Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

INTERMINGLING OF CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY53REVALUING JAVANESE COURT DANCES (SRIMPI AND BEDHAYA)WITHIN THE CURRENT SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTMichi TomiokaIntroductionSrimpi 1 (see Photo 1) and Bedhaya 2 (see Photo 2),ritual dances of the Karaton Surakarta Hadiningrat (theSurakarta Court), were first permitted to be performedfor the public as part of a national project called PusatKesenian Jawa Tengah (PKJT, Art Center of CentralJava) in the 1970s. Both of these court dances haveexperienced many changes or innovations since then. 3Photo 1: Srimpi (cf. Appendix)(ASKI, the Indonesian Academy of Arts) Surakarta.Combined, these two organizations are often calledPKJT-ASKI. ASKI Surakarta was later upgraded as theSekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (STSI, the IndonesianCollege of Arts) Surakarta in 1988 and then the InstitutSeni Indonesia (ISI Surakarta, the Indonesian Instituteof Arts) in 2006. 5Surakarta Court dance was in decline due to a lack ofdancers when the PKJT project began (Pamardi 2002).Although the court dances were still regarded as thesource of Javanese traditional dance, Humardani didnot preserve them as they had been. Instead, he thoughtit more important to innovate with the former arts inaccordance with the changing times and encouragedparticipants to produce pemadatan (contracted) versionsof court dances after reviving them (Tomioka 2005a).He did not merely shorten the duration of theperformances but also transformed many other elementsof the dance and the music, applying the concept ofperforming arts from the modernized West to Javanesecourt dances (Tomioka 2005a). He included onlypemadatan versions in the ASKI curriculum, so that thefull versions of revived dance compositions were nottaught in the course of study.Vital changes established in the PKJT project are: (1)pemadatan (contraction of time), shortening the durationof the performance to one fourth of the original length(fifteen minutes); (2) faster tempo and more dynamicchanges to the tempo than was traditionally the custom;and (3) synchronized movement as in corps de ballet 6(group dancing in ballet).Photo 2: Bedhaya (cf. Appendix)The project was started in 1970 under the first fiveyearplan of the new president, Suharto, in order torevive traditional arts and culture, and lasted for threeperiods (1970-1983). There were many activities in thePKJT project, not only for the court arts, but also forfolklore arts and contemporary arts. The project wasled by Gendhon Humardani (1923-1983), 4 who wasalso the head of the Akademi Seni Karawitan IndonesiaAccording to interviews with many dancers of PKJT/ASKI from those days, these contractions andtransformations were successful in attracting publicnotice in the 1970s in Central Java, and they were veryproud of that fact (Tomioka 2005b, 39). However, SalMurgiyanto criticized the PKJT performance in Jakartain 1979, saying that the ten-minute srimpi pemadatanwas terlampau tergesa (too rushed), and that theyneeded a good chief who could deal with traditionalmaterials (Murgiyanto 1993). The transformations ofthe traditional customs made by the PKJT project wereAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows