(1) However, Michael Aung-Thwin, among others, has questioned this widespread use of Euro-American art historical labels such as ‘classical’ in relation to the Southeast Asian past (Aung-Thwin 1995).

(2) The first of these projects was my own independent study of the site and of its dance reliefs from 1992 to 1995, an extension of my doctoral work; the second project was at the Dance Studies department of the University of Surrey, Guildford from 1999 to 2000, working together with Professor Janet Lansdale, Jean Johnson Jones, Vesna Milanovic and Didik Bambang Wahyudi; and the third project was a collaboration of the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, where I was based, the Architecture Department and Southeast Asian Studies Program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta in 2000 –2002. Participants of this last project were Dr Pinna Indorf, Dr John Miksic, Professor Dr Edi Sedyawati, computer and animation expert Terry Braun of Braunarts, animator Eduardo Carrillo, NUS architectural students Upali Nanda and Swati Reddy and Javanese dancer Mugiyono Kasido. A website for a virtual exploration of Prambanan was set up in 2002. Financial support from the Getty Research Program is gratefully acknowledged.

(3) Throughout this chapter I use the term ‘dance body’ as distinct from living body: the dance body is here understood to be an incorporeal model, fluidly constructed around the actions of dance technique, which isolates tiny movements of each body part and requires their synchronised execution. In practice, in order to become a real moving body, the dance body needs to be embodied, changing from disembodied abstraction to embodied corporeality through repetition of actions, which change and reshape the living body, such as posture, rotation angle in the joints, flexibility, mass etc.

(4) I deem it necessary to point out, at this juncture, that I distance myself from those views, which I earlier endorsed, of Prambanan and Indian dance as historically intertwined, thus regarding dance reliefs as representations of an obsolete Indian or Indo-Javanese dance technique. Here I am emphasising the value of the Indian codifications as an analytical tool in a cross-cultural context, regardless of the question of whether Indian dance was known in Indonesia and how knowledge of it was diffused or to what extent Indian dance influenced the growth of Javanese dance (Sedyawati 1981,1982). Whether the Prambanan dance units are an obsolete, Indian or Indian- derived body movement technique is an issue which remains extraneous and of little consequence to this discussion.

(5) This is of course an interpretive choice. The principle of the shortest route is helpful and appropriate to the ‘thinking small’ methodology adopted in this project. The point is not to reconstruct an ‘authentic’ dance unit but, more simply, to engage in re-creating a plausible one.

(6) New York based Ballet de Trockadero de Monte Carlo by having men performing on pointe and in drags have engaged in a choreographic satire of the ballet world and its conventions. Audiences, however, still marvel at the fact that these men can credibly dance as ballerinas.

(7) Meduri has challenged ethno-centric readings of masculinity and femininity of Asian Indian performance by positing the Indian classical performer as a “perhapser” in her words “ a self-styled magician playing at everything without inhabiting any one space exclusively” (Meduri 1992,99). In doing so, Meduri subverts the over-determination of the male gaze theorised by certain western feminist critiques , suggesting instead an “episteme of play” which engenders an alternative, and more empowering, narrative by restituting agency to the (female) performer.

(8) P2, P3 etc are the names given to the reliefs, following their sequential order which begins on the eastern side of the temple. The P stands for Prambanan

(9) This was envisaged as being on the web and later also as a CD-Rom. The CD-Rom idea had to be eventually abandoned due to causes beyond our control.

(10) Hypertextuality is of necessity set within fixed parameters and choices are finite, whereas intertextual analysis has virtually no boundaries. Nevertheless, within the given multiplicity of choices, users could use an intertextual approach. The hypertextuality /intertextuality connection, in the context of Dance Studies analysis has recently being explored by Janet Lansdale as part of a research project at the University of Surrey entitled Decentering the dance text: an exploration of the interface between intertextuality and hypertextuality.

(11) I have worked with Professor Adam Hardy, Director of PRASADA, an architectural research unit earlier at De Montfort University, Leicester, now at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff on this dance/architecture relationship, complementing the dance/rhythm/architecture investigation carried out by Upali Nanda, a NUS post-graduate student of architecture employed by the Getty Prambanan project as researcher, under the supervision of Dr Pinna Indorf. The portion of the project which I developed with Hardy later became an independent project on dance and the architecture of the Hindu temple, with a focus on the temples of India, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board at Roehampton and De Montfort in 2002-2003 with a Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts. Additional contributions to this project were given by dancer Vena Ramphal and musician M. Balachander. This entire section of the paper draws on the joint work done with Hardy and his students, especially Jhilmil Kishore and Pranali Parekh and on the work done by Nanda and Indorf. See also the DanceTemple website, set up for this project.

(12) Homology and co-homology are concepts developed in algebraic topology and used extensively by Lacan i.e. the Mobius strip who saw a connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation (Lacan 1970). See also Slavoj Zizek 1991.

(13) I am aware that Laban is a historically controversial figure because of his ambiguous links with Nazism. His notion of ‘dance as a living space’ was inspired by Haushofer ‘s Lebensraum, ‘life space’,which the Nazis used to justify their politics of occupation (Kant 2002, 56- 61). I feel obliged to clarify that my reference to Laban ‘s conceptualisations of the dance space does not constitute an endorsement of Nazi policies.

(14) Both the homology of algebraic topology, made popular in the social sciences by Lacan and the isomorphic analogy of the cognitive sciences, though somewhat different in conceptualization, in practice overlap and in this specific instance provide a means to understand the correlation of dance and temple. Nanda, in the work on Prambanan done as part of the Getty project, has utilised the concept of ‘isomorphic analogy’ , whereas I have invoked a Lacanian homology :we are both referring to the same processes but having recourse to a different set of metaphors. Isomorphism is of course a defining characteristic of homology.

(15) Mugiyono Kasido, after participating in the Prambanan project, went on to map this process of choreographing Prambanan in his work Mencari Mata Candi (2003) (In Search of the Temple Eye), first presented in Brussels at the Kunsten Festival des Arts in May 2003. He recently danced it in Paris, in January 2006, at the Centre National de la Danse and received acclaim for it in the French press. Though Mencari is wholly inspired by Prambanan, Mugiyono has adapted it and performed it at candi Sukuh on 17th August 2004.

(16) Bourdieu 1993; Grosz 1994,1995; Butler 1993; Leigh Foster 1995 are just a few outstanding names among the contributors to this discourse, with a literature that is being constantly augmented with interventions from a variety of situated disciplinary knowledges.

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