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BAHASA KOREOGRAFI
OVERview of BAHASA
KOREOGRAFI by Alfian Sa’at
Soultari Amin Farid talked about the Malay ‘lenggang’, which he
describes as a Malay gait used in dance, involving the swaying of the
hands. It is a gendered movement: the male lenggang derives its
energy from the elbow, while for the female it is from the fingers.
There are also other forms of lenggang recorded in the dictionary, like
‘lenggang janda’ (divorcee’s gait), used to describe a flirtatious walk;
‘lenggang patah tujuh’ (gait broken into seven parts), to mean
walking through a forest and avoiding branches, roots and thorns;
and even ‘personal signature’ lenggang, such as a swagger
described in Hikayat Anggun Che’ Tunggal as ‘lenggang si tabur
bayam’ (the spinach-sower’s gait), cultivated by the hero of the
romance. Amin wanted to study whether there were national forms of
the lenggang (the Singaporean, Malaysian, Indonesian) articulated
during Nusantara (serumpun) festivals and how they could tell a story
of the colonial dismemberment of the Malay world.
Best of all, for me, was spending time just listening and
conversing with Helly Minarti. A specialist in Minang dance,
and a curator of the Indonesian Dance Festival in Jakarta, it is
easy to be absolutely awestruck (kagum, segan) in her
presence. It is rare for me to encounter people in real life who
strike me as having the quality of a living library, and Mbak
Helly is one of them. This is someone who can tell you the
differences between the Solo style (more fluid) and the Yogya
style (more geometric), recalls quotes such as that by Pina
Bausch (“I am not interested in how people move but what
moves them”), who cautions against jumping into dance
dramaturgy without settling the question of what is dance
choreography first. And yet throughout the sessions she was
always nothing less than humble and generous. How brilliant
to discover that we have so much, and even more brilliant to
have someone show you what all of it is worth.
Ayu Permata Sari discussed her research into codifying and
embodying the movements of those men (bapak-bapak) attending a
dangdut concert. Dangdut is a massively popular form of pop music
in Indonesia, but which has a reputation in some quarters of being
the music of the not-highly-educated masses (kekampungan). She
was fascinated by some of the movements produced by the men at
these concerts, often so immersed in the music that they would sway
with their eyes half-closed. While interviewing them, she realised that
for some of the men, the movements came from their working lives:
there was keyboard-tapping, for example, or motorbike
handlebar-twisting, turned into units of movements that were
repeated and elaborated. By ‘borrowing’ these movements, Ayu
wanted to see whether she was able to overcome the formal habits
of her own trained body and to reach a stage of sincerity, or even
innocence (keikhlasan tubuh), which for her was encapsulated in the
phrase “menari dengan hati” (dancing from the heart).
About
ALFIAN SA’AT
Alfian is the Resident Playwright of W!LD RICE. He
has been nominated at the Straits Times Life!
Theatre Awards for Best Original Script ten times,
and has received the award four times. His plays
with W!LD RICE include HOTEL (with Marcia
Vanderstraaten), The Asian Boys Trilogy,
Cooling-Off Day, The Optic Trilogy and Homesick.
He was the winner of the Golden Point Award for
Poetry and the National Arts Council Young Artist
Award for Literature in 2001. His publications
include Collected Plays One and Two; poetry
collections One Fierce Hour, A History of Amnesia
and The Invisible Manuscript; and short-story
collections Corridor and Malay Sketches.
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