'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.