I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking…Some day all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin
We might say that photography is unclassifiable
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Photography, archaeology, dance
Archaeology and photography: there has been much discussion about how the two relate to each other. From the end of the twentieth century we have witnessed a shift of attitude in how archaeologists regard photography and the visual in the construction of the past (Molyneaux 1987, Smiles 1994, Moser 1998, Smiles and Moser 2005), in the wake of social anthropologists’ critiques of the political and ideological implications of photography (Edwards 1992; Tagg 1998) and photographers’ reflections on the negative effects on their practice of an uncritical perception of photography (Sekula 1992). The photograph, as used by archaeologists, is no longer, by and large, thought of merely as an illustration, a technical aid: its interpretive position is crucial, engendering a transformation and a reconfiguration of the photographed subject (Bohrer 2005, 180-191). Attending to the uses of photography by archaeologists, Shanks has proposed, in his essay ‘Photography and the archaeological image’, that photography as a category is ‘unstable’ and that rather than thinking in terms of photographs as documents, we should think of the photograph as ‘photowork’ equating this to “one aspect of how the archaeologist may take up the remains of the past and work upon them” (Shanks 1997,73).
The archaeography project, initiated by Shanks under the Metamedia banner in 2004, further explores the connection between archaeology and photography, elaborating on the idea of photowork: as the introduction to the photoblog says, “Photography is profoundly archaeological. Photographs are like archaeological traces of the moments they capture. Photowork raises a question faced by all archaeologists - how do we document events? But neither photowork nor archaeology create transparent windows on the past, though many think they do” (Archaeography)
It is in the context of this ongoing interrogation of the photograph as testament and as witness, and of photography’s way of participating in the construction of history through an assumption of evidence, that I wish to look more specifically at the relationship of photography and dance, inscribed within an archaeological investigation of dance, as part of the overall project of examining how dance is reConstructed and rePresented.
Dance photography: high art or commercial endeavour?
Even though the academic study of photography is a burgeoning field, with a number of critical studies which integrate photographic theory and photographic practice (Sontag 1979; Barthes 1984; Edwards 1992; Ramamurthy 2004; Wells et al 2004 to name but a few), there are no specific studies of dance photography as a genre and virtually no critical engagement with photographic images of dancers. Dancers are constantly being photographed and yet there is little discussion of dance photography (1). For some, it is even doubtful that dance photography is a truly distinct photographic genre. Most photographers of dancers tend to say that they choose dancers and dance as their subject because they are fascinated by movement: the tension between the static medium and the moving subject-object is what they find engaging, and regardless of whether they do ‘dance photography’ or other kinds of photographic work (commercial, editorial, fashion or other) they either work with dancers or with models who are, in general, able to move (and to express and emote through body movement) (2) .
This relative lack of interest in dance photography and lack of recognition of it as a possible genre is in contrast with the attention that dance, including Asian dance genres, has received in the context of film and television (see Dodds 2001, Allen and Jordan 1993 and Mitoma 2003 for screen representations of dance in a Euro/American context; the studies of dance in Bollywood films by Munni Kabir 2001, Subramaniam 2003, Ganti 2004; and Hughes-Freeland 1988, 1996, 1999 and 2005 for Javanese dance). When talking of media in relation to dance it is the film or digital video that seems to be privileged in all accounts, perhaps because it is perceived as being better equipped than still photography to capture the dynamism of dance, as part of an underlying (false) assumption that film can document – and preserve - dance more fully and completely (3) .
Historically, one can mark the 1920s as the time when an interest in photographing dance begins to emerge. It is at this time that Dresden born photographer Charlotte Rudolph began to produce images of dancers in motion, images of dancers “who dance during the shooting” (Rudolph 1929, in Preston-Dunlop 1990, 80). The consolidation of modern dance through Isadora Duncan, the eurhythmics of Jacques Dalcroze, Laban’s scientific study of movement are all part of the modernist concern with the active body, the body as a wonderful piece of machinery, and configure the healthy body culture of the period between the two wars. This newly emerging dance photography connects with the idea of visually documenting and analysing the movements of the complex machine that is the human body, paralleling concomitant interests in developing dance notation systems, Laban’s kinetography being a primary example of such efforts. But this new dance photography also connects with the modernist idea of the ‘perfectible body’, a body that can be improved upon, manipulated and altered through the camera and thus allies itself and eventually turns into the photomontage and experiments in the darkroom of photographers such as Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer (Wilk 2006,252). And from there it morphs into a photography whose concern is a representation of the human body, now dismembered and mutilated, now naked, now clothed, now sexualised (or de-sexualised), a photography, in sum, that in allowing a construction of different meanings for human bodies, powerfully disciplines them, in a Foucauldian sense. The boundaries between dance photography and other photographic genres is therefore, and inevitably so, extremely porous, which is the reason why consensus on whether dance photography constitutes a genre of its own has not yet been reached (4).
Photographers, per force, move between genres, in order to find work. Thus dance photography is promiscuous: akin to fashion photography, with its focus on the gendered body, it simultaneously falls into the broader category of commercial photographic work – think here of photocalls and advance publicity for shows; is categorised as portrait (hence art) photography and partakes of the documentary, photojournalistic essay. Dance photography is nevertheless recognisable because its subjects dance. How the dancing is represented remains optional, a highly individual choice of each photographer, increasingly working in collaboration with the dancer/choreographer and thus sharing with him/her an authorial relationship. The result is a photowork, which by playing upon and emphasising the elusiveness and ephemerality of dance, will turn itself into a ‘historical document’, an archaeological trace, to be archived, and to be activated when viewed, by what Shanks refers to as ‘actuality’, or “ a return of what is no longer the same”, (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 41-42).
A great deal of dance photography takes place in the context of advance publicity photo shoots. This is how we consume it, through images that advertise and identify a dance form, a dance production, and its dancers; images that reach us through the media, which speak to us, imply and also, very often, misrepresent. Flyers of forthcoming performances by this or that dance company are instances of advertising photography, a genre - or non-genre, according to Ramamurthy (2004, 204), which has been abundantly critiqued for reducing the wealth of human experience to a commodity. The flyers, with their visually stunning photographs of dancers and ‘moments’ from a particular choreography, sell us the performance: the image is often created well before the choreography has been completed and it is representative, through a careful construction, of the forthcoming performance. Like the fashion image, the dance photograph aspires to artistic status; like fashion photography, dance photography creates a world of illusion, more often focusing on “what is contrived and stylised rather than the ‘captured’ moment so revered in documentary” (Ramamurthy 2004, 223) - this is especially evident in advance publicity shoots. In referring to award winning British photographer Chris Nash, whose career as dance photographer spans almost thirty years, Val Bourne, former director of the Dance Umbrella Festival, launched in London in the late 1970s, notes in one sentence how his photographs “offer instant recall”, can be appreciated as “works of art” and “can most certainly sell tickets” (Bourne, 2001, iii). This imbrication of art and commerce is by no means unique to dance photography, but it certainly constitutes its defining character.
Dance photography in the 21st century: dancers representing themselves
The archaeological character of dance photography, in the light of the above remarks, is almost self evident, but the nature and dynamics of the representation and rePresentation through photography needs some investigation. I mentioned earlier the collaborative effort of photographers and choreographers. How do dancers/choreographers use the photographic medium to represent themselves and their craft to local and international audiences and to market their work ? Who are the photographers? What kind of images are being circulated? How is dance consumption linked with its photographic representation? These are the questions which underpin this chapter’s discussion and I will attempt to answer them referring to, as a case study, contemporary dance photography in Indonesia, where I recently had an opportunity to research this topic as part of a bigger project. I do so in the hope of stimulating further reflection on the dynamics of the process of marketing and production of dance performance, in a global context (5) and how this can be viewed, historically.
