Key Pages
Home |Changes [Dec 09, 2008]
8. ConclusionIl va falloir de la méme manière réveiller l'expérience du monde tel qu'il nous apparait en tant nous sommes au monde par notre corps, en tant que nous percevons le monde avec notre corps. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception)
Prambanan: dance, architecture and archaeology
In earlier chapters I have focused on the relationship of dance with texts and sculptures and their instrumental role in projects of dance reconstruction and representation; here I would like to move on to a discussion of the conjunction of dance, architecture and archaeology and how this enables a different way of working with and apprehending an archaeological site.
I shall discuss the work done at the Prambanan site, in Central Java, to explicate how this transdisciplinary approach works in practice. This work, done in the last decade and through multiple collaborative projects, has seen the use of innovative technologies, such as the recording of real live motion as digital data (motion capture) to represent the reconstituted and re-embodied movements, and a multi media exploration of the site aimed at a diversity of users. The ‘Prambanan experience’ has thus been articulated through multivocal and intersecting narratives.
Prambanan is a temple complex located in the vicinity of the city of Yogyakarta, and was built around the 9th century CE. It belongs to the so-called ‘classical period’ (1) of Javanese history, otherwise known as the Hindu/Buddhist or Indo-Javanese period (Fontein 1990, Klokke 1993, Miksic et al 1996). Around the outer balustrade of the main temple, there are sixty-two reliefs showing groups of three male dancers in action. These reliefs alternate with others portraying three figures, male and female in any combination i.e. two males and one female, two females and one male, showing them in standing postures. The dance reliefs have been the object of research over a period of several decades (Oudheidkundige Dienst (OD)1948; Sivaramamurti 1974; Vatsyayan 1977a; Sedyawati 1981,1982).
Photo: Prambanan complex
Photo: Dance reliefs, Siva temple
Drawing: Location of reliefs along outer balustrade
Throughout the 1990s, I engaged in research at Prambanan, through three interrelated projects, ranging from analysis and reconstitution of the dance movements shown in the reliefs (Iyer 1996, 1997) to attempts at recording the reconstituted and re-embodied movement vocabulary using the LifeForms software (Lopez y Royo Iyer 2001) to an exploration of the site with a team of archaeologists, architectural historians, animators, dancers and art historians (Lopez y Royo et al 2002) to map its diverse contextual meanings (2).
Even though the different projects varied in their focus, the point of departure for the overall research effort has been, throughout, the use of the body for apprehending the site. This work at Prambanan instantiates a phenomenological approach to archaeology through the dance experience and a way of producing knowledge through the body. The site has been incorporated in the archaeological process of dance movement reconstitution and its re-embodiment, and this has also enabled the experiencing of architecture as dance and conversely, dance as architecture, exploring spatio-temporal relationships through the moving body. An archaeology, in other words, conceived as an embodied and performative practice.
I will chart in this chapter the trajectory of the ‘Prambanan experience’. In so doing, I will re-engage with Prambanan as a performance locus, discussing the different phases of corporeal interaction with the site, from the reconstitution of its dance units and their computer animation to the exploration of the body-dance-temple-site connection. I shall raise questions on the reconstitutive process of the dance units, ideas of embodiment, body intelligence and body knowledge, the visual dance record and the dance past, engaging in a performed/danced archaeology. This is a form of sensory and bodily experience of the archaeological site which is comparable to the walking and visual experience of phenomenological approaches to the choreography of monuments in past landscapes (Richards 1993; Tilley 1994; 1999).
The archaeological process is normally lived as excavation and reconstitution of an outer reality, the site. But in the effort I am about to describe the archaeological process has been internalised, etched in the body, inscribed in corporeality, and translated into ‘bodily writing’ (Leigh Foster 1995,15). The reconstitution of a dance body – the ‘Prambanan dance body’, an abstract, incorporeal body of fragmented and segmented movements (3) – has been refleshed in the physicality of the archaeologist/dancer’s body: it is in this sense that I am using the term embodiment. This process has mirrored the reconstitution of the site, activated by the disembodied architectural or ‘monumental' choreography of the buildings at the site. It is a process through which the archaeologist/dancer’s body is made to coincide with the site, ‘embodies’ it and turns it into bodily writing – the latter, unlike the re-embodiment of the segments of dance movement, stretches to a choreographic interpretation, the choreography stemming from the ‘site re-embodiment’.
