Terima Kost
by Jecko Siompo (Indonesia)
27 and 28 May 2009
Singapore Arts Festival 2009

By Choy Su-Ling

Jakarta-based dancer-choreographer Jeck Kurniawan Siompo Pui (better known as Jecko Siompo) is a short, sturdy man with brown skin and uncontrollably curly hair.  I was told by a former danseur recently that, this is not exactly the form excepted by professional ballet companies, and that a lot of short but brilliant Asian dancers are ruled out simply because they don’t fit the cookie-cut form.

But Jecko is no cookie cutter.  His creative identity is strongly attached to his aboriginal roots and his new-found love for hip hop, creating a unique choreographic style that sees his rise in Indonesia’s contemporary dance scene.

Although Jecko had performed at the Kallang Theatre in 1996, he only made his debut as a choreographer in Singapore at the recent Singapore Arts Festival with Terima Kost or “Room Exit”. 

In Terima Kost, he engages us with a unique movement language and cross-cultural physical grammar, which integrates hip hop, contemporary dance, everyday gestures and drama, and the essence and spirit of traditional Papuan folk and tribal dance movements.

What is Papuan dance and what are Papuan dance movements?  From start, we hear the sounds of animals, and this gives us a hint of the movement vocabulary.

We see the fragile façade of a condo - just one floor - presented in unvarnished wood with crudely cut-out openings representing doors and windows.  Dancers appeared from the roof tops and swung from window to window like monkeys.  One dancer displayed great athletic prowess when he leapt like a frog with incredible height and grace.  More frequently, the dancers held their hands to their chests with a taut dangle, imitating kangaroos standing on their hind legs.  Meanwhile, warriors move forward quietly holding an imaginary spear, ready to attack.   We don’t see the traditional Papuan dance proper, but only the essence of it, reconstructed in contemporary form to portray creatures of the urban jungle.

The dancers move about outside and within the condo exploring space and adding dimension to the stage.  Jecko examines the space inside the tiny, claustrophobic rented rooms, and outside, on the streets.  While the tiny rooms puts the youths on the verge of break down, the open space of the streets make them burst into break dance.  The boys put on their canvas shoes and shows off their moves to screaming girls who then responded with some MTV-style dancing.  It was a juxtaposition of confinement and freedom. 

Jecko’s work is bold, loud, and vivacious.  It takes an equally bold and extroverted dancer to verbalise this piece.  There is frequent use of voice – mumbling, shouting, singing, rapping, shouting and reciting excerpts from James Bond movies; and noise - from slapping the body, slamming the body against the wall, and hitting the wooden condo like drums.  While these make the performance more interesting, at times, I felt that there was too much noise.

The dramas of everyday life conveyed by the dancers vibrate tensions from worldly pressures.  The atmosphere pulsates with anxiety and borderline lunacy as we get a sense of unsettled spirits in the urban strangers expressed in the exaggerated actions of playing computer games, putting out clothes to dry, leaning out of the window, seducing the other sex, and mopping the floor with t-shirts.  A corny script describes a murder that took place resulting from jealousy.  And then, in an ultimate display of releasing pent-up frustrations, a woman is seen laughing on her own and a man suddenly squats and wailed loudly.  These scenes are random, chaotic and a bit confusing at times.  It makes me wonder if this is really the urban landscape of Jakarta.

In these scenes of chaos and lunacy, compounded by portrayals of animals, the lines are blurred between the urban space and the natural eco space.  I am reminded of the conclusion in George Orwell’s Animal Farm – “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

In part, Terima Kost takes us on Jecko’s personal journey to the days when he first left his village to pursue dance at the Jakarta Institute of Arts.  He tells us that he certainly did not find everything he was searching for in the big city.  Why do we worship modernity when indigenous wisdom provides most of the answers we seek?

When I spoke to Jecko after the show, he said, “The more we move forward, the more we move backwards.  In the jungle, I see naked people; when I’m in New York, I also see naked people.  In the end, I don’t really know which one is the jungle.”

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About Jecko Siompo

Dance was a constant feature throughout his childhood and adolescent life.  Growing up, he lived in various areas in Papua (Irian Jaya):  the hinterland Wamena, the coastal Fak-fak (his hometown), and the provincial capital Jayapura, exposing him to both hinterland (pedalaman) and coastal (pesisir) dance forms.  As with the bulk of Indonesian contemporary dance, the rich local dance traditions of his tribal culture provides the strongest influence and the main fuel of his unique multicultural dance vocabulary.

Mastering Javanese, Sumatran and Minang ethnic dance and other contemporary forms as a student at Institut Kesenian Jakarta (Jakarta Institute of the Arts), he later immersed himself in ballet and street dance.  The further he was away from Papua, the more he understood his traditions, and he started exploring his own dance culture.  In 1999, he picked up hip-hop from B-boys in New York while on an invite to the Bates Dance Festival (Portland, USA), and has incorporated street dance into his dance vocabulary since, bringing both his firm connection with Jakarta’s hip-hop subculture and deep roots in Papuan dance culture into his choreography and dance films.

Sponsorship Acknowledgements

Special thanks to: 
National Arts Council, Singapore
Singapore Tourism Board