a collage of music of Steve Reich, Alain Michon and Indonesian composer R. Supanggah (Keli and Kerukunan).

In a collaborative work such as Summit and Second Name of that Woman, three important things are put face to face: the art, the man behind it, and the cultural background of the arts and the participants.

It is not too difficult to fuse the arts but it is not that easy to bring two or more artists of different aesthetic beliefs and cultural backgrounds. An intercultural interaction, to me, is a double-edge activity.

It can be liberating but it can also be a continuation of colonialism, a further exploitation of other cultures. Our task is to encourage the first and avoid the second.

Bringing people together is one thing, sharing everything in equality is another. If we are to engage effectively in a collaborative project, then we have "a responsibility to make the necessary cultural and intercultural adjustment" (Fitzgerald, 1997).

It is ironic that the best advice of artistic collaboration across culture I have read was given by an artist whose government now looks down at Indonesia as a nation.

To be truly productive, an artistic collaboration across cultures "requires a willingness to suspend or even radically change some of our long-held cultural beliefs, and while not necessarily accepting all aspects of the other culture's beliefs and values, at least make a commitment to studying and experiencing them in order to meet at a deeper level of understanding" (Stock, 1998).

Stock's statement is right not only in a collaborative project between Westerners and Asian dancers, but also among Indonesian dance artists which entails long-term mutual obligation.

The excellent achievement in the artistic field and in the building of understanding among artists of different cultural backgrounds was not matched by a successful publicity and marketing of the arts. In many of the festival events, only half of the arena's seats were full.

In Indonesia we live in a society where we have to coexist, which does not mean that we have to like other cultures. But we have to be sensitive to each other's cultures. Indeed, through sensitivity, openness and a willingness to learn, we can grow not only as a better artist or scholar but, also and more importantly, as a better human being.

The festival showed that we need to continually remind ourselves that humanism is the essence of the art.