Rather than being a passive object of inscription, the body, as discussed in this chapter, writes, as well as being written upon. Thus the ‘bodily writing’ is a choreography of knowledge, produced by the body as subject (Leigh Foster 1995,15-16). Embodiment of movement and embodiment of knowledge are interconnected. But - and this is a caveat - not only is embodied movement a knowledge intertwined with other cultural knowledge, embodied movement is also an immediate corporeal experience and the cultural knowledge that is embodied through movement can thus be known through movement alone (Sklar 2001, 30-32). In other words, the site embodiment which will be discussed, being a movement knowledge, can only be fully grasped through the experience of a moving body: writing about the experience can powerfully evoke it , but cannot be a substitute for it.
Gendering movement and animating sculptures
The impetus to the research was given by my desire to make sense, kinetically, of the movements frozen in sculpture as dance poses in the reliefs which I encountered during a short visit to the Prambanan site in 1989. While retracing the postures in each relief with my own body, I sensed a movement logic. In each, self-contained, relief there are three figures which stand in a clear relationship with each other: if one replicates all their postures in succession, a short movement sequence/dance phrase is obtained, though inevitably there will be gaps to be filled while moving from one movement segment to the other. I felt compelled to find out whether these movement segments could be rejoined, eliminating the hiatus between them, in the best possible approximation of the movements which inspired the sculptors of the reliefs.
I drew for my analysis on the theories of Kapila Vatsyayan who, as explained in chapter 4, has concerned herself with the question of how movement can be represented in stone, forging a tool for investigating corporeality on the basis of reassembled units of dance (4). I realised that her way of ‘thinking small’ would be helpful to my ‘restoration’ process and so I worked with the smallest movements of each body part and with postural deviations from the spinal axis. Each deviation would determine the overall height of the body and the position of the lower limbs in relation to the hip.
As said in an earlier chapter, a dance unit can be subdivided into stance and smaller segments of movement such as movement of legs and feet, movement of the arms and hands, and even tinier segments, such as the movements of shoulders, chest, sides of the torso, waist etc. It is important to be aware that the dance phrases retrievable from Prambanan may not have been regarded as ‘dance units’ in 9th century Java. We do not know how the dance technique was conceived of at that point in time and where its caesurae were. But as the ‘frozen’ movements are reconstituted into short dance phrases, these reconstituted short dance phrases can be categorised as dance units, thus recreating the Prambanan movement vocabulary: short, recombinable sequences which can function as dance units for choreographic purposes.
One could easily take the Prambanan dance reliefs at face value as static poses. But the reliefs show three different phases or ‘cadences of movement’ – as Vatsyayan calls them - and their plane and level. In the context of each relief one can put together the three cadences of movement supplying the missing segments which link them on the principle of the shortest route from one point to another (5), following the overall dynamic pattern of the cadence, which one can infer by looking at the plane and level of the movement (high, middle or low). The classifications of dance units devised by Vatsyayan (1983b) are helpful for an identification of the movement path of each Prambanan unit. Iconometric measurements are also very useful to establish the exact proportions and relationship of the limbs with each other and to work out their relationship with the central median and the consequent disposition of the weight; this ensures greater precision in working out the movement path, by the shortest route, of the missing segments. Occasionally, when more than one choice is possible, alternative interpretations of the movement cadences can be given.