Photography, as Chris Pinney tells us in his Photography’s other histories, is a "globally disseminated and a locally appropriated medium” (Pinney 2003,1). Far from being an exclusively Euro-American practice, photography has indeed been developed, throughout the 19th and 20th century, as a global practice with distinctive local inflections, an expression of ‘vernacular modernisms’.
Predictably, it was the Dutch that brought photography to Indonesia: as elsewhere, colonial photography was seen as a tool for recording reality and documenting it, for the purpose of classification. And, according to writer and critic Alexander Supartono, Indonesian photography continued in that role well into the second half of the 20th century, a prisoner of the documentation imperative, not ever developing outside photo-journalism or beyond the exclusive photographic salons, which celebrated technical, rather than aesthetic, achievements (Supartono 2004). It was only in the 1990s that photography schools and photography departments at art institutions, photographic galleries and specialist journals began to appear, in the main Indonesian cities. When photography went digital, it became relatively affordable, and though professionals, everywhere, will insist that the best results are still to be obtained only through analogue camera film, the much cheaper digital photography has made it possible for an increasing number of people in Indonesia to take up photography as an amateur and/or a semi-professional pursuit. The post- 1998 period, following the fall of the Soeharto regime, has seen a burgeoning of photographic activities, with young photographers discovering the aesthetic possibilities of the medium and exploring a different visuality embedded in newer visual discourses. One of such new developments, paralleling the explosion of contemporary dance making, has been dance photography.
Dance photography in Indonesia continues to be practised as photo-journalism in the tradition of documentary photography, as discussed by Supartono, with increasingly more sophisticated images obtained through rehearsal photo-calls, rather than in the actual performance, and published in newspapers of large circulation such as Kompas and the English language The Jakarta Post – see for example their coverage of events such as the annual Indonesian Dance Festival. But, as elsewhere, advance publicity photo shoots for posters and brochures are also the context of Indonesian dance photography. In contemporary Indonesia dance performances are increasingly intended for a global market, and thus photography has begun to play an important role in the local consumption of dance, be it by local urban audiences or by tourist audiences. Additionally, Indonesian dance photography is consumed through images that advertise and identify a dance form and/or a choreographic work and, even more importantly, its performer and/or choreographer. Much of this work is simultaneously used for web output.
Photo: Ritus Legong presented at IDF 2004 reviewed in Kompas 18th July 2004 (Source Kompas. Abain Rambey)
Thus programme notes with photographs; imaginative business dance-cards, personal brochures and portfolios; contact sheets and comp cards (sometimes in a digital form); and publicity posters are becoming a de riguer accessory among Indonesian contemporary performers, essential to their marketing strategies. They are a stable feature of Indonesian urban performance, a marker of true professionalism, regardless of whether the performers situate their practice within traditional genres or contemporary ones – and photographic and graphic styles will subtly reflect such distinctions.
Images of Indonesian dancers are also directly linked with commercial advertising, from advertisements of tourist resorts to credit cards – this too has a counterpart in Euro-American advertising trends, to be seen in the Rolex advertisement featuring celebrated ballet dancer Sylvie Guilllem or in the fashion spreads for glamorous magazines such as Elle by English ballet star Darcey Bussell, a favourite model, because of her unusual height, or indeed advertisements with Miss Bussell, as in a now famous American Express photoshoot.
Photo: An advertisement for a City Bank credit card in the Indonesian press, featuring a Balinese dancer (Source unknown)
Photo: Balinese dancer/choreographer Madé Jimat advertises the Club Med resort (Source: Jimat's brochure for Australian tour in 1992)
In Indonesia today, we find dance, photography and commerce, through fashion, simultaneously present in an eclectic mix at events such as the Bali Fashion Week, now in its seventh year, an international fair which showcases Indonesian designers, covered by the domestic and international press, aimed at providing sustained interaction with the international fashion and textile industry. Bali Fashion Week features street parades and street dancing, much in the same way as the Pesta Seni (Bali Arts Festival), but with an emphasis on original costume design. The one in June 2005 for example, featured a 2.5 hour long street parade of music, dance and fashion involving about 1,000 street performers and ending in a sunset beach party, with endless photo opportunities.
I shall leave aside the photography, dance and fashion connection, interesting though it may be from the point of view of the photographers and their ability to switch genres, undoubtedly impacting their image making. Instead, I will follow only one specific line of enquiry and look at how contemporary Indonesian dancers work with photographers, the kind of images that are produced through such a collaboration and for whom, noting “how contemporary imaginaries and spectacles inform new styles of deportment and presentation of the self and determine new ways of perceiving, and consuming, dance as a visual medium” (6) .
Representing the contemporary, RePresenting the traditional
In the course of my research, I met several photographers, mainly in Jakarta but also in Yogyakarta and Bandung. Some of them, for example, Yanuarius Harisinthu, a name increasingly acknowledged in dancers’ publicity material, teach photography at vocational colleges such as Institut Kesenian Jakarta (The Institute of Fine Arts of Jakarta) and are keen to endorse a photo-journalistic angle to their work – in conversation, Harisinthu emphasised the documentary and ethnographic purpose of his photographs, though some of his images are highly constructed, clearly the outcome of carefully manipulated photo shoots in the ‘studio’ mode. Other photographers combine art photography, straight advertising, sometimes fashion shoots and editorial work with performing arts photography, either through commissions or through photojournalism, following a pattern of urban production and consumption which is not so dissimilar from that of their Euro-American colleagues, except in terms of financial rewards. Perhaps one of the most acutely felt problems among Indonesian photographers concerns acknowledgment, the selling of photographs, and copyright protection. Images made by Indonesian photographers can be easily copied and reproduced in ways that would not be possible in a Euro-American context and which bypass any kind of copyright protection measure.
Among the photographers best known for their work with performers one finds, apart from the above mentioned Harisinthu, the following group, inclusive of women photographers, mostly Jakarta based: Naswan Iskandar; Sudjanto Gunawan; FG Pandhuagie; Ganug Gurit Geni; Indriati Satwika Galuh Wardhani; Novindra Dhiratara Kirana from Yogya; Fafa Utami from Solo, and Yani Mae, a lecturer at STSI (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia or Academy of the Indonesian Arts) from Bandung (7) .
All the above mentioned photographers are active in art photography and occasionally, photojournalism. Their work has appeared in publications such as The Jakarta Post, the art magazine Gong and periodicals such as Tempo, to name a few. Some of them are also known as writers and dance critics (e.g. Naswan Iskandar and Fafa Utami.) But the number of active Indonesian photographers keeps on growing. Paparanet.com for example is an online photo gallery of Indonesian photographers, worth visiting – it shows a range of images taken in recent years by professionals and semi professionals. Indeed, the spread of the internet has given a boost to photographic activities in Indonesia, allowing photographers to create international networks and discussion forums.
I will now review a few examples of photographic work.
A choreographer who has a strong sense of the visual and has always endeavoured to use striking images to represent himself as a performer and performance maker is Sardono W. Kusumo. He is a photographer and a film-maker in his own right. The image here is from a catalogue-brochure illustrating his recent collaboration with installation artist Sunaryo, at Selasar Sunaryo in Bandung, West Java, with the double title Sunken Seas (dance performance) and The Mountain of Wind (installation). The installation –performance was accompanied by a limited edition of a catalogue-brochure, with text by Sardono and Sunaryo and stunning photographs by a team of photographers (Yus Heriwan, Siswadi Djoko, Awan Gatot, Muhammed Abdiansyah, Muhammed Reza, Agung Hujatnikajennong and Adi Rahmatullah). Prompted by the tragic Tsunami(s) and the May 2006 earthquake that took place in Indonesia, Sunken Sea was a rather powerful performance-event which tried to reflect and make sense of these mournful happenings. On the cover of the catalogue we see an architectural drawing of the installation –space (the gallery), white lines on a black background, with a recent photo of Sardono, appearing to be almost flying above the space (probably a shot of him kneeling and about to rise). His facial expression is intense, his eyes closed, his moist shoulder length hair falls onto his face, the upper half of the body is naked. There is a contrast between the humanity of Sardono’s image, a Sardono caught in all his vulnerability and the technical dry-ness of the drawing.
