Titis to paint to musical accompaniment

Titis to paint to musical accompaniment

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): Picture, if you will, a forty-something lady at
the opening of her painting exhibition in Paris. She already has
over 65 exhibitions under her belt, and some of her works have
become prized collector's items.

But in an era when there are too many ideas and not enough
expression, she wanted something different.

So she read poetry with a cellist accompanying her. Spoken
lines blended seamlessly with the flowing musical phrase. The
audience was spellbound. In fact, it was so enthralled that
"collaboration" seemed too technical a word to do the performance
justice.

But the lady, Titis Jabaruddin, was already lost in thought.
Suddenly, she was itching to transpose the experience to her
homeland of Indonesia. Call it anything you like: coming-of-age,
postmodernism, artistic heresy, or plain freedom of expression.
But the real message is that collaboration between conventionally
unrelated artists simply shows that art has no boundaries.

Such is the premise behind Intermezzo, scheduled to perform at
the Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on Tuesday, at 8 pm. This time, the
collaboration embraces a broader hodgepodge of artists: Titis,
pianist Irsa Destiwi, dance choreographer Agus Jolly, music
director Jassin Burhan and French cellist Robin Clavreul. A
pretty disparate group, you may say, both in expertise and
experience.

Agus Jolly is a very prominent local artist with numerous
painting and sculpting awards to his credit. His spectacular
breakthrough in the area of installation art has taken him to
Australia, while his intense involvement in dance and
choreography has led him to India and New York.

In an interesting contrast, Jassin Burhan's active
participation in the local music scene only began since his
return from his studies at the Conservatoire Nationale Superieur
de Musique de Paris.

Robin Clavreul, born in 1950, has long traveled the European
highway of classical musicianship. His cello studies include
seeking out podium pointers from Jorma Panula at the Sibelius
Academy in Helsinki, after which he continued honing his craft at
the likes of the L'orchestre de l'opera de Paris and Pierre
Boulez's L'ensemble Intercontemporin.

As for Irsa Destiwi, she is the current golden girl of Yayasan
Pendidikan Musik, a promising talent of merely 17 summers.

The program will begin with their duet, possibly to lay the
foundation. With the exception of a prelude by J.S. Bach, the
substance is predominantly French, with Elegie by Gabriel Faure
and two sonatas by impressionist master Claude Debussy and Henry
Duparc. It is a kind of a gentle and conventional prelude to
daring things to come.

Imagine this scenario: Titis will paint on the podium. By the
time the music ends, she will have finished her work, which will
then be auctioned off. Fifty percent of the proceeds will be
donated to the starving people of Irian Jaya.

Agus Jolly will do expressive things with his body, mining a
mother lode of inspiration from various crises that are currently
afflicting the nation: burning forests in Kalimantan and Sumatra,
the mass starvation in Irian Jaya, the economic recession.

There is no connection between them other than the shared
context of an ongoing piano-cello duet, a 45-minute contemporary
fare which includes G. Scelsi's Fluve Magique, Luciano Berio's
Les mots sont alles, and a sonata by D. Chostakovitch. This
scheme is both Arcadian and virile: individual bodies at play, in
their element, the music being their only link to each other and
to the audience.

The images that come to mind are certainly provocative.
There will be relative stillness (Titis) against motion (Agus).
Immediate inspiration (Titis) against planned metaphor (Agus).

With Agus, there will be none of the wearying constants of
choreographic symmetry: he will groan, cry, writhe, slump to the
ground as he agitates against the brutal forces of nature and
their effects on mankind.

Meanwhile, Titis' self-expression will be governed by mood,
shrouded in mystery, unfolding in no clear direction. And just
how will those stark counterpoints coalesce with the linear flow
of the music?

Even Titis' purpose hints of an oxymoron. While her choice of
acrylic is one step to ensuring that she can better meet her time
limit, what if she doesn't finish her painting properly at the
end of the musical phrase? What should we make out of artistic
expression that is timed to precision? Is it real inspiration?
Or is it calculation?

The criteria for judgement will be as nebulous: do we judge
individual acts by themselves or the performance as a whole?
The artists seem to want us to think in terms of separate
entities: "each artist has his/her own activity and integrity
without any attachment or obligation to each other, be it in
harmony, melody, color or movement."

But until we watch it for ourselves, we will not know what
feeling will be generated by a collaboration that does not aspire
to make any joint statement.