To re-embody the Prambanan dance movements, the fragments of an abstract dance body are reconstituted in one’s own and in this reconstitution the dance body is gendered by the interpreter: gender can thus be viewed as “a corporeal style, an “act”, as it were, which is both intentional and performative” where performative suggests “a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Butler 1999,177). This is a pertinent observation: the dancers in the reliefs are male – this may engender false expectations of reconstituting a ‘male’ dance, whereas the dance is either ‘male’ or ‘female’ – masculine or feminine - depending on the interpretation given by the performer, as noted in chapter 3, when discussing how karanas can be stylistically interpreted. Gender categories in most Indonesian performance practices are very fluid – one needs to look beyond a balletic model which can be extremely rigid in the way it conceives of gender to the point of having a differentiated training for female and male dancers (6).
In many Asian dance traditions one finds male dancers taking on the role of females and vice versa and this is not necessarily dependent on external elements and props such as costume and make up, but it relies exclusively on movement quality and movement interpretation. Javanese dancing for example can be said to have an androgynous quality: its most important movement classification is along the refined/unrefined axis rather than the female/male, and the refined male and refined female modes overlap; whereas in Bali female dancers can be seen performing the role of young men, in the bebancihan mode, as in the Tarunajaya (kebyar) dance of North Bali (Bandem and deBoer 1995,74-75) (7).
Photo: Ni Madé Pujawati and Eka Damayanti in Jayaprana, in bebancihan mode
It follows that dance movements are ungendered until embodied and once embodied they can be given a gender quality by the interpreter, irrespective of the interpreter’s own gender, yet overlayered by the way the interpreter’s body has already been scripted upon by a variety of markers, for bodies are not neutral. Similarly, stylistic interpretations relating to the movement register - for example, ‘hard and staccato’ or ‘ fluid and soft’ - are also a way of doing and are not encoded in the dance units. They are qualitative choices to be supplied by the interpreter.
By way of reflecting, through practice, on the process involved in the act of re-embodiment and of ascribing a quality to the movements themselves, the project was developed further enlisting the help of a dancer and working with computer animation. The issue of communicating the reconstitution of the dance units preserving its kinetics was crucial and this necessitated engaging in re-embodiment. How else could it be experienced? But rather than using a more traditional means for recording dance, such as notation, which still requires engaging in re-embodiment, or video-recording a dancer in the studio, which results into a two –dimensional image, I decided to work with computer animation and in particular with the LifeForms software of Credo Interactive.
The LifeForms animations were an appropriate substitute for notation as I was envisaging a web output and, in particular, wanted people unable to read notation to access the information and get a clear sense of the movements. The animations were based on the performance of the units by a classically trained Javanese dancer, whose movement background mattered precisely because the movements had to be stylistically interpreted – and he clearly imbued them with a Javanese dance quality. The dancer was Didik Bambang Wahyudi, from STSI Solo.
The animations were accomplished manually, through performance observation and practical studio work. They were three-dimensional and interactive, allowing a shift in the viewpoint of the observer through manipulation of the models – something that cannot be done with a two dimensional video. But they could not record stylistic nuances, much as I would have wished it. Back in 1999, when this phase of the project took place, the technology was not sufficiently advanced to enable one to do so. Thus the animation needed to be complemented by video clips of the performance which visually captured those nuances in the dancer’s execution (cf. Lopez y Royo Iyer 2001)
Though I have already given a fairly detailed account of this phase of the project in Internet Archaeology, I will give here an example of how the dance units of Prambanan were animated. Let us take relief P49 (8). The figures in the reliefs seem to be performing a movement sequence which can be reassembled using the codification of karana 25 (K25) in the list given by Vatsyayan in her work about the Sarangapani temple (Vatsyayan 1983b, 65). Wahyudi interpreted the short movement sequence - the exact height of the bent leg in relation to the hip, the foot, neither pointed nor flexed, the small path of the arm, the position of the hand at the end of the sequence and the degree of flexion in the wrist: all these were decided by him. His interpretation was then used by the LifeForms animator. Below readers can view and manipulate the LifeForms animation and also a video-clip of the animation in QuickTime. A photo of relief P49 and a video-clip of Wahyudi’s interpretation in the studio (also in QuickTime) further illustrate the process.