Photo: Cover of catalogue for Sunken Sea
Photo: The Mountain of Wind (From performance-installation catalogue).
Sardono no longer uses personal brochures to introduce himself, he does not need to, in view of his stature as internationally situated performer and an acknowledged master of the kontemporer (contemporary dance) genre. But each of his performances is accompanied by a carefully assembled brochure/catalogue, containing some of his writings, and photographs of the choreographic process. Sardono has been inspirational in many ways to a whole generation of dancers who seem to have picked up from him his gift for understanding how to make images work for them and create a rapport with their audience on the basis of the images that circulate before the performance.
Among the current performers/choreographers enjoying international visibility, continuous presence and recognition is Mugiyono Kasido, who danced with Sardono for many years and eventually left Sardono Dance Theatre to found his own company Mugidance in 2003. Since then Mugi (his nickname) has become established as the Indonesian choreographer of the moment, in demand everywhere.
Mugi has created for himself a portfolio of images relating to his works, the most recent one being Mencari Mata Candi (with photos by Harisinthu). Visually, Mugiyono’s photographs are very striking; he has a very pictorial imagination and has very clear ideas about how he wants to be portrayed . He tends to like carefully constructed images, though they may appear to have been obtained through merely pointing the camera at him and clicking. Sometimes he cites some of the dance ‘greats’ –such as Martha Graham, creating an immediate, entirely visual, reference point for his global audience (8) . Mugiyono has an amazing body flexibility which allows him to contort himself into impossible poses, which he can hold for long enough to allow the photographer to do the shoot.
Photo: Flyer for Mencari Mata Candi
Photo: From a solo in 2002: citing Graham's Lamentation
Didik Nini Thowok is the next choreographer I would like to focus upon. He is the cross-gender performer of today’s Indonesia, a label he uses to describe himself (9), as can be seen on his website. Didik has one of the most elegant brochures I have seen among contemporary Indonesian performers, which reflects his sense of humour – he is one of those rare performers able to laugh at himself, gently. The cover image is very complex, playing on the theme of mirror-self reflection. Didik also has postcards of himself, with very graceful images of him in poses from different genres of Indonesian dance, dressed in female costume (10).
Photo: Didik's brochure
Photo: One of Didik's postcards, showing an East Javanese dance
Another interesting example is that of EKI (Eksotika Karmawibhannga Indonesia) a musical theatre company based in Jakarta. EKI is a contemporary professional company, with its own studios and school, run by several people, held together by clear purpose and vision. Marketing is something that EKI has mastered to perfection, with sleek publicity material, produced in house. Their website is also well designed and user friendly.
Photo: EKI's production China Moon
So far I have discussed contemporary choreographers. What about traditional performers?
Jakarta based Retno Maruti, who reinterprets traditional Javanese court dance in an urban context, projects herself as a traditional Javanese woman of the court, favouring images that show her wearing a simple but elegant green kebaya over a batik sarong, with her hair coiffed in a bun, following Javanese custom. Jennie Pak, an American-Korean transplanted to Yogyakarta, now her home, goes for the understated look for her company brochure, which specialises in traditional dance from the Yogyakarta court. This is very much in tune with what she wants her audience to understand about Javanese dance and in particular, the female style of court dancing, in which Jennie has trained to a very high performance standard, receiving acclaim for her elegant rendition of the court repertoire. This is a style of dance where women are refined and demure, and move with down cast eyes, slowly and softly – by her own admission Jennie is, dance wise, a traditionalist, and her dance images are so constructed as to convey the acknowledged qualities of Javanese female (and male, as her company has both male and female dancers) court dancing.
