Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

An Indonesian interlude

The recent dance-poetry performance at the Museum Theatre was at once tantalising and obscure

MATCHING STEPS WITH VERSE Didik Nini Towok, Javanese dancer, performing at Museum Theatre PHOTO: S. THANTHONI

It was austere. It was tantalising in bringing to life hints of the rich Indonesian tradition of dance as performed by Didik Nini Towok, a famous dancer from the island of Java, with a poetic recitation in English by Elizabeth D. Inandiak, a French poet, scholar and translator of a richly erotic Javanese saga named Serat Centhini.

But it was also obscure to the point of being absurd.

That, however, is one of the problems of trying to create connections between different cultures. As Jean Pascal Elbaz, director, the Alliance Francaise, who along with the Prakriti Foundation brought the spectacle, that was titled "Java, the Lotus in the Red Ocean" to a rapt audience at the Museum Theatre, explained, "There are so many cultural links between India and Indonesia, this would be a very good opportunity to explore them."

It could be that even the so-called obscurity is a result of this huge gap in leaping over the Red Ocean and plucking the flowers of Indonesian culture. Why then should we complain when Inandiak has done this for us by her diligence?

Inandiak's interest in Indonesia led her to seek answers from the farmers and grave minders on the slopes of Mount Merapi, the volcanic mountain on the island of Java. It's from here that she discovered a copy of a famous classical Javanese literary work that was composed in the first half of the l9th Century by the King Pakubuwonot. She has spent a decade in carefully deciphering the old Javanese script and translating the work into a modern poetic form. The West has always had a keen interest in exploring and interpreting the very complex Indonesian mindscape into a beautifully anaesthetised product and one can only suppose that she continues in this tradition.

For it has to be noted that there was a marked contrast in the way that Inandiak sat reading on one side of the stage and the periodic dance items by Didik wearing the most extraordinary changes of costume. She had the composure of a nun in an elegant yogic posture on a batik covered platform to control the lava of emotions that seemed to be taking place around her.

This is a story full of fierce battles between conflicting forces, episodes that describe of sons of mixed racial parentage, Chinese and Indonesian, invocations to Allah, for it is the layered mix of Islam with the spirits of the earth and the sea that we find here. There is an unconsummated bridal watch that stretches on for 40 nights.

Or as Inandiak explains, there is a night when the people of Java go down to the beach, the black sandy beach covered by volcanic ash and wait for the Queen of the Red Ocean to appear as the King used to do and all night they make love. For, as she says, "In Indonesia, the line between spirituality and sexuality is not a line at all, it is a space."

With so much to explain, there was little space for Didik himself to appear, except in small homeopathic doses, in an amazing display of virtuosity, a one person troupe of characters, wearing an array of wigs and masks and the most splendid of costumes. As part of the audience, one wanted to exclaim in the Sanjay Gandhi way, "More Dance, Less Talk."

Indonesia remained very far away and do lotuses bloom from any ocean, or is that just another Western conceit?

GEETA DOCTOR

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail