Bundaran
choreography by Josepha Dumatubun
22 min.
21st March 1996
Melkwegtheater, Amsterdam
Ketuk Tilu
choreography by Gerard Mosterd
30 min.
21st January 1999
Melkwegtheater, Amsterdam
Three women stand at attention in a pool of light at the center of the stage. They are all dressed in black, wide-legged pants and tight green crop tops. When they begin to move they first stretch their arms and legs outwards, in unison. A rhythmic and relentless series of patterns begins, a formalist language of extension, line, and synchronicity: this is dance with nothing extraneous, it is dance for the sake of movement. The women are disciplined, neither emotive nor robotic: arms swing, legs pivot, and suspensions allow for only the briefest of pauses. The circle expands, then reverses direction. The dancers change faces and levels, bending forward, then sweeping back into arabesques as the light opens the space. A bright ascending gong scale sends all three dancers turning in place like tops, legs pushing their bodies around and around, as if to signal something new is to begin. The next scene starts in a corner and moves downstage with the dancers in a tight triangle, jumping into a wide second position and then seesawing back and forth, from one foot to the other, faces serene, before the bell sends them into another series of top-like movements…
So far, so (post)modern—and by this phrase I mean that abstract dance, originating in America in the 1960s, that eschewed narrative and sometimes athleticism to highlight the simple beauty of movements set in space and time. Bundaran, a trio by Josepha Dumatubun for three female dancers that premiered at Melkweg Theater in 1996, looks like just such a postmodern dance piece. Except of course, that was very clearly a kengser, the foot shuffle from Javanese dance whereby one moves sideways by bringing the heels of the feet together and then away from each other. Suddenly the dancers face each other in mendah (a bent-kneed position), with the hands in niting (middle finger and thumb touching) in front of the navel, head performing the figure-eighted wiggle called the pacak gulu. These moments are brief, but unmistakable: the choreographer has taken movements from traditional Javanese dance and stitched them into her choreography.
Wulan Dumatubun—formerly Josepha—produced choreographic works from 1989 to 2001. At the time, she was favorably compared with both Lucinda Childs and Dutch minimal dance luminary Krisztina de Chatel (van Schaik, 1995). In this vein, Dumatubun’s leotard-like costumes, empty black box stage, graceful extensions, and dynamism of the choreography looked similar to other performances of “European concert dance.” Her choreographic strategy was also clearly modern: the incorporation of non-Western dance “languages” into the formalism of modern dance has indeed been foundational to modern dance1. Throughout her career, however, her work was very often programmed in what were called “multicultural” or even “allochtone” or “zwarte” dance evenings, if not specifically in Indonesian or indische dance evenings.
“Allochtoon” and “autochtoon” were terms adopted by the Dutch government and wider society at the end of the 1980s: an autochtoon was someone born in the Netherlands, an allochtoon was born elsewhere (see Jones, n.d.). They were intended to replace the term buitenlander (“foreigner”) or immigrant, but in common usage were far from neutral. Allochtoon was vastly more frequently used to describe and/or stigmatize people with MENA origins, for example, than ethnic French, German, or Danish people. Dumatubun is Dutch, born and raised in the Netherlands, and her last name and appearance point towards her Indonesian descent. Her piece Bundaran shared a dance evening called “Heritage” with Indonesian-Surinamese-Dutch choreographer Ubit Iskandar, British Indian director Vik Sivalingam, and African-American choreographer Yusuf Daniels. I think it is safe to say that “allochtoon” often meant “non-white.”2
Of course, the titles of her works (Mendung, Ganantara, Bundaran) spoke of a clear Javanese influence3, and Dumatubun was candid about the incorporation of Javanese dance movements into her work. However, Dumatubun also continued to champion the aesthetics of (post)modern dance and insist on choreographic strategies from the avant-garde playbook. The performance of Bundaran defies the categorization of otherness that has been placed on it: it is European concert dance that will neither exoticize nor obscure the origins of its movement material. Twenty years before the Dutch government officially abandoned the term allochtoon, the women dancers of Bundaran suggest that the problem lies in insisting on the distinction at all. This, unfortunately, also flew in the face of longstanding funding logics: if career longevity and structural support are the markers of choreographic success, then Dumatubun was not particularly successful. The subsidies petered out, and after Bundaran she largely ended her modern experimentation.4
Gerard Mosterd is another choreographer of the same era whose artistic strategies seem quite contemporary, but his preoccupation with “Indonesian” themes quickly brought him away from a dance-interested audience and to an Indonesia-interested audience—at least in the Netherlands. As Mosterd transitioned out of his career as a ballet dancer, he presented his first works, also at Melkweg Theater. Ketuk Tilu is a trio for two female dancers, one male dancer, and a large “eye” in the center of the stage, a light-and-set contraption that appears to react to the sound and mood of the performance bathed in its light. The work has five distinct scenes, among them a man’s solo in a pool of light; a delicate duet choreographed to jaipongan music, a final scene where each dancer solos as the other statuesquely watch.
