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Sal Murgiyanto: The dancer who writes
Sal Murgiyanto: (JP/Ika Krismantari)Indonesia may have many great dancers, but there is only one dancing figure who also builds the art of dance through writing
Sal Murgiyanto: (JP/Ika Krismantari)
Indonesia may have many great dancers, but there is only one dancing figure who also builds the art of dance through writing.
Meet Sal Murgiyanto, exceptional dancer and renowned dance critic.
Dance is undoubtedly the topic that the man knows by heart as he has dedicated his entire life to the art.
It is little wonder the maestro can spend hours talking only about dance. The 67-year old recently spoke to a group of journalists on a workshop on writing dance critiques. Despite his old age, there was no sign of slowing down as he was in high spirits during the entire session.
The similar enthusiasm was also noted during a recent interview with The Jakarta Post.
“I am only 67. Age should not become a barrier for my work,” he grinned.
Sal explains he has just retired from teaching but a pile of work has been awaiting him. One of those jobs is to produce qualified young dancers so as to maintain the reputation of Indonesia in the global dancing scene.
According to Sal, the future of dance art in Indonesia is at stake because no new choreographers can come up with world-class performances and match big names in the local dancing scene such as Eko Supriyanto, Sardono W. Kusumo and Maruti, leaving a regeneration issue.
The man noticed this sad condition from the recent Indonesian Dance Festival (IDF) that despite the swarming of international choreographers in the event, he believed, Indonesia had failed to steal the spotlight.
“It really breaks my heart to see those awesome dancers from other countries, but we did not have our own that could be compared,” he said, contrasting to his golden time when Indonesian artists dominated global stages with their dances.
The initiator of IDF believed the problems stemmed from the existing art education system that highlighted only the technical skill but ignoring the knowledge and dancing discourse.
The former lecturer at the Taipei National University of Arts emphasized the importance of keeping the mind and skills balanced so as to ensure the quality of the dancing itself, a principle that he also applies in his life.
Before becoming a dance thinker, Sal was a true dancer with a specialization on monkey characters in Ramayana famous epic due to his tiny and thin build.
The urge to dance was inspired by his late grandfather, who was an artistic director for the Sri Wedari wayang wong dance theater in Solo.
Sal started practicing dance in elementary school and became one of the best dancers in the class. His career took off when he was offered the chance to join the Ramayana ballet team to perform in Prambanan temple, in Yogyakarta. With the group, he had the chance to travel abroad to perform.
It was his experience on the dance tour to India in 1966 that opened his eyes to the need to improve his knowledge on the dancing apart from the skills.
The enlightenment came to him through a Holland audience who met him behind the stage after a performance in New Delhi.
The spectators praised his performance and asked him several questions, which Sal could not answer due to his limited knowledge and language barrier.
“Through them, I pushed myself to learn English and more about dancing so next time foreigners ask me I can answer well,” he recalled.
With good intentions to deepen the science of dance, Sal enrolled in the National Dance Academy of Indonesia in Yogyakarta, becoming one of the first artist generations that obtained an education degree for the profession in the early 1970s.
The bachelor degree, however, was not enough for Sal. He continued to pursue his master study at the University of Colorado, US, in the mid 70s to broaden his knowledge on choreography and contemporary dance. That was quite new in Indonesia at that time.
Returning from the US, Sal became one of the lecturers at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts and joined the Jakarta Arts Council as a member of dance committee and secretary.
He began his work on building the Indonesian dance scene through the management of what he believed are the four main pillars in the performance arts, comprising artists, critics, audiences and producers.
Together with other dance artists, he tried to build what he mentioned as the republic of dance that heavily depended on the existence of those four elements.
To strengthen each part, Sal had come up with several programs. Among them were organizing the Young Choreographer Festival (YCF) to sow new talents and arranging workshops on writing dance critiques with journalists to build the public’s appreciation on the art.
Sal himself was also a vocal critic that frequently wrote reviews on dance performances. People, therefore, know him as the dancer who also writes dance reviews and publishes books on the subject.
“I feel other artists have taken their roles as pillars and walls and to make this so-called the house [republic] of dance function well, we need someone to play the roof roles,” Sal said of his position in the dancing community.
After serving more than eight years for Indonesian art, Sal decided it was time for him to recharge his brain battery. He flew back to the US to pursue his doctoral degree at New York University in 1985, taking his wife Endang Nrangwesti, who was also a dancer, and two daughters with him.
After six years, he returned to Jakarta and initiated IDF in 1991 to replace the defunct YCF to revive the young generation’s enthusiasm towards dance.
However, his further involvement in the event did not last long and was not intense enough, so he went to Taiwan to lecture at the national university.
There, he became a lecturer at the graduate school for 19 years before retiring early this year.
Looking at the recent development of the dance scene in Indonesia, Sal said he was pretty devastated. The IDF initiator said the recent festival had made him “dizzy”, as he felt that this year’s celebration has strayed from the previous vision and mission.
“It ends up being just like another festival with no real output that can stimulate creativity,” he complained.
He also shared his concern against the economic colonization of local performance art, turning dancers into brainless “body laborers”, who only dance for money without desire for creativity.
It has been more than 46 years since Sal began his life-long devotion to dance, but the work is still far from finished.
Even though he may not be young anymore and has planned to have peaceful and relaxing retirement in Yogyakarta, the man, who looks way younger than his age, knows for sure that he cannot stop working to improve the condition of the local dance scene through his ideas and writing.
