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.