Unlike Dumatubun, Mosterd did not study traditional Indonesian dance and therefore his choreography does not incorporate specific Indonesian dance movements. Instead, his is what Mosterd describes as a “phenomenological” approach: he was fascinated by the repressed sexuality inherent to the music and dance style of jaipongan,5 and his choreography reflects this. Jaipongan is the theme of the work, but jaipongan dance style does not dictate the movement material of Ketuk Tilu. Instead, Mosterd’s choreography draws on ballet, it draws on floorwork, it draws on improvisation. Certain images do feel very Indonesian: there are the stances whereby the hips counterbalance the head, there is a soft focus on fluttering hands in the initial male solo, gong flourishes in the music often translate to isolated movements of the head and hands. However, the movement language is not a facsimile of traditional Indonesian patterns or rhythms. Instead, the dancers of Ketuk Tilu are actively and artistically looking to inhabit the theme of sexual restraint, filling the movement with tentative searching pulses.
Mosterd’s artistic strategy seems almost the opposite of Dumatubun’s: her approach involved extracting traditional Javanese movements from their context and putting them, “dry,” into her movement sequences. Mosterd, on the other hand, appears to be choreographing what he understands to be the subtext of jaipongan. Couples dancing does not really exist in traditional Indonesian dance—members of the opposite sex rarely touch each other. The male/female partnering duet in Ketuk Tilu—sculptural limbs encircling one another, a delicate head on a broad chest—is thus pure ballet. But Mosterd, like Dumatubun, is also not exactly hiding his inspiration: jaipongan music is heard at various points in the piece. The diminuitive female dancer accompanies the sung shouts of a dalang with jerky, almost puppeteered movements. Gerard Mosterd’s name is certainly Dutch coded, but, like Dumatubun, he did not ignore that his interest in jaipongan came from his own interest in his indisch heritage—including seeing the presentation of non-Western themes on European stages as politically necessary. The premiere of Ketuk Tilu shared a bill with other choreographers of indisch and non-Western backgrounds whom Mosterd had invited.
Where did these interests bring Mosterd? In short, straight to Indonesia. Six months after the premiere in Melkweg, Mosterd showed Ketuk Tilu at Pasar Malam Besar, the storied festival for Dutch-Indo culture: from there he received an invitation to Indonesia. Mosterd ended up touring extensively in Southeast Asia, and also returned to Pasar Malam Besar for nine seasons. However, his work, despite its phenomenological approach, was not present in the Dutch dance platforms, the (post)modern dance “scene”: he did not receive support from Dutch dance institutions. Within the Netherlands, he found approval with audiences—and structures—who were interested in Indonesia and/or the former colony, not necessarily in dance. In our conversation Mosterd noted that this was not the case in his tours through Southeast Asia, nor in invitations to Germany and Britain, among them to the International Choreographic Competition in Hannover.6 It seems to be a specifically Dutch problem that thematic “Indonesian-ness” eclipses the use of innovative artistic strategies.
The 1990s in the Netherlands were perhaps the apex of a time in which Dutch society defined itself—and was seen by the world—as open, tolerant, and multicultural. Marijuana and sex work was legal. Immigration was easy. Diplomatic relations with Indonesia were reinforced by Queen Beatrix’s visit to the former colony. Geert Wilders, that politician with indisch background most well-known for his aggressively anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stances, was still in the liberal VVD. As far as cultural policy went, the budgets were large and there was a focus on intercultural and integrative cultural outings. Wulan Dumatubun and Gerard Mosterd took the modern promise that mixing and matching styles, approaches, and inspirations would lead to innovation in dance, while also making clear their personal connection to Indonesia. These artistic strategies are indeed relevant for the stages of European concert dance. However, it was this “Indonesian-ness” (present in very different ways) that defined their reception, never mind the fact that their choreographic and compositional approaches were shared by any number of contemporaries.
Dumatubun and Mosterd’s choreographic oeuvres make clear that, in the 90s and early 2000s in the Netherlands, making dance work that drew explicitly on one’s non-Western heritage contained an inherent risk for the artist. The risk was that, by making such work, one would find one’s productions and therefore one’s career separated from “European concert dance” or “the modern circuit.” Instead, one could find one’s work put, quite literally, into evenings with other choreographers of non-Dutch (but more specifically, non-white) heritage. This risk made the following inevitable: if you wanted to have a career in (post)modern dance, as an artist you may have made the strategic decision to avoid making work that drew on your heritage.
Does this risk still exist today?
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