Warriors: Male and female dancers are featured in the Arjuna & Srikandi piece, a photo that inspired new dance choreography.

When three creative professionals from three different fields pour their love for Indonesia into a collaboration project, amazing thing happens.

Photographer Martha Suherman was very excited about her first collaborative project, which illustrates Indonesia’s diverse and rich culture.

The “Indonesian Beauty” collaborative project, a combined photo exhibition, workshop and discussion, runs until Nov. 18 in Galeri Indonesia Kaya at Jakarta’s Grand Indonesia shopping mall.

“I had the chance to work with Didiet Maulana, a passionate fashion designer, and also choreographer Rusdy Rukmarata. Both of them also gave their best to this project,” Martha says.

Together, the three creative professionals spent six days on a photo session that involved around 30 dancers from the EKI Dance Company.

The dancers represented the diversity of Indonesia’s peoples, hailing from Aceh and Medan in North Sumatra, Batam in the Riau Islands, the nation’s capital of Jakarta, Makassar in South Sulawesi and Bali, as well as many other regions.

Rusdy said the photo session was interesting, as it produced a “motion picture” — or movement photography — with each picture capturing a dancer’s movement.

“Some of them are still images, but when you look at them closely, you can see movement,” said Rusdy.

He said the project did not cast the dancers as models, but as dancers who collaborated with a photographer and a fashion designer.

“In the process, I even created new choreography, as I had to adjust some movements to expose the beauty of the dances,” he said.

Balaturangga dance

Arjuna & Srikandi is the new dance he created during the photo shoot, which used one frame for each of 73 photographs to commemorate 73 years of Indonesian independence — only, they were one dance short.

So Rusdy suggested that he create Arjuna & Srikandi, featuring both male and female dancers, to complete the commemorative series.

Didiet and Martha were very interested in his idea, especially knowing that Srikandi is a woman who goes to war just like her male counterparts in the Indonesian interpretation of the ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata. The character thus showed that gender equality was deeply rooted in Indonesian culture.

Following the photo shoot, Rusdy finished creating the dance that the photographic series had inspired. The short version of Arjuna & Srikandi has already been performed at Galeri Indonesia Kaya, while the full version is to be performed at the EKI Update 4.0 #wesingwedancewelove show on Nov. 23 to 25 at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta playhouse.

Rusdy said the basic idea behind this collaborative project was to illustrate Indonesia’s unique diversity through fashion and movement in contemporary dance captured in images.

“We used cultural aspects as ingredients to create something new. The final creation doesn’t refer to any one ethnic group in Indonesia […],” he said.

Bring it on: Dancers perform the Ceker Geger dance. The photo was created through a collaborative project entitled Indonesian Beauty and is on display at the Galeri Indonesia Kaya in Jakarta until Nov. 18.

For Didiet, the collaboration was a challenge in which the three creatives had to listen to each other, work as a team and produce something new and artistic.

“I challenged myself to create a new look for dances that already had their own set of rules. For example, I switched batik with tenun ikat Sumba (Sumbanese woven fabric), and other materials from Sumatra, Java and eastern Indonesia,” Didiet said.

Changes during the creative process were inevitable.

For example, Martha had imagined several different poses before the shoot began, as she had already reviewed videos of the dances. But the photographic process became more interesting once she was on
location.

“I used a slow [shutter] speed with mixed lighting. Most of the time, the model is moving or dancing. So I needed to improvise the lighting and the choreographer adjusted the movement,” she said.

Didiet, who founded Ikat Indonesia by Didiet Maulana to reinvent traditional textiles as wearable fashion items to preserve the craft of hand-weaving, hopes that the collaborative spirit of “Indonesian Beauty” will have a positive impact on the country.

“Indonesia is beautiful when each difference is united in harmony, collaborating toward a great vision of one Indonesia. I hope this collaboration will be a good start to capturing beautiful stories about diversity in art — through photography, dance and fashion,” he said.

— Photos courtesy of Martha Suherman