Alessandra Lopez y Royo

Embodying a Site Choreographing Prambanan

The article re-engages with the 9th century CE temple complex of Prambanan, in Central Java, as a performance locus, discussing the different phases of a bodily interaction with the site from the reconstitution of its dance units, retrievable from the dance reliefs of the main temple, to an exploration of the temple–dance–site connection. The author proposes that archaeology can be conceived and experienced as an embodied and performative practice: the Prambanan site has been incorporated in the archaeological process of dance movement reconstitution and its re-embodiment. This in turn has enabled a choreography of the site through an exploration of the architecture/dance relationship, mutually inscribed as a corporeality.

Classicism, post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s work: re-defining the terms of Indian contemporary dance discourses

This essay discusses contemporary dance in India, foregrounding the link between dance and politics. The author proposes that contemporary dance in today’s India can be seen as a continuum, marked by tension and rupture. It embraces, on the one hand, ‘classicism’ – strictly speaking ‘neo-classicism’ – and, on the other, an ideological move away from this ‘classicism’, which constitutes itself into an heterogeneous movement motivated by a search for new dance languages. These new languages, growing out of ‘traditional’ roots (variously defined), claim to be sustained by the ‘classicism’ of Indian dance. This movement can be referred to, for convenience, as ‘post-classicism’. This ‘post-classicism’ is otherwise known as ‘Contemporary’ dance, with a capital ‘c’, in accordance with a western model. Dance in today’s India, whether ‘classical’ or ‘post-classical’, is wholly entangled with the issue of an Indian religious and secular identity, increasingly dominated by a Hinduizing discourse, and this informs the artistic choices of dance artists. The essay discusses the work of Ranjabati Sircar, here seen as ‘post-classical’, against this scenario, and begins to reflect on the impact that Ranjabati Sircar’s choreography and her cosmopolitanism has had on dance in contexts other than India, such as the British South Asian diaspora.This essay discusses contemporary dance in India foregrounding the link between dance and politics. The author proposes that contemporary dance in today’s India can be seen as a continuum, under which is tension and rupture. It embraces on one hand, ‘classicism’- strictly speaking ‘neo-classicism’ - on the other, an ideological move away from this ‘classicism’, which constitutes itself into an heterogeneous movement motivated by a search for new dance languages. These new languages, growing out of ‘traditional roots’ (variously defined), claim to be sustained by the ‘classicism ’ of Indian dance. This movement can be referred to, for convenience, as ‘post-classicism’; this ‘post-classicism’is otherwise known as ‘Contemporary’ dance – with a capital c , in accordance with a western model. Dance in today’s India, whether ‘classical’ or ‘post-classical’ is wholly entangled with the issue of an Indian religious and secular identity, increasingly dominated by a Hinduising discourse, and this informs the artistic choices of dance artists. The essay will discuss the work of Ranjabati Sircar, here seen as ‘post-classical’, against this scenario, and will begin to reflect on the impact Ranjabati Sircar’s choreography and her cosmopolitanism has had on dance in contexts other than India, such as the British South Asian diaspora.

Indonesian Performing Arts across Borders

This issue presents a panoply of historicised writings on theatre, dance, and music from Indonesia, ranging from the early 20th century to the present. Common to all the articles is the view that the last century has been a period of great change for both modern and traditional performing arts, which was co-articulated with advances in communication and transportation and the opening up of Indonesia to multinational capitalism. Indonesia is a maritime nation deeply etched by lines of traffic in goods, ideas and people, yet its performing arts have been primarily thought about in static terms. Performance is usually considered to be grounded in particular regions or centres of production, inscribed within the non-permeable bounds of genre and traditional patronage arrangements and constrained by ritual prohibitions and ancestral reverence. Such traditionalism is at least in part a legacy of Dutch scholarship which tended to reify Indonesian performance by assuming fixedness and strict adherence to immutable rules. Writers such as Jaap Kunst, Jacob Kats, and Th. B. van Lelyveld interpreted the music, dance, and theatre of Java and Bali as continuous with western Indonesia’s ancient Indic past. They were quick to dismiss hybrids and modern performance as corruptions and bastardisations. Such a prejudice was also embraced and promoted by indigenous colonial elites, instituting a discourse of heritage preservation which continues to generate anxiety and strategies aimed at containing any possible cultural loss. Modern performers such as dancer Raden Mas Jodjana (1895-1972) were thus dismissed as inauthentic due to their overly ‘individualistic’ interpretations of tradition (Lelyveld 1931: 38) which would compromise its purity, and hybrid arts such as keroncong or kethoprak merited little consideration. Only recently have scholars begun to unearth histories of itinerant performers and travelling art forms in order to describe and analyse processes of innovation, hybridisation and crossfertilisation. This issue considers traditions of Javanese and Balinese performance as being in constant flux and movement, subject to appropriation and expropriation and radical reinterpretation by both Indonesian and non-Indonesian artists and intellectuals. Authors in this volume offer insights into performers, agents, institutions, writers, and ensembles whose work has generated new insight into how Java and Bali are conceived both in Indonesia and abroad. Rather than staging received

THE PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS, GONGAND TABUH-TABUHAN: Balinese Music and Dance, Classical Ballet and Euro-American Composers and Choreographers

This article looks at the work of 20th century choreographers and composers whose inspiration was Balinese gamelan music. It focuses on two dance works, The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) by Cranko, re-choreographed by MacMillan in 1989, and Gong (2000) by Mark Morris and discusses their interconnection through the music of composers McPhee and Britten, and the relationship of their choreography with Balinese dance. The article reconsiders issues of influence and cultural appropriation, of transformation and translation and highlights the negotiation of sexual identity through the use of the gamelan as a gay marker among 20th-century North American composers. 1This an extended version of a paper presented at the Sound Moves conference, Roehampton University, 5–6 November 2005.

Rock corridor: Buddhism with a contemporary Javanese inflection through a site-specific performance in Tokyo

Introduction What does it mean to ‘translate’ or ‘recreate’ performance in a different location and in a different medium? What are the problems associated with ‘translating’ performance works across cultural boundaries? The word ‘translate’, like ‘transfer’, means ‘carrying across’. Here it denotes a carrying across places, a carrying of values across cultures and from one context to another, from one medium to another – for example, from Indonesia to Japan and Europe, from a live performance to a video-tape, from a context resonating with ritual associations to a more decidedly secular one. The ‘transfers’ are in each instance a relocation, an interpretation and adaptation, a recreation, a transformation and a representation: the word translation encompasses all these meanings. These broad questions are useful tools to tease out a global discourse of cross-cultural performance transformation and I would like to use them to frame contemporary Indonesian performance in a transnational context, examining a work that instantiates these different transfers or translations. Thus this paper will focus on a video-taped version of Rock corridor (1999) by the Javanese performer, performance maker and director Sardono W. Kusumo (Figure 1). Why is Rock corridor – and this video version in particular – so significant? There are several reasons. The work was created over a period of several weeks in 1999 in Indonesia but was performed in 2000 in Tokyo. It references ritual in a secular context.

Dance in ninth century Java: A methodology for the analysis and reconstitution of the dance

Demonstrating the universalism of the dance, the author, a scholar of Southeast Asia, tells us that rather than focusing solely on contextual issues, such as the nature and function of dance at a particular point in time and in a specific sociocultural context, it is enlightening for scholars of the past to look at these depictions from the dancers point of view, in other words, in terms of movement reconstitution and its reembodiment. The authors work on the Prambanan dance reliefs of Ninth century Java is just such an exploration.