Photo: relief P49
Wahyudi dancing P49 *MP4 File 1.7mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
LifeForms animation *3.4mg download - LifeForms 0.4 required for download from Credo Interactive
video-clip of LifeForms animation *MP4 File 1.6mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
Overall it can be said that in the reconstitution of the dance units the archaeologist/dancer is the subject, engaged in exploring her own physicality and materiality, journeying through her own body, experiencing herself and her movements as an artefact and re-embodying her own individuality through the movement reconstitution – her own peculiarities as a living, moving body. She experiences the partitioning and ‘dismembering’ of her own body and its immediate reconstitution. The segmentation of a dance body cannot be separated from its re- embodiment – the two occur simultaneously. The fragmentation transmutes into a reassemblage, an archaeological process inscribed in corporeality, a coordinated performance of every segment, now re-joined into a whole, yet able to move, to a greater or lesser extent, separately, at will – head, neck, torso, sides, hands, waist, thighs, shanks, feet and even smaller movements of fingers, toes, and parts of the face.
Performing Prambanan as a virtual site
The LifeForms animations paved the way for a recontextualisation of the dance units, within an interactive and networked interpretation of heritage and its consumption, focused on the temple site. The new project had very ambitious aims. The temple complex would be reconstituted in cyberspace. The dance units would be viewed as an integral part of the temple site and be part of the way the site is experienced by visitors today, in the context of a multi media exploration of the site aimed at the visitors and at a diversity of internet users, specialists and non-specialists.
Animating the dance units of the Prambanan reliefs therefore led to rethinking Prambanan as a virtual site (9) using new technologies to help to break the divide between the experts and the general public, giving access to depth, and empowering alternative perspectives. A virtual reconstitution of the site was planned which would allow a virtual exploration of the entire complex using QuickTimeVR images.
In conceiving such an interdisciplinary endeavour, an archaeological, architectural and art historical interpretation of the site were intertwined with an interpretation of the dance associated with it. The emphasis was on allowing the users to explore links and connections, turning the virtual site into a research tool, to articulate alternative views and engendering an overlayered ‘choreography’, an overall interactive, highly individual ‘performance’ of the site devised by users themselves.
The computer user would thus be able to travel through the temple complex exploring it from the ground as well as through an interactive map. Users would be provided with a range of choices, giving them the opportunity to manipulate the complex, locating it in its own landscape, allowing a diversity of interpretations, using hypertextuality for an intertextual analysis (10).
The Prambanan complex is today associated with dance performance as it provides a performance venue for the Ramayana ballets, which re-enact the Rama story seen in the narrative reliefs of the main temples of the complex and which began to be choreographed in the late 1960s. The Ramayana ballet is a modern ‘ritual of heritage’, a term I use to denote what occurs when the site is re-appropriated by government/public agencies and used to affirm a continuity with an ancient glorious past, through specially commissioned choreographed performances (Lopez y Royo 2002). As commissioned public art, such forms reflect the nation’s self-image and reconstitute the past to suit contemporary needs. Though principally aimed at tourist consumption of the site, dance becomes here an important metaphor for how heritage is imagined and a ritual expression of this imagining.
Photo: Ramayana ballet, Prambanan
Our project allowed the visitor/computer user to reconnect with the dance past of the temple site through a different route. Supplied with information about the reliefs, the computer user would be stimulated to conjecture different uses of dance in the context of the temple complex activities and to choreograph such dances in a virtual space. For example, the presence of the reliefs around the main temple points to a possible role for dance in the ancient rituals of the complex, a role that is consciously reflected in the contemporary ‘ritual’ performance of the ballet. The original positioning of the reliefs around the outer balustrade of the main temple is no longer known because the reliefs have been moved around in the course of several restoration attempts but it has consistently been suggested that it would have followed some kind of choreographic arrangement (OD 1948; Iyer 1997, 23-31). On the basis of this information, through an interactive animation of the dance units of the reliefs, users could provide their own choreographic input, manipulating the relief sequences, using an imaginative approach anchored in disciplinary knowledge. The animation would also enable users to visualise and experience kinetically the dance vocabulary of the reliefs, no longer in use in the context of present day traditions of Javanese dance.
