Visual Takes on Dance in Java

Introduction

This article addresses the questions of how performances have been represented in physical form (as verbal and visual texts) and of the role of indigenous concepts of performance. Rather than discuss historical examples of texts/products as others have done, I present some of my own "physical" forms of dance from my film and video work in Java. I argue that film is a valuable research tool as well as a mode of representing performance, with reference to the literature on the contribution of film/video to the development of cross-cultural understanding, in particular the writings of filmmaker David MacDougall (1995, 1997, and 1998). The examples are two film projects completed during twenty years of research into Javanese dance. The Dancer and the Dance is a personal view of women's dance in Yogyakarta in the style associated with the sultan's palace, filmed on 16mm with a proper budget in 1987 during a fellowship at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield. Tayuban: Dancing the Spirit in Java is a video document of a village ritual and its performances, filmed on Hi-8 video with no budget in 1994 during a two-month field trip to Java supported by the British Academy. Both performances—and a collection of stills—are available in the eCompanion to this article at www.oraltradition.org.

Using extreme contrasts of female performance I argue that a visual text—represented here by dance, film, and dance on film—offers different sorts of information from a verbal one. Rather than representing performance as a text, film is particularly helpful for representing performance as action or practice, as a phenomenological object that is contingent on historical and social factors and constructions, inseparable from the stuff of social events and action, and constituted by the contexts of practice and understanding. Film can reveal/represent dancing as the physical dimension of human existence that both embodies and imagines social values, which addresses ethical and aesthetic aspects of social life. This article also raises questions about interpretation and reception: how much can we expect to understand from a film? Is it feasible to use images to challenge assumptions about cultural practices and to go beyond appearances?

An Approach to Film

Filmmakers have been capturing dance on film for over one hundred years, but the potential of film and video to both document and represent dance research continues to be neglected in favor of other representational systems such as dance notation. Film and video have a valuable role in performance studies, but their role needs to be understood in the context of debates about cross-cultural understanding.

That most lucid writer on anthropology and film, the filmmaker and author David MacDougall, has suggested that we think of a film as an "arena of inquiry" rather than as an aesthetic or scientific performance (1995:128). He asks us to consider a film as "a human product and not a transparent window on reality" (1998:86). Anthropological film in these terms is not "a pictorial representation of anthropological knowledge, but a form of knowledge that emerges through the grain of film-making" (ibid.:76). Filmmaking in anthropology itself is "performing culture" instead of what Talal Asad has called "the representational discourse of ethnography," and provides a means to explore issues of power and representation in the discipline (Asad 1986:159).

If filmmaking "performs culture," it aspires to capture in its images something of the style and ethos of the society being represented. This requires the audience to modify its expectations of such visual documents: they should not be looking for beautiful camerawork associated with Hollywood fiction or television travelogues; nor should they expect a film to be stuffed with information superimposed by means of the so-called "voice-of-God" commentary. The sound-images, which are the substance of a film, constitute an interpretation that is produced as part of a complex process of research, collaboration...