Photo: Retno Maruti
Photo: Jeannie Pak
Last but not least, I am including as an example a brochure prepared for a performance done for a Master degree from STSI (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) in Solo choreographed in 2006 by Dwi Rahmani. This was a site specific performance involving theatre and dance, attempting to rePresent a re-imagined moment of Indonesian colonial history. STSI master students taking this exam equivalent to an American MFA are expected to a submit a brochure as part of their performance assessment and this further demonstrates the importance given within contemporary Indonesia performance art education to issues of presentation. Dwi Rahmani’s work is also of interest because of its content and thus it snugly fits in the overall discussion attempted in this chapter and in this ebook, as it raises issues of presentation and representation, of history and its understanding, both in photographic terms as also in performance content. The performance is about the arrival of a young royal couple, a local king and his Dutch bride, on a boat, in the village and the festivities arranged for this momentous occasion. Using a fragment of local history, Dwi Rahmani reinterprets this moment as the arrival of Queen Wilhelmina in Indonesia. The brochure is a simple sheet of A3 paper, folded up into two. The inner side of the sheet, spread upon two pages has a photograph of the royal bride and bridegroom, as they get off the boat, surrounded by attendants. It is in brown tints, to convey a sense of the past invoked through the performance and it is covered, on the left, with writing in white ink, giving details of the performance. The outer side of the brochure, with the title of the performance Arus (Current) and the name of the choreographer, as well as the occasion for the performance, has a photograph of the same scene but this time the focus is on two villagers paying homage to the couple, clearly showing the river in the background.
Photo: Brochure for master degree performance Courtesy: Dwi Rahmani.
The performance presents ‘tradition’ and ‘history’ in a contemporary interpretation and it shows a way of making performance work which reflects on the past and involves the entire community of the village in which it is set – a number of actors and dancers, and a great number of extras, especially children, were actually drawn from among the villagers and from the village school.
Conclusion
The ability to produce and circulate striking still images of their work is an important part of the process of how dancers go about creating performance opportunities for themselves and their companies. It also has an effect on their performance work, very often stimulated by and built around the images devised well in advance of the choreography (11). What photography does for dancers cannot be replaced by the moving image: though a carefully edited DVD of a performance will be needed by programme organisers at some point in the pre-programming phase, to see what they are actually going to programme, the first encounter by venue managers with a proposed production is always through the still photograph, the flyer and the dancer’s brochure.
The same applies to audiences: despite the increase in the use of emailed video-clips and distribution of free DVDs, one often goes to see a performance, not after watching a pre-performance DVD – among other considerations, would there be time for it? but simply because the flyer and/or the poster, which is now increasingly circulated by email, rather than hard copy, has managed to capture one’s attention and has fired one’s imagination.
Going back to the case study presented, it would seem that in Indonesia, particularly with the boost that photography has received since the 1990s, we are witnessing a novel way, through collaboration with dancers, for newly trained photographers to be absorbed by the industry, retaining their creative impetus. This is clearly not only an Indonesian development, but one which, though locally articulated with its own idiomatic peculiarities, is part of a more global phenomenon with interesting intersections, parallels and overlaps.
For dancers/choreographers, the act of becoming involved in the process of photographing their own dance, not as passive models, but as active subjects, becomes an extension of their choreography. The images thus produced are yet another way of conceptualising their work, of putting their ideas in focus and of initiating a dialogue with their audience and the global dance community, rediscovering the visuality of choreography and performance and deploying photography as a means of self-representation and self-expression.
Forward to: 8. Conclusion
Return to: 6. RePresenting dance: Plastic Jungle 1983 and 2004