The animations were no longer done manually but were obtained by using motion capture, a technology which allows the movements of a living body to be processed as data by a computer. The movements are captured through sensors, attached to the joints of different body parts. Javanese dancer Mugiyono Kasido, also classically trained, but more active as a contemporary solo performer, was thus captured while performing the movements. The data was then processed and an animator worked on a 3D scan of a plaster model of the main figure of relief P2.
Photo: model for animation (Eduardo Carrillo)
The motion captured data could drive a simulated figure on the computer, where images could be merged, connected, re-sequenced, and mapped to the anatomy obtained with the modelling software. This model was given the motions captured from the dancer. The movement data ‘embodied’ by the animation thus became equivalent as far as possible to that of the moving human body.
Photo: Mugiyono readied for motion capture, Southampton
Motion capture of Mugiyono's perfomance of sequences from Prambanan *MP4 File 5.1mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
The animation had the potential of being referred to for actual re-embodiment of the movement by another human body (allowing an interactive ‘virtual teacher’). A further feature of the animation is that the movement data could also undergo further analysis of a quantitative and qualitative nature when mapped on to the computer model, depending on whether one can avail of the expertise of a biomechanist. Altogether, twenty dance units were animated in this fashion.
Simultaneously, an architectural model of the temple was prepared at the National University of Singapore, based on the maps and drawings supplied by the Prambanan archaeological office. This was complemented by the archaeological analysis of the complex and work on the narrative reliefs on the inner side of the balustrade of the temples (Ramayana and Kresnayana) and their relationship to the dance reliefs on the exterior of candi Siwa. A website was created in 2002 and much material has been uploaded to enable the virtual exploration of the site, though the website is no longer being updated, as the project had only a two year lifetime. The website has suitably identified links and users can create their own individual pathway to Prambanan, adding their own links on their individual computers.
Embodying the site: homology and isomorphic analogy
Re-embodying the reconstituted Prambanan dance units is itself a ‘site embodiment’ (11). The embodiment is homological. In reconstituting the units a new incorporeal dance body is created from segments and fragments of movement, an incorporeal body which is re-embodied, coinciding with a living human body. For convenience, I have called this incorporeal dance body the ‘Prambanan dance body’. This is structurally homologous with the architectural structure of the complex; it coincides with the ‘body’ of the main temple (12).
Prambanan, and its main temple in particular, dedicated to the god Siva, follows a classic Hindu temple model (Hardy 1995; Indorf 2002; Nanda 2001; Indorf, Nanda and Wong 2002). The reference to a temple ‘body’ is common in the Sanskrit architectural literature from India, which conceive of the temple as a replica of a human body naming its parts after bodily parts (Chakrabarti 1999). These architectural texts prescribe that before a temple is built a cosmic diagram should be traced on the ground - and it is very likely that such prescriptions and rituals were also known in Hindu Java. The diagram corresponds to the body of a primeval giant who is sacrificed to ensure prosperity and auspiciousness – in Hindu belief this symbolises the unity of macrocosm and microcosm, the human body corresponding to the universe. In this scheme of things, the temple is identified with the body of the deity and is simultaneously perceived as the deity’s abode. The names of the different parts of a Hindu temple correspond to body parts – thus there is a neck of the temple, shoulders etc. The correspondence of body and temple is meticulously charted down to identifying the power centres of the human body (in Hindu belief a body is conceived as a body-mind continuum with an outer, gross body and an inner, subtle body), known as chakras in yogic meditative practice (Zarrilli 1998, 123-153), with physical centre points along the vertical axis of the temple body, which are specially marked on the temple exterior.
