Alon(e) Alon(e)

When I was about to leave for a second trip to Java in July 2005, Cristiano Carpanini, the director of Dansem International Festival, suggested that I make a coproduction to create a performance with an Indonesian dancer.
It was the begining of the story of “Alon (e) Alon (e)”.
After my performances in the Yogyakarta Art Festival and the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival, I then taught the dancers of the Miroto Dance Company. It was during this workshop that I met Sudiharto; I was totaly fascinated by his way of moving, and we are now partners in the performance. He came for a long stay in France in autumn of 2006.

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In Java, you can’t separate dance from music; the dance is very precisely based on the music so I decided to work with:

• an Indonesian dancer: Sudiharto
• a French dancer: Veronique Delarché
• an Indonesian musician: Sapto Raharjo
• a French musician: Alex Grillo

These two musicians have been friends of mine for a long time, and they met each other in Paris during the Banlieues Bleues Festival, while Sapto Raharjo was performing there with André Jaume in 1995. Since 1997, Alex Grillo has been invited several times by the French Cultural Centers in Indonesia for collaborations with Sapto Raharjo. In his country, Sapto is one of the leaders of contemporary music, he is the appointed Ambassador of Culture by the gouvernment, and organes many cultural events like the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival as well as often performing internationally.

In gamelan music there is no leader. The relation between the musicians is very subtle and each musician assumes a part of the composition which is really only interesting once it is put together within the whole composition. Isolating an instrument doesn’t mean anything; it would be like isolating a finger of a pianist. I would like to keep this quality of the Javanese philosophy; the individual being less important than the community.

We decided to prepare “Alon (e) Alon (e)” as a real collaboration in which each of us is giving his contribution to build the performance. The roles of each artist appeared little by little and the wall between music and dance was quickly broken by the fluidity of the exchanges. Of course, the gamelan instrument expresses a type of unity we were looking for that no other instrument offers. Before rehearsals, I had chosen the main subjects I felt it was important to speak about. To do this I found inspiration in the cultural differences I felt during my stay in Indonesia. I decided to use very concrete things which would concern a French as well as an Indonesian audience. Some discussions with Alex Grillo consolidated these choices but the work really began with the arrival of the Javanese artists. An important part of the charm of the performance comes from the complicity between the artists and their direct relation with the audience.

We experimented changing the roles amoung us; the Indonesian dancer was working on what seems to be typically French dancing styles and the French dancer concentrated on typically Indonesian dance styles.

For example, in Bali, the “kecak” dance finds its origins in a very old ritual, the “Sang Hyang” dance, where the dancers work themselves into a transe in order to communicate with their ancestral gods. The french dancer uses this concept.

I was really touched during my stay in Yogyakarta by the warm mutual aid. They are poor but united. Here, we are rich (at least that’s what they think from there) and lonely. I would like to explore this idea of solitude along side promiscuity.

In Java, solitude and silence don’t exist. The Indonesians that I met are able to sleep everywhere even with a loud noise level around. Sometimes if the place is too quiet they have to leave the TV playing all night long in order to be able to sleep! I didn’t find any silent places there during my stay, so giving an accentuated sensation of the human multitude. We were working on ideas of silence and it's absence, until the moment where silence contacts the sensation of time that the audience have, thus effecting their perception of the flowing of time.

Another point I would like to deal with is the notion of inside and outside which is also very different from in France. For example, the dancers of the Miroto Dance Company, who attended my workshop in the Tari Banjarmili studio, were entering the studio with their motorbikes on and were going away starting up their bikes in the studio. The cool weather allows them to have no windows and sometimes no walls. We are inside but we are outside. But you have to take off your shoes! We are outside but we are inside. We take off our shoes when we go through the symbolic step of an inside space as is done in the beautifull halls for gamelan and dance which are completely open. Such rehearsals are animated by the visits of curious visitors. Moreover the Indonesians are able of such a deep level of concentration in spite of the peripheral movement and noises. They have an extraordinary capacity to bury themselves in the work which obviously delighted me as a teacher.

So inside – outside…

And of course, what is more evident when we arrive there, is the concept of time. It seems that the weather of the equatorcan makes the time become elastic…. We will deal with this notion of time, so different even if the way of life in Java is much more occidental now than before. Stress doesn't seem to be able to touch the Javanese people who are really busy or those who look like the have nothing to do. The empty flowing of time or its plenitude.

Then finally we get to look on the notion of routinity, all these small gestures which build our way of moving in society and which are full of cultural signs we lose conscience of.
Begining the artistic work, we felt it necessary to connect the performance with all the inherent difficulties of building these kinds of projects; we enjoyed to wink at the administrative maze and the agony of obtaining a visa to come into France. This prologue to the pleasure of meeting connects the performance with its politic context and makes the cultural crossing more real and deeper.

People often ask me questions about the title. In the Indonesian language “alon” means slowly and “alon alon” means very slowly. This is exactly what an Occidental person will percieve as soon as he comes off the plane onto Indonesian soil. I’ve put a final “e” for french phonetic reasons, which then produced the word “alone” and this is exactly what the Javanese will feel when arriving in France as an indelible sensation. The title of the performance is at the crossing point of the two cultures.

Véronique Delarché

Partners:

• General Council of Var
• SPEDIDAM
• ADAMI
• Indonesian Consulate of Marseille
• Indonesian Ambassy of Paris
• Town of Cabasse

Programation:

• Festival Musiques en Patrimoine, ADIAM 83, Cuers
• Festival Danse M, Marseille
• Espace des Arts, le Pradet
• Leda Atomica Musiques, Marseille
• Impolite Musics Festival, Nouvé
• Studio le Regard du Cygne collaboration with Indonesian Ambassy (Paris)
• French Cultural Centers in Java (Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Surabaya).

Around the performance:

• Lecture about Javanese culture and the process of creation
• Workshop of gamelan music
• Workshop of classical Javanese dance Yogyakarta style
• Workshop of contemporary dance