Performing arts: Art Summit and beyond

Edi Sedyawati, Former Director General of Culture, Jakarta

In the year 2001, the most significant event in performing arts here, at least from its many dimensions, was the Third Art Summit Indonesia: Performing Arts. This international festival of contemporary art took place for a whole month, from Aug. 27 to Sept. 27.

Seventeen selected works in dance, music and theater were performed for two days each, either at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta or Graha Bhakti Budaya, Taman Ismail Marzuki. The groups participating in the festival were from Australia, China, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

In most cases, the general rehearsals were also open to selected groups, that is, the press and secondary school students.

A general assessment of the event would lead us to conclude that interest in contemporary performing arts among the Indonesian public is still divided. For dance and theater the interest is great, as demonstrated by the large attendance at theaters where they were shown. Contemporary music, however, seems to not be fully appreciated. The problem at hand might be the segregated worlds of serious music on one side and popular music on the other.

Popular music is a mighty world in itself, which is greatly supported by its industry through very aggressive promotion campaigns and the idolization of "celebrities." It is then a challenge in itself to square, and to bring into balance, the musical orientation of the Indonesian population at large.

While enjoying popular music, which is also a platform for creativity in its own right, people should also be trained to appreciate explorative contemporary music, as well as forms of traditional music with their unique established esthetics. Musicians themselves are expected to do more "bridging" between the two worlds.

One dance-theater group, Pappa Tarahumara of Japan, also performed at Indonesian Art High School (STSI) Surakarta, Central Java, on Aug. 23 through their own arrangement. The STSI Surakarta and the Goethe Institute had also arranged for Folkwang Tanztheater of Germany to perform and have workshops in the city (after its performance here on Sept. 27) but it was canceled due to the unfavorable political situation after the Sept. 11 attack on New York and Washington.

As a substitute the German group held a workshop with the Karmawibhangga group of young choreographers, dancers and musicians near Jakarta. It is indeed expected that the groups invited to Art Summit Indonesia should also visit other places besides Jakarta, to perform and do workshops, with the artistic community of each place as host.

Out of the 17 performances in the Art Summit there were achievements worth special recognition. Some of those are in the area of exploration of the medium, or the instrument; some others are in what could be called the shaping of new symbols; some can be categorized as "the flexing of traditions"; while another aspect that may transect the three above categories is that of poetry in movement and sound, as well as technical feats.

Strange Fruits of Australia explored the free air as a medium for movements of the dancers who moved on the tips of four-to- five-meter-high flexible stilts. Despite the extra physical control needed and the limited possibility of movement, the dancers managed to evoke touching feelings with their maneuvers.

Boi G. Sakti with his group used sand, spread over the stage floor, as a characterizing base for the dancers' movements. Moreover he used many more ingenuous staging techniques; sand poured from above so as to form a shield-like image, a row of small flames in the background and small dry leaves scattering in the air.

That set supported the unyielding dynamics of his choreographic composition including the very tiny and delicate, as well as the very fast and strong movements. All these elements, integrated with the music composition and costume design, framed in scenes referring to the toiling of land, are at the same time a work of symbol formation.

Another work that plays on poetry and symbol formation is the theater piece Presiden Burung-burung, written and directed by N. Riantiarno. It has been incorrectly perceived as a political message. Although the work did allude to some political figures and incidents in Indonesia, this was used as a mere background for an interpretation of human entanglements, a philosophical musing on the essence of power. This work was supported by the visual design of the grandiose but disjunctive figure of Rahwana.

Another line of symbol making was the work by the choreographer Henrietta Horn of Germany. It was more of a non- thematic "figures of expression". Superb precision, surprises in a sequence of movements, exaggerated movements, as well as the typical shaking and the use of chairs as the expansion of the dancing figures, were among the elements that in an integrated form created symbolic reverberations of human loneliness.

The flexing of traditions can be found among others in the works of composers A. L. Suwardi of Indonesia and Yuji Takahashi of Japan, and choreographer Akram Khan of United Kingdom. Among them Suwardi was the most extreme, since he also constructed new, unique, musical instruments for his compositions.

His music sounds like traditional music but in reality he uses newly generated sounds, and is composed in an original way. Technical feats, both in sound and movement production and juxtaposition abound in the many works presented during Art Summit.

Several festivals of the more popular genres especially in music were also organized, such as the Jak Art and the Percussion Festival. They were quite successful in drawing audiences.

A special type of performance that has gained more popularity in 2001 is the humorous version of the Javanese traditional genres of performances. Television stations appear to compete to broadcast the best. Both the ketoprak and wayang wong humoristic versions have dialog in Indonesian with occasional lines in Javanese subtitled in Indonesian.

Both also have used the same strategy of inviting well known celebrities among film or TV drama series to take the leading roles.

Those performances, of different groups, are all well supported by newly designed costumes. The popularity of those performances is, however, coming to a halt.

Questions can be raised, as to: first, whether the competition for more refinement, especially in the quality of the humor itself, is now needed; second, whether explorations should also be made to adapt in the same way other forms of traditional performances, not only those originating from Java; third, whether a more serious, not the humoristic kind of adaptation into Indonesian is also needed; and finally, whether full fledged traditional presentations with Indonesian subtitles are needed.