Photo: chakras (courtesy: A.Hardy)
This could provide a fitting conceptual background to construct a correlation of body and site. However, tempting though it might be to fall back on Hindu metaphysics to sustain, conceptually, the body/site correspondence, this is not the route I will be taking, limiting myself to indicating it as a possible interpretive choice. I am pursuing instead a phenomenological exploration of the site, through the body, inscribing the spatio-temporal structures of dance into architecture, and conversely, of architecture into dance. Charting a correspondence based on the exact equivalence of temple, body parts and dance units, searching for hidden meanings, with reference to imagined temple activities and religious ideas, would be wholly arbitrary and would not serve my purpose. Contrary to false notions of movement signification, of wide currency, applied to Asian dance forms in particular, there are no intrinsic meanings in dance movements; the meanings are contextual and dependent on interpretation. The correlation I am proposing is built entirely on dynamic architectural principles. It is in the patterns of movement expressed by the temple architecture that the correspondence of the temple site with the dance body is found and thus experienced, written-through-the -body.
The idea of movement in architecture has already been widely explored. Yuddell writes, for example, that “all architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction. It is one partner in a dialogue with the body” (Yuddell 1977, 59). At Prambanan we need to work with the peculiarities of its form, which are articulated in a specific architectural idiom. Prambanan, as said earlier, adheres to a classic Hindu temple model. Two cardinal axes (longitudinal and transverse) crossing at right angles orientate the ground plan, and are intersected by diagonal axes through the corners of the sanctum and through the exterior corners, throughout the height of the temple body. At the centre there is a vertical axis which links the sanctum with the finial at the top. The superstructure – the body of the temple - conveys a centrifugal, downward movement , which starts from the finial and emerges and expands outwards in the cardinal directions. (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002).
Drawing: Centrifugal movement in superstructure (drawing by A. Hardy)
The axiality of a dance body is immediately recognised as being vertical, for in practice dance cannot exist without being in a body: its primary axiality thus depends on the axiality of the human body, subject to the laws of gravity. A dance body can be visualised as being surrounded by a space bubble, a kinesphere
the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot, which we shall call the stance (Laban 1966,10)
or, as Vatsyayan explains - transferring to dance two important concepts which underpin the architectural geometry of the Hindu temple - the dance body is surrounded by a circle circumscribed within a square (Vatsyayan 1983a, 52-53; 114) (13). Boner has attempted to explain these dynamics translating their geometry into the vivid image of an indissoluble connection to a polarity from which nothing can escape:
the movements from the centre are collected by the circumference and reversed towards the centre, or an unending movement may arise and flow around the circumference, held together by the centre (Boner, quoted in Nanda 2001, 55).
…What underlies the square, a motif constantly repeated in the architectural patterns, is the circle; thus every square manifests the circle in the cardinal directions, with the circle representing , symbolically, the entire cosmos (Nanda 2001,56).
In parallel, the dance body can be divided into planes around its longitudinal and transverse axes (the head; the torso; the hip; the knees, the feet or the upper right, lower right etc); broken up into smaller parts, along its axes, the movements are isolated and individually articulated. In architectural terms this corresponds to the segmenting of the aedicular structure: the aedicule is a self contained shrine-image, made up of base, wall, and a superstructure with a finial, possessed of axiality and bilateral symmetry, which through a process of proliferation, emergence and expansion, makes up the superstructure (Hardy 1995). The animation below, devised in 2003 by Hardy and his team at PRASADA and colleagues from Art and Design at De Montfort University shows this process.
Dance Animation * 103mb download. To view this file download Bink Carbon Player from RADGAME TOOLS
Conceptually, an aedicule is equivalent to a dance unit: the structure of an aedicule is matched by that of the dance unit with its stance, movement of the lower body and movement of the upper body; embodiment is presupposed, which gives it axiality, and movement segmentation and co-ordination is involved. Both aedicule and dance unit combine with other aedicules or other dance units to create a larger whole: a section of a building and then a building in the case of aedicules; dance phrases which make up a choreography in the case of dance units. Thus at Prambanan, the aedicules of the main temple are equivalent to the dance units of its dance reliefs.
