FUSE#2

Element#2
BAHASA KOREOGRAFI
Overview of
Bahasa Koreografi
by Alfian Sa’at
I had the honour of spending time with four
dancer-choreographers and their mentor, Helly Minarti,
as part of a programme called ‘Bahasa Koreografi’. The
aim of the programme is to explore choreographic
language specific to Malay dance, and to uncover the
discourse of dance in the Malay/Indonesian language.
My deepest thanks to Daniel Kok and Dance Nucleus
for the invitation.
Over four intensive days, I listened, took notes, and marveled at
the kinds of discussions generated in the studio, along with the
demonstrations. Norhaizad Adam talked about Article 152 of
the Singapore Constitution, the one which enshrines minority
rights and the ‘special position of the Malays’ (those of you who
still use the phrase ‘majority rights’ please wake up your idea,
like now, immediately). As someone trained in traditional Malay
dance, he wondered about the space for those ‘minorities’ like
him who wanted to challenge orthodoxy. If he were to approach
the various dance gurus and gatekeepers to formulate an
analogue to Article 152, what shape will it take? What ‘special
position’ will be accorded to the rulebreakers, and will the list of
caveats and exceptions be longer than the article itself?
I came in as someone who is still very new to dance,
and with my own biases towards some forms of
traditional performances. These biases often revolve
around consumption, where spectatorship is often
inextricable from a social duty to ‘support’ what has
been branded as one’s ‘cultural heritage’. Given this
starting point, of a culture that is under siege
(modernisation/urbanisation/Westernisation etc), the
tendency is for criticality to be subordinated to anxieties
over whether a certain cultural form is even being ‘kept
alive’. But what is on life support is often not very alive at
all, and to settle for the ‘at least’ will lead to the
proliferation of cliched mediocrities and a crisis of
connoisseurship.
Mohd Fauzi Bin Amirudin took us through some of the forms
he was trained in, including that of the tarian piring, a Minang
form where dancers balance saucers in their hands, and where
the shifting of body weight (pemindahan berat badan) is crucial
to its execution (the weight of the saucers assimilated as points
of weight on the body itself; the saucers become extensions of
the body). But perhaps most magical for me was Fauzi’s
demonstration of the terinai, a dance from the court of Perlis,
which have movements and phases with the most gorgeous
names, such as ‘timang burung’ (weighing a bird on the palm),
‘ketam bawa anak’ (crab carrying its child) and ‘layang mas’
(golden kite). Performed while sitting down, the dance is
hypnotic to watch, the majestic hauteur of the performer at
points dissolving thrillingly into a series of liquid strokes.
11 12