Deshima
directed by Ping Chong
40 minutes
28th April 1990
Springdance Festival, Utrecht
Deshima is not strictly a dance piece. At the invitation of the Mickery Foundation, this interdisciplinary theatre work by New York theatre director Ping Chong premiered in 1990 at Springdance Festival in Utrecht. It featured the African-American actor Michael Matthews and a kind of corps de ballet of six locally hired dancers with Indonesian heritage. I first heard of Deshima from a community panel member of changeMakers in March, who noted that the production had a major impact on the experimental theatre and dance scene in the Netherlands—both because of its focus on the legacy of Dutch colonialism, as well as its audition notice for specifically Asian dancers. Mentioning such things in audition notices of avantgarde pieces was at the time “not done,” according to the panel member.
In the last several months of the exhibition, Deshima continued to pop up: Nita Liem (one of the original six dancers) wrote about it as one of her contributions on the changeMakers website. Then, when I interviewed Wulan Dumatubun about her work Bundaran, I learned that she had also danced in Deshima under the name Josepha Dumatubun. Another of the original dancers, Arnaud Kokosky Deforchaux, also became involved in the changeMakers process, teaching Balinese dance to artists and panel members and attending community meetings. Cast members of Deshima were able to build impressively sustainable careers in dance, and several of them continued to engage with the Indonesian/indische aspects of their heritage: How could it be that one piece appeared as the starting point for so many dancers of indische descent?
Ping Chong created Deshima at a critical juncture in his own career. Until this work, his collaboratively created productions tended towards the allegorical and the fantastic. However, in 1990, just as Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history through the triumph of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, Chong felt the need to focus on histories that had been suppressed through this purported triumph. He began to focus on marginalized identities, particularly Asian ones (Chong is a second-generation Chinese American). His “East/West quartet” started with Deshima and continued with Chinoiserie, After Sorrow, and Pojagi. The script was written in a collaborative working process with Michael Matthews and the Dutch dancers, who in addition to Wulan Dumatubun, Arnaud Kokosky Deforchaux, and Nita Liem also included Kristin de Groot, Jur Londt-Schulz, and Rop Severien. The performance loosely traces 400 years of relations between Japan and the West: the medieval shoguns who quarantined Dutch traders on the island of Deshima; the Spice Wars in the Indonesian archipelago; the occupation of the Dutch East Indies by the Japanese during the Second World War; the simultaneous internment of Japanese-Americans in US-American concentration camps; and then, finally, the Japanese art boom of the late 1980s during which Japanese companies purchased European impressionist paintings for astonishing amounts.1 Voiceovers from radio interviews and video footage of the atom bomb punctuate the various historical scenes, which can shift abruptly between locale and personas. Only the set of the work remains the same for (nearly) the whole piece: rice paper screens flood the stage in different coloured lights. Towards the end, somewhat spectacularly, the performers step into what appears to be a Van Gogh painting.
Chong’s work asks “Who is being othered, and how?” and the answer to this question changes from scene to scene in Deshima. As he drily noted in my conversation with him, Ping Chong is an “equal opportunity critic”: the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Japanese, the US-Americans, the local Indonesian gentry who collaborated with the Dutch, and the Indonesian nationalists who welcomed the occupying Japanese forces do not come away looking particularly enlightened amidst all the imperializing going on in the show. Dealmaking, trade agreements, and occupation are major repeating themes. Identity is not static in this piece, but fluid—the “bad guy” shifts around depending on the context. The reasons for such othering processes seem particularly motivated by human arrogance and human greed: a re-occurring tagline in the show begins with “In the name of God,” but gradually shifts to “In the name of Profit”—the sacred has been degraded, but has all that much really changed?
The dancers of Deshima perform physically throughout the show, but their dance prowess is most obviously on display in three scenes. At one point Matthews plays the role of a radio commentator, and the group competes in the American jitterbug. At a ball held by the governor of the Dutch East Indies, the waltz is danced out of rhythm (a feat in itself!). In yet another scene, a dance in traditional Javanese style is performed, first set to a voiceover interview with the inventor of the Sony walkman, then parallel to an attempt by a Dutch colonial official to converse with his Javanese nobleman host. The stage is stained orange as Arnaud Kokosky Deforchaux, flanked by Wulan Dumatubun and Nita Liem, perform the elegant movements of the Javanese courts in full costume: synchronized hands, fluttering fingers, and downcast eyes.
