'Dance culture starts with thinking'

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 08/19/2007 7:14 AM | Life

Helly Minarti, Contributor, Surakarta

Amid the deep cultural malaise concerning the alarming quality of local modern/contemporary dance artistry in the recent years, a workshop was held in Surakarta (Solo), from July 26 through Aug. 8, with as its agenda the empowerment of young choreographers.

Organized by the Kelola Foundation, the workshop invited Lin Hwai-min -- a world-class choreographer and founding director of Cloudgate Dance Theater in Taipei -- to deliver the material on ""choreography"".

Lin Hwai-min is considered not only among the handful of world dance artists whose work has continuously evolved eclectically in the last three decades, but also a versatile personality -- a shrewd artist and yet a passionate teacher.

Lin selected the participants -- 10 choreographers from four cities -- from 41 applicants. Five came from Surakarta, currently considered the seedbed for young choreographers, one from Bali, Jakarta and Makassar (South Sulawesi) plus two from Padang Panjang (West Sumatra).

They all were asked to bring one dancer to work with, later to be joined by another seven dancers on the third day, three of whom were theater actors.

The first three days were for identifying ""the body"".

""They are all excellent dancers, but when they represented themselves through movements on the first day as I asked them to, I didn't see the body -- their body had gone,"" commented Lin, metaphorically pointing at the participating choreographers' uniform tendency to indulge in a variety of dance techniques rather than critically analyze their original dance training.

Thus he asked each, including the dancers, to perform excerpts of dance technique (mostly traditional forms) they were trained in, requiring them to point to the part of the body from which the movement originates.

Many pointed to the lower part of the buttocks, often referred to as ""sacrum"" in Javanese dance, while some located their upper thigh or in the case of a choreographer who performed Tari Piring (Plate Dance) from Minangkabau (West Sumatra), the knee.

They were later asked to explore the movements on those core parts of the body, and see where it would lead them.

""You can use the traditional body to create your own 'traditions' but not by borrowing its ornamentation and merely inserting them as decorations (into your new dance),"" said Lin.

Initially, this sounded like a simple task, but not everyone got it right, even at the end, especially after the element of musicality in movement was involved.

Lack of intellectualism

It did not take long for the workshop to get more intensive as Lin pushed each to their edge, engaging them with the supposedly familiar concept of ""dance as communication"", in which dance is broken into phrases and sentences; or to movement motif, pattern and theme, emphasizing the concepts of variations and how to structure them all.

The other aspect to look at is the classic relationship between dance and music, which led to a rather shocking discovery that they tended to show a lack of understanding of rhythmical structure.

Aware that he cited too many examples from Western classical ballet -- Lin asked the organizer to invite an expert in classical Javanese music, Waridi, of ISI Surakarta (the arts institute) to give a two-hour afternoon lecture in order to contextualize.

The workshop ran from 9 a.m. until early evening every day, with Wednesdays and Sundays ending right after lunchtime. The first hour was spent in a warm-up session, when the 10 choreographers took turns. They all had to work until late, re-working their short pieces -- first solos, then some moved to duets.

Whilst the morning session focused on craft, the afternoon was for thinking: how to read choreography critically. Lin screened some famous works, from the classic modern dance period of Martha Graham's Lamentations or George Balanchine's landmark of modern ballet, Theme and Variation -- all created in the 1920s.

He contrasted it with playing Piano Phase, an edgy piece of Rosas (a highly acclaimed of dance company in Belgium, led by choreographer Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker) from a more recent time. All the choreographic concepts drilled in the morning were used to analyze these works.

In between, Lin also creatively expanded the examples to other forms of art, from the 1970s classic movie The Godfather (by Francis F. Coppola) to Leonardo da Vinci paintings. ""Structure is very important in choreography, and you can find it in other forms of artistic expression,"" said Lin.

In the last leg of the workshop, Lin introduced his own concert dances -- some already performed hundreds of times -- and detailed his choreographic approach contextualized in different periods, which somehow chronicled his eclectic change of styles.

""It took me 20 years to find ""the body"", while Martha Graham needed 10,"" he said to the participants, referring to the long process choreographers have to go through to find their own esthetic voice.

Most participants found the workshop inspirational and eye-opening. It inevitably underlined hard work as one of the main drivers. ""What stuck into my mind is when he said that to be a choreographer is a lonely choice, and that you got to be 'sick' to be a (good) one,"" said Made Tegeh from Bali.

Lin was impressed -- at times inspired -- by Indonesian dance culture, which he said is, ""probably one of the richest in the world"".

""Indonesia does not lack (dance) talent, but, initially, modern dance started with intellectualism,"" warned Lin boldly in his closing session, implying that is what Indonesian dance lacked.

It was essential, in order to transform its diverse dance tradition within the complexities of 21st-Century modernity.

It will probably take another generation to revive the avant-gardism that once was triggered by the main Indonesian dance artists back in the 1970s.

On the Net: Cloudgate Dance Theater: www.cloudgate.org.tw Kelola Foundation: www.kelolaarts.or.id

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