Asia Dance Channel

Enviable Exchanges in Jakarta
A Review of Fitri Setyaningsih's The Colour of the Inner Earth

by Joelle Jacinto

One of the most remarkable things I discovered at the Goethe Institut's Regional Dance Summit was that the locals in Jakarta prefer watching contemporary dance of other Indonesians than if foreign artists came to visit. Coming from the Philippines, a country where we go crazy for foreign artists coming to town, I am quite overwhelmed at this bit of news, and, honestly, insanely jealous as there are a lot of great Filipino artists who need a bigger local audience. So, hurray for Jakarta!

This then made me even more interested in the world premieres of the Indonesian choreographers Fitri Setyaningsih and Jecko Siompo, performed on the 6th of August at the GoetheHaus in Jakarta. I was rather interested in Fitri's work as I had also been already chatting with one of her musical collaborators, and heard around that she was trained in traditional Javanese dance but choreographs completely different. So, let's see how different exactly.

The Colour of the Inner Earth was different in that it started slowly - very slowly, to be precise. A cloaked figure moved from one side of the stage to the other, swaying side to side like a lethargic pendulum, each step pushing the dancer forward but just by tiny margins. Another dancer joins the first one and does the same movement on another length of stage. They do not interact or even notice or acknowledge each other when they pass, and since they are cloaked, we cannot tell which cloaked figure is her dancer and which is Fitri herself. The cloaks are remarkable in that there is a material sticking out of the fabric all over; later we find out that it is thin wire. They walk from one end of the room to the other in this manner for long periods, breaking form only now and then to do repetitive jerky and abrupt movements, sharply twisting their bodies left and right, before coming back to their serene lines.

The dancers are not just androgynous but also ambiguous. We do not know what they are or what they are doing, why they are doing this strange dance of alternating calm and frenzy. As this goes on for quite a while, I was beginning to create stories in my head about who or what they were and thought they fit right in the first Star Wars movie where the stocky desert people walked gracelessly over sand dunes in their bulky cloaks. The stage began to look like a desert then, and the faint pastels on the cyclorama behind them reminded me of the colors of the strange double sunset of the planet that Luke Skywalker had lived the first half of his life.

After what seemed a lifetime of this kind of movement, the ambient music began to get more frenetic, and the dancers began to get more frenetic as well. I don't remember how this started; sometimes, when we wait for something to happen, we unfortunately blink and realize we shouldn't have. The high point of the performance is when the two dancers run into each other, sharply twisting their bodies left and right into the other dancer, and effectively entangling the wires that stick out from their costumes. The rest of the dance involves disentangling and finding their own rhythms alone again.

The discussion about the piece that took place afterwards proved to be just as interesting as the piece itself; in some aspects, perhaps even more. All performances at the dance summit were provided audience talks right after and moderated discussions with the summit participants on a separate day. At Fitri's audience talk, any attempt by anyone to give their own reading to the work was negated by Fitri, which I thought to be peculiar because it seemed like she wasn't interested in other people's possible readings.

On the other hand, some of the aspects of the work that she did purposely weren't even noticed by some of the audience. For example, she mentioned that she timed the colors changing on the cyclorama to depict the sunrise to sunset, with one minute representing one hour in the day; the piece was around 24 minutes long. This enlightened me on why the piece had to be so long and slow-moving, but I have to admit that I didn't even notice that the colors on the cyclorama were changing at all, or that it had any real impact to the performance.

Thai dance artist Pichet Klunchun made a very interesting observation that The Colour of the Inner Earth alluded to traditional Indonesian dance, where the dancers enter the performance space very slowly, swaying side to side. He actually praises her work by pointing out how successfully it captivates the audience the way traditional Indonesian dance does. However, this does not amuse Fitri as she has shares that she sloughed off all evidence of traditional dance before working with contemporary styles.

Of course, this is not the absolute truth of what her work means, merely one reading of one person from the audience. But I do understand where Fitri is coming from -- audience members and critics tend to overread artistic objects and perhaps she just doesn't appreciate when false meaning is imposed on her work.

I do come away from The Colour of the Inner Earth with a better understanding why the Jakarta audience love their choreographers. They are a very intellectual group - both audience and artists - and the exchanges made from the works are indeed very stimulating. A scene to really be envious of, definitely, and to want to participate in again soon.