The dances scenes evoke a sense of where we are in a multi-locational and non-linear piece: California, a Dutch East Indies ball, a Javanese court. The dances are, at first glance, stereotypical representations: the exhuberant American jitterbug, the stilted European waltz, the sedate Javanese dance. They are also a necessary contrast to the highly formalized text-based aspects of the work. Michael Matthews monologues as Vincent van Gogh, an American businessman, and a radio commentator. The dancers converse as Asian nobility and European traders, colonists and natives, revolutionaries and occupying forces. As Youker (2012) writes, the “image of a lone speaker in a light pool recurs throughout the play, indicating both an invitation to connect and a barrier against that connection. It is only in Deshima’s lengthy dance sequences—the play’s non-discursive component—that the performers engage in extensive physical contact, as if the dances, as representations of a social fabric woven from shared traditions, represent the “feeling for poetry” that the Regent [a role in Deshima] describes” (p. 163). What could be added is that these dances—performed by the indische cast—complicate notions of cultural identity by suggesting that identity is not a matter of what one is but of what one does. Deshima’s words, bargains, contracts, and signatures reflect the modern urge to document, order, and other (ibid.). Dance forms a counterpoint to this urge, the messy proposition that bodies moving together, even if out of line and off the beat, will find unexpected ways of connecting with each other across all attempts to categorize.
Arnaud Kokosky Deforchaux choreographed the Javanese dance in Deshima based on his extensive experience of performing traditional Indonesian dances at indische community events as a child and youth growing up in the Netherlands. In his memoirs Geen Gewone Danser Tussen West en Oost, Kokosky Deforchaux notes that, much to his surprise, the dances he learned as a child in the Netherlands were simply not the same dances he would later learn during his formal studies on Bali (p. 28). For example, his teacher in Maastricht created a version of Oleg Tamulilingan, the 1954 Balinese duet choreographed by I Mario, by stitching together poses from touristic postcards featuring the dance (ibid).2 This was in the 1970s, when regular travel and exchange between the Netherlands and Indonesia was difficult. Passports were not widely available to Indonesians living under the dictatorship of Suharto, and Dutch-Indo families could barely afford the exorbitant fees of early airplane travel—if they aspired to return to the archipelago at all. The Javanese dance in Deshima is thus a diasporic version of Indonesian traditional dance: its very existence belies what its formal function within the work appears to be, which is dance as an earmark for a certain place, time and culture.
As the highlight of the first half of the piece, it is again Arnaud who breaks the fourth wall, to speak to the audience about his grandfather and father who were imprisoned by the Japanese in Indonesia. He speaks about his uncle, who was tortured to death by the Japanese at the age of 18. Amidst the radio lingo, the sound bites, and the voiceovers of Deshima, this monologue hits different. We (correctly) assume that the horrors being described are not external events to the performer speaking of them. This rupture with the so-called Indische Zwijgen3 is, however, embedded in a piece that also acknowledges the disastrous effects of the Dutch colonial regime in the archipelago—and the complicity of Indonesian feudal lords in this regime. Part of the emotional intensity of this moment is that this painful and complicated history is really embodied in the person speaking: Arnaud is of indisch descent, he is speaking as his real self in a theater piece that, like most, must otherwise rely on characters.
The show Deshima was conceived and directed by a Chinese American, starring an African American as Vincent van Gogh, in which the Dutch-Indo cast play, in no particular order, Portuguese missionaries, Japanese converts to Christianity, Indonesian nationalists, Japanese imperialists, Japanese-American farmers, Dutch merchants, Javanese nobility, Dutch-Indo immigrants, etc. At a micro-level, the dancers with Indonesian heritage working on this production learned, in a very physical way, the serious and abiding advantages of their hybrid identity for making contemporary art. The shifts in performative register demanded by the piece necessitate an aesthetic flexibility that is very much a skill in the contemporary dance world (van Assche & Schaffer 2023). Simultaneously, these dancers gave real, embodied presence to a central problem of modern Dutch society, perhaps more generally the modern nation state. The histories of the Netherlands and Indonesia are literally inextricable, falling together in the bodies and memories of those with Dutch and Indonesian heritage. Examining how this entanglement might be performed is exactly the purpose of the changeMakers exhibition.
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