'Paradis', a slice of heaven for urban art devotees

'Paradis', a slice of heaven for urban art devotees

By Rusdy Rukmarata

JAKARTA (JP): Is it possible to see people break-dancing,
headspins and all, to Baroque music? In Paradis you can; at least
in Jose Montalvo's version of paradise, you can even see more
bizarre situations become natural.

To watch Paradis was to get lost between myth and reality,
illusions and facts, daydreaming and boredom. People were dancing
upside down, a St. Bernard dog was moving together with desert
camels, African foot stomping went alongside ballet on pointe
shoes and barefoot contemporary dance. Touching scenes of love
were also combined with situations of black humor.

So in what category did Paradis fall? Comedy or tragedy? Dance
or pantomime? Junk food or gourmet? Well, it was none of the
above, but it was paradise.

Perhaps the urban art-lovers in Jakarta are in the middle of
the quest for paradise. No wonder you could hardly find a vacant
seat in Teater Tanah Airku, where Paradis was performed on March
14. Ballet authority Farida Oetoyo, classical Javanese
choreographer Sentot and poet Sitok Srengenge were among those
who came in droves to see the performance. The number was
supplemented by expatriates and students from various dance
schools who took three minibuses to the venue.

After all, it is a rare treat to have a performance as good as
Paradis in Jakarta. Moreover, it took place in Teater Tanah
Airku, which is located quite a distance from the center of the
city.

"It happened that Graha Bhakti Budaya and Gedung Kesenian
Jakarta had no space in their schedules for us," said Montalvo's
assistant manager Thierry Beviere. "Besides, we like the best
well-equipped theater building to meet the technical facilities
required."

The show began late, after a few announcements regarding the
half-hour delay. The audience was restless, and some began
clapping. You could say the Jakarta theater-going public felt
apologetic, because they gave a standing ovation at the end of
their marvelous performance. The applause did not end until the
stage lights faded to black. The audience seemed to be
contented.

But how satisfactory were the dancers of Montalvo-Hervieu, on
the other hand?

"The floor is too hard for the movement technique applied.
But, anyway, the show must go on," Beviere said after showtime.

Beyond the stage, far from this country, there is Jose
Montalvo, to whom the credit goes for the focus. He is part of a
new breed of modern dance choreographers. Since Isadora Duncan
shocked the world by breaking all the sacred rules of ballet
movement and staging, modern dance choreographers have emerged
with original styles, technique and staging.

There are those we can call the "hard-liners", like Martha
Graham and Merce Cunningham, who are strict in getting away from
everything to do with classical ballet. There are also those who
still use ballet techniques, pointe shoes and all, such as Twyla
Tharp, but use them in a very different way. The modern era of
dance is not only marked by the new and freer styles of movement,
but also the variety of stagecraft. Photography and
cinematography were also introduced in dance performances marked
by the works of Alvin Nicolay. Maurice Bejart, though technically
classically based, was known for his daring in combining drama,
rock and folk music and further breaking the rules on how dance
choreography should be staged.

When this Spanish-born 54-year-old Frenchman moved to Toulouse
and enrolled at the National Center for Choreography as a
teenager, he might not have imagined he could choose dancing a a
profession. It was not until he met the American choreographer
Jerome Andrews and learned about the beauty of cultural diversity
in dancing that the young Montalvo had the guts to abandon the
architecture he previously studied to join the Ballet Moderne de
Paris, where he found Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda
Childs and Pina Bausch.

He "found" his co-director Hervieu in the junior class he
taught in early 1980s when she was warming up in the company's
studio in Paris suburb. In an interview with The New York Times
in October 1999, Ms. Hervieu said, "I became his researcher, then
his dancer, his partner, his assistant, his co-choreographer and
now his co-director", adding with a laugh "but not his wife".

After founding the company in 1985, Montalvo and Hervieu began
to collect prizes. It needed one year for both of them to win the
second prize at the International Choreographic Dance Competition
of Paris, and another decade to gain numerous prizes at other
competitions across Europe along the way. The year 1994 was a
year of note, because the company's performance of Hollaka,
Hollalla led them to burst onto the scene. The company itself
gained fame, with a collage of multicultural dancers beautifully
staging contemporary French choreography. If it had not been
Montalvo, the existence of third-world immigration might easily
be parodied into a cynical scenes. But he is an idealist who
believes and fights for his ideas about multiculturalism by
embracing everything on stage.

How did he come up with his cast? "Chantal Loial imposed
herself on me," Montalvo recalled of the recruitment of one of
his dancers from Martinique. "She presented herself one day and
challenged me, 'You are always saying how open you are, but not
to bodies like mine'" he quoted the corpulent dancer saying to
him. "So I said, 'OK, so what can you do?' She showed me. She
stayed. That was four years ago."

Like in most of his pieces, in Paradis Montalvo even breaks
the rules of proper dancer that should be included in
choreographers. He dares to bring break-dancers and African
street dancers to join the cast of the Paradis -- which has been
performed as much as 200 times around Europe, the Far East and
Latin America -- as equal to classical ballet and contemporary
dancer. Also, the stagecraft is no more a backstage thing for
Montalvo. Very complicated cinematography editing has the same
quality of importance in deciding on what steps and formations
the dancers have to do at a certain time.

All of that creates a performance that is very technical,
realistically impossible, yet very natural in the sense of its
artistic value.

However, did the performance answer the question from urban
Jakartans about paradise? No one knows. In fact, we only see them
leaving with cheerful faces -- as if they forgot the recent
problems occurring in the country. At least, one of them told me
that he felt that he was brought into a new experience, a new
world with various new offered possibilities.

Well, Jakarta may probably never be like the paradise brought
by this French dance group. It may probably be, yet no one knows
when.

-- The writer is the resident choreographer of Eksotika
Karmawibhangga Indonesia, a performing arts company based in
Jakarta.