In both aedicule and dance unit the movement originates at a single point in relation to a vertical axis. In the dance body the point of origin is the navel, the mid-point of a circular diagram positioned frontally and vertically, and divided into four quarters by vertical and horizontal axes passing through the navel. In the temple the axiality is similar, but articulated differently:the circular diagram is horizontal, aligned with the four cardinal directions, and three-dimensional, with a vertical axis which rises from the intersection of the cardinal axes, at the level of the sanctum, up to the top of the temple body (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002). On the basis of these correlations, the embodiment of the site occurs therefore through the embodiment of the dance units, at the level of abstract dynamic patterns. These when expressed through bodily means become visibly dynamic and unfold in a spatio-temporal continuum. The dynamism in architecture is conceptual; through dance it becomes physically embodied and it is physically articulated.
Photo: The lines drawn across the figure show the navel as mid-point (drawing by Upali Nanda)
Taking the aedicule as his module, Adam Hardy identifies the dynamic attributes of a Hindu temple as “projection, staggering (multiple projection), splitting, bursting of boundaries, progressive multiplication and expanding repetition” (Hardy 1995,21). In dance terms, if we take the standing posture, with the weight equally spread on both feet, as the basic mode - this is seen on the main temple in the reliefs showing three figures in a standing posture - we see that from this position
the dancer projects her limbs, thereupon she staggers the body parts in order to connote movement, this can be seen in terms of the splitting of the whole body and bursting its static boundaries. While this is in terms of actual physical movement in dance, it is in terms of interpretation of the visible attributes in architecture. (Nanda 2001,61; emphasis mine).
The dancer’s actions can happen in any of the body planes indicated earlier. To visualise these planes we have to see the body as surrounded by its space bubble, in which we can draw the intersecting axes; these axes correspond with the longitudinal, transverse and diagonal axes of the aedicule, the entire superstructure being made up of emerging and expanding aedicules. The archaeologist/dancer therefore embodies the site through an ‘isomorphic analogy’ (14) of dance and architecture, seen in the parallelism of the dance units with the aedicular units of the superstructure.
The concept of ‘isomorphic analogy’ is used in the cognitive sciences: in analogy making, first an analogous situation (the source) is ‘retrieved’, then a correspondence between elements is found and the elements are mapped onto one another and finally the analogy is applied i.e. to understand a surrounding reality. The analogy is said to be isomorphic if the mapping is structurally consistent (Nanda 2001,7, Holyoak and Thagard 1995, Eliasmith and Thagard 2001). Analogic isomorphism allows us to study structure in different contexts through a process of translation: thus through isomorphism we can understand the larger, dynamic architectural structure of the Prambanan site by focusing on the dynamic structure of the dance reliefs, which we can embody. At Prambanan dance is contained, architecturally, in the inherent dynamism of the temple structure and is projected on the surface of the main temple structure through the dance reliefs, themselves an architectural device. Re-embodying the dance units is thus equivalent to re-embodying the architectural dynamics of the site and the temple complex itself. The site is thus ‘embodied’ and from this moment, it is choreographed (15).
Photo: Mugiyono Kasido in his Prambanan inspired work Mencari Mata Candi (Hari Sinthu, courtesy MugiDance)
Video-clip of ''Mencari'' performed at Sukuh, Central Java, in August 2004 *MP4 File 4.6mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
To put it another way, through my bodily engagement with the Prambanan site, I am able to re-position myself and subvert a discourse which consistently elides the physicality and the intelligence of the body in disciplinary domains – such as archaeology - which are not immediately identifiable as ‘bodily’ – such as dance. I am arguing against the persistent notion of a mind/body split through what in my terms I describe as an embodied and performative archaeology – I am aware here that the performative is, according to Pearson “an in between space of contestation and change” ( Pearson and Shanks 2001,14-15) but I am comfortable with this ambiguity and embrace it in my practice, for my intervention at Prambanan is itself an encounter at the edge, "in the space between performer and spectator" (Pearson and Shanks 2001,15). Through a dance, whose movement cadences I am reconstituting, re-embodying the movement segments and somatising them, I am embodying a site by homology, simultaneously engaging in the act of choreographing the archaeological process – in other words, choreographing archaeology by translating it into bodily writing.
