New collaborative dance contemplates lost scenery

Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta

Scenery will get a new touch as well-known choreographer-cum- dancer Martinus Miroto, Singaporean choreographer Angela Liong and Singaporean installation artist Han Sai Por collaborate to present it as an art performance for the 2002 Yogyakarta Arts Festival.

The show at Miroto's Banjarmili dance theater studio on Friday night, June 21, involves four Singaporean dancers from The Arts Fission Company, five dancers, including Miroto, from Miroto Dance Company, and volunteer dancers mostly from the Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI) Yogyakarta and Yogyakarta State University.

"I called it Borrowed Scenery because I came here to borrow from Miroto's studio, from the people of Yogyakarta, a dance scenery or whatever we are looking for, that we no longer have in Singapore," said Angela Liong, Arts Fission Company co-founder and artistic director.

She said Miroto's studio was chosen because of its rural scenery, one that she could no longer find in her home country.

And she is not exaggerating, given the fact that the studio, which is located in Kradenan village in Sleman regency -- just on the western outskirts of Yogyakarta, is built right next to the Bedhog River, one of only a few rivers left in the city that has clear water. Right across from the studio, one can view local residents bathing under the waterspouts on the slope of the river.

"I come here to search, to look for something that we have lost, including farms and villages, that may not be coming back," Liong said.

She said she had found that rural settings in most Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, had obtained a very modern and cosmopolitan look, leaving almost nothing to keep track of the past.

"Singapore, for example, is a very, very small island with a very fast pace. People do everything very routinely there, leaving only a very little time to really think of what they are doing, of why they are doing things and even to communicate with each other. In fact, creating arts is a matter of human communication," Liong said. She added that she came to the city to communicate with local artists.

"The whole idea is that doing this (collaboration) helps me, as a performing artist, to look at what kind of change are we looking at," said Liong, remarking that Indonesia could experience the same thing unless people here knew exactly what change they really wanted.

According to Miroto, it was Liong who prepared the whole concept of the 90-minute planned show, which tells about the fears of urban people over the impact of modernization which could see the loss of nature's beautiful scenery.

"It's more a reflection of Angela's (Liong's) personal experience. But I agreed to name it Borrowed Scenery because the whole concept, I think, also reflects my own anxiety that someday we could also lose what they have lost in Singapore. Besides, although this place belongs to me, this is still God's property, isn't it? So I just borrow it from Him," Miroto told The Jakarta Post in a separate interview at his Banjarmili Studio recently.

Unlike most other shows needing only a single stage, Borrowed Scenery uses both indoor and outdoor stages at the studio. The dancers, therefore, will dance both on a smooth surface inside the studio and on rough surfaces, even on rocks, outside.

Well-known Singaporean artist Han Sai Por will enrich the scene with her installations to create a more specific dimension of the natural scenery.

During the show, the audience, therefore, will have to move from one scene to another to enjoy the show.

"I hope this will give the audience as well as the dancers a new experience, opening a new horizon in performing a dance piece," said Miroto, who will dance on the river's rocks with natural waterspouts as a backdrop.

Liong's choreography, according to Miroto, dominates most of the first part of the dance theater performance, while Miroto's will be in the middle part up to the last.

In creating the piece, Miroto and Liong met only in March this year to discuss the collaboration work and explore the studio. After that, discussions were conducted through e-mail and one more meeting between the two for the real creative work only six days ahead of the show.

"What is interesting with this collaboration is indeed the fact that we have never seen each other's work before. That's why I call this a very sincere collaboration," Liong said.

Back in Singapore, Liong is famous for performing her dances in unconventional performance spaces. Her dance works often focus on the link between memory and human sensibility in the emerging Asian cities. She is concerned with redefining the original Asian performance space for dance in an urban environment.

Liong set up her first professional dance diploma program at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore in 1989. She implemented the first Singapore Bachelor of Arts dance degree program in Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts while she was the dean of the Performing Arts there in 1998.

Since 1984, Liong has served actively as an advisor on various government arts and cultural related committees. Her collaboration with Miroto is the second with Indonesian artists. The first one, staged in Singapore, was with dancer Sukardji Sriman of Surakarta, Central Java.

For Miroto, his collaboration with Liong is the second he has had with Singaporean artists. Previously, he jointly created a dance theater piece with Singaporean choreographer Ongkeng Sen and presented the work abroad, including in Singapore and Germany.