Sardono cherishes his good fortune

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."