The dance past, in the form of reconstituted, re-embodied movements, is dynamically projected - danced - in the present, in a trajectory of change: in this process my own body, through the architectural homology, becomes the site, and the site in turn coincides with my own body. Throughout this process my body is an artefact, but it never loses its lived identity, its ‘embodied experience’ – for I cannot disembody myself. In this further sense, engaging through dance with the archaeological site means that the site itself is breathed life into and is activated by the act of dancing.
An approach to archaeology through the dance experience
Throughout this chapter, I have discussed an approach to a site involving the body and a lived experience of the site as dance, as choreography. I inscribe my bodily engagement with Prambanan within the transdisciplinary theoretical debates surrounding the body and corporeality (16). Archaeologists, through their writings of the past decade dealing with accounts of the body experience and embodiment, have been active participants in this dialogue, often adopting contrasting positions (Thomas 1991,1993; Yates 1993; Tilley 1994; 1999; Conkey et al 1997; Snyder 1998; Rautnam 2000; Meskell 2000; Sweeney and Hodder 2002; Hamilakis et al 2002).
The debates surrounding embodiment and subjectivity and the embodiment of space (Grosz 2000; Briginshaw 2001); body knowledge and knowing through the body (Fraleigh and Hanstein 1999; Mertz 2002); the archaeology and performance interface (Lopez y Royo 2002c; Shanks 2002; 2003) and the disciplinary blurring of archaeology and theatre in relation to archaeological praxis (Pearson and Shanks 2001;Pearson 2002) are also equally relevant.
An engagement with the Prambanan dance reliefs is significant in terms of dance performance, here to be seen as an embodied practice inscribed in a broader discourse of dance reconstruction (H. Thomas 2004), and thus involving issues of ‘authenticity’, of dance heritage, definitions of ‘technique’ and issues of classification. I have eschewed a discussion of ritual practices involving dance, even though, and very arguably so, some would regard it as obligatory in view of the fact that the site in question is an ancient Hindu temple and as such it must have been the stage for some kind of ritual dancing. I am not disputing this may have been the case, but my concern is not to re-imagine a ritual dance of the past . This is a somewhat restrictive interpretation of archaeochoreological reconstruction.
What I have instead attempted to address is how, through an interaction with the site lived as an embodied experience of its spatio-temporal structure, reflected in the spatio-temporal structure of its dance reliefs, the site can be apprehended , its spatiality and its memory interpreted, through the fluidity of body movements. I see the ‘monumental choreography’ of Neolithic archaeologists , despite those criticisms of it as not having “any reference to corporeal, lived or individual identity” (Meskell 2000,16) converging with my bodily interpretation of the monumentality of Prambanan. The dancer/archaeologist’s and the walking archaeologist’s body – the archaeologist/flâneur - has a lived identity : the architecture, in both instances, is seen in relation to the living moving body, activated by it, as the living body interacts with the choreographic memory of the site.
Prambanan is situated within a ‘sacred lanscape’, aligned with other temple sites in the Central Javanese region, their architectures in a discursive interaction, the sites pullulating with bodies of the present, in semiosis with the traces of bodies of the past, in their landscape memory. Far from proposing a choreography of disembodiment, I am suggesting an exploration in which the choreography of the site – of the sites - is a lived experience of the body as subject, present in the phenomenon - and in describing this lived experience, the structure of consciousness is brought out. In other words, I am proposing a phenomenological approach to archaeology and the study of material culture which draws on ‘body-centred endeavours’ - such as dance making - “as practices…with their own capacity to reflect critically on themselves….a form of theorising , one that informs and is informed by instantiations of bodily significance” (Leigh Foster 1995,15-16).
Forward to: 6. RePresenting dance: Plastic Jungle 1983 and 2004
Return to 4. Dance: cross-cultural representation
AL: Prambanan was badly affected by the earthquake of 27/05/06. Candi Brahma's balustrade has partly collapsed and carvings have been damaged. The photographs in this ebook show Prambanan before the earthquake, except for the one below, taken in August 2006.
