Sardono cherishes his good fortune

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Some say success is 90 percent hard work and 10 percent talent, but famed Indonesian dancer and choreographer Sardono Waluyo Kusumo says luck also has plenty to do with his success.

"To tell you the truth, I was very lucky. There were probably a lot of other people better than me, I was just lucky," the 57- year-old said in an interview recently.

Sardono, or Mas Don as he is affectionately known, said he was lucky to have the patronage of former Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin, who helped him become what he is today -- one of Indonesia's most renowned and respected dancers.

"Ali Sadikin could respond to (the artists') needs. Today's artists aren't so lucky (to have such patronage)," he said.

One of the former governor's most valuable contributions to the Jakarta art scene, according to Mas Don, was the establishment of the Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) arts center in Cikini Raya, Central Jakarta, and the Jakarta Board of Arts (Dewan Kesenian Jakarta) in 1968.

"For myself, if it wasn't for Taman Ismail Marzuki I wouldn't have been able to dedicate myself fully (to my work). It was because of this that every time I created something there was an audience and feedback, whether insulting or praising. That is what motivated me (to create)," he recalled.

Mas Don remembered when TIM was the center of arts and culture in Indonesia. "Whatever (art developments) were happening in the regions, they all made their way to TIM. Choreographers from Bali, Surakarta in Central Java, Bandung, Makassar, Irian (Papua), all came, performed and we all shared (our knowledge). We examined each other's works and we interacted."

Art is about being in the middle of society, he said, how an artist can express his work in the middle of society. Being in touch with society is the way for art to thrive without losing touch with its surroundings. On the other hand, people would not realize the importance of art in their lives if opportunities for performances and art discussions were limited.

"This requires other people who aren't artists. It requires producers, critics and the media. I see there are a lot of artists around but they don't interact with society because there are no venues to do so. There are no public spaces for society to meet the artists' work," Mas Don said.

"I survived because I expanded my work beyond Indonesia and I already have a long track record. Before that, I was fortunate, I worked at TIM, I was given the facility," he said, explaining that it was only because of his experiences at TIM that he was "strong" enough to take on the international community.

Born in Surakarta, Central Java, on March 6, 1945, Mas Don was introduced into the world of Javanese dance at the age of 11 by his pencak silat (traditional martial arts) teacher, R. Ng. Kridosoekatgo -- a pencak silat expert who was in the service of the Surakarta palace at the time.

"In his opinion dance was a higher form of silat. If you learned silat, you would be able to paralyze the attack of an enemy. With dance, you could paralyze your aggressive intentions before the attack had chanced to appear," he said in an article published on the Internet titled Hanuman, Tarzan, Pithecanthropus Erectus (2001).

Mas Don's early dance teachers included R. Ng. Atmokesowo, who taught him the ropes and the refined dance styles of the classical Javanese dances, and R. Ng. Wignyo Hambekso who taught him to be free with his movements and expressions.

His golden days as a classical Javanese dancer came in the 1960s with roles such as Rama, Hanuman and Rahwana in the Ramayana epic performed with Sendratari Ramayana Prambanan. He then went on to perform with the government troupe at the New York World Fair in 1964.

Explorations beyond the world of classical Javanese dance resulted from his interaction with international dancers at the World Fair, like the Jean Erdman Theater of Dance in New York, which in his own words did some "strange experiments".

In 1968, he became the youngest member of the newly established Jakarta Board of Arts.

"The Jakarta Board of Arts was amazing at the time. They saw my work in Surakarta and wrote a letter asking me to become one of its board of directors. They gave me a Jakarta ID card and told me to move to Jakarta and I was only 23 years old, can you imagine," Mas Don said.

His work included the Samgita Pancasona (1969-1970), which the late scholar Umar Kayam called the "Indonesian contemporary dance", but which received heavy criticism from the more traditional minded in Surakarta.

Indeed, Mas Don does not see dance as a static art too ingrained in its own traditions to expand, but as a writhing, wriggling, dynamic animal, based on tradition but continually renewing itself and exploring ways for invigoration. For this view, Mas Don was to meet a lot of criticism and complaints from traditionalists.

His breaking down walls of tradition did not stop with Javanese dances, in Teges Kanginan village in Bali, too, he gave new life to the kecak dance of Walter Spies, rooted in the traditional sanghyang trance dance of Bali.

"Sardono's kecak was more dynamic, energetic, involving a lot more movements and sounds than the old kecak, which was performed sitting down," I Ketut Rina, Mas Don's pupil and successor of his Cak Tarian Rina, once said.

Mas Don's exploration of traditional dances also took him to Papua with the Asmat tribe of the marshes and the highland Dani tribe, and to the hinterlands of Kalimantan to the Dayak people of Modang and Kenyah.

"My work is to search into the future through the past to recover the essential link between man and nature. I dance the man who has lost his cultural roots, or from whom they have been torn, wandering in our contemporary forests," he said in 1997 after receiving a Prince Claus Award. The award, which he received together with art critic and curator Jim Supangkat, made him "guardian" and "interpreter" of Indonesian arts in foreign countries.

His works include 1979's environmental-themed Meta Ekologi (Meta-Ecology), 1983's Hutan Plastik (Plastic Forest), 1987's Hutan yang Merintih (Groaning Forest) and the critically acclaimed Mahabhuta (1988).

The 1993 work Passage Through the Gong was well received at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in New York, and in October 1994 at the Indonesian Dance Festival Mas Don performed Detik-Detik, Tempo, from midnight until dawn, to protest the closure of the magazines Detik, Tempo and Editor.

"That was the last time I felt TIM functioned as it should. The last time I felt there was an interaction between society and the artist, in this case me, and that the infrastructure existed (to support that interaction)," Mas Don said.

If his work found has been produced abroad more often than at home -- his work Soloensis was performed in Hamburg, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea, as well as in Jakarta in 1997, and at the Rio Earth Summit in 1999, and Nobody's Body at the opening of the Esplanade in Singapore last year and in Jakarta last month -- it was more because of a lack of venues here than by choice.

"(The existing venues) aren't enough. There's too little money and not enough space. When TIM's theaters existed there was a place for small productions, big productions and medium productions. Look at it now, the theaters have been torn down," Mas Don said.

"I can only take pity on our artists", he said. "It's bad they has to think about what to eat for their next meal as well as find time to practice and create."