Indonesian choreographer and dancer Maharani Pane had been living in an apartment building for quite some time to take for granted the fact that the residents did not care about each other – whether their neighbors live or die, that is.

She never bothered to get to know her neighbors because they did not care to get to know her either.

Until one day, the police discovered the dead body of her 30-something male neighbor three days after he had died. An alarmed superintendent had notified the police after receiving complaints from residents about a rotting stench coming from the man’s room. When the police came to the scene, none of the man’s neighbors knew his name, let alone his occupation or his family’s whereabouts.

Are vertical living residents that self-centered as people?

Haunted by this question, she gave birth to a dance piece called (A)part, which was performed recently by eight dancers at the Salihara arts center in South Jakarta.

Dancers opened the show by dancing behind a large box shrouded by a large white curtain.

In the pitch-black theater, audience members could see the dancers’ silhouettes in motion with only a small flashlight as lighting.

Simultaneously, in front of the curtain, a video-mapping presentation was shown of residents going about their mundane daily routines: waking up, eating, applying makeup, riding an ojek (motorcycle taxi) to work, returning home and repeat.

Then the dancers pushed their faces and hands against the white curtain to evoke the images of ghosts pushing through walls like in Hollywood horror movies, cleverly depicting how vertical living residents behave like ghosts in their everyday life.

We are cramped together in a very narrow space, yet we are confined only by our four walls and know nothing about the many other people who live with us in the same building. Their presence does not seem real to us and ours do not feel real to them.

Then, the curtain fell to show eight dancers occupying their own tiny booths, symbolizing rented rooms large enough only to contain two desks and nothing more. They started to perform different movements, symbolizing the very personal issues that occupy their minds every day, but their lives do not intersect with others.

One housewife, for instance, was busy making sambal (chili paste) while compulsively screaming out its ingredients over and over again: red chili, salt, onion and shrimp paste. In a different corner, another woman was laughing at the housewife’s obsession over making the perfect sambal for her family.

In a different booth, a different dancer kept murmuring discreetly about somebody who had borrowed money from her and failed to return it on time, as promised.

Sometimes, while murmuring, these dancers performed catatonic movements over and over again, showing that they were too preoccupied with themselves, trapped in their own minds, to care about other people’s struggle.

“Have you ever crossed paths with your neighbors in an apartment or boarding house and the two of you do not greet each other and just walk by, saying nothing? I wanted to portray that,” Maharani explained.

Music was minimalist; only droning sounds and dull feedbacks accompanied the dancers, symbolizing solitude that enveloped the whole building and resulting in loneliness and tedium among its residents.

Sometimes, these dancers also clicked their tongue, imitating insect sounds to symbolize how eerily dead these buildings can feel, despite housing so many people.

In the middle of the dance, Maharani seemed to remind people that despite their personal struggles, a common thread actually binds them together: all of us are trapped in the same solitude, self-centeredness and indifference. This was when the eight dancers started to dance in synchrony with one another.

Then, there was a wrestling scene among the dancers.

“I want to symbolize just how our neighbors refuse to help us, even when we cry out for their help. In a way, living inside our own cocoons can be stifling and confining, but it can also be a comfort zone for us, so much that we are afraid to come out of it to make an effort to interact with our fellow residents,” Maharani said.

But we can all strive to break free from our own comfort zones, as seen in the conclusion of the dance piece where the dancers moved their boxes around, rearranging them to intersect with each other – symbolizing an attempt to break free from their own rabbit hole of loneliness and indifference through social interaction.

Still, in the stifling atmosphere of shoebox living, which is a reality for many, we are nonetheless still able to negotiate our spaces and movements to find a little bit of freedom. (ste)

— Photos Courtesy of Komunitas Salihara/Witjak Widhi Cahya

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