6. RePresenting dance: Plastic Jungle 1983 and 2004

(1) However the 1997 “Preservation Politics” dance conference at the University of Surrey Roehampton had as its subtitle “Dance revived, reconstructed, remade”

(2) An excellent discussion of Sardono’s work is given by Murgiyanto in his doctoral thesis. Sal Murgiyanto, Moving between Unity and Diversity. Four Indonesian choreographers. Unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 1991

(3) There are now two versions of this article available on the internet, published in 2001 and in 2002 respectively. The one published in 2002 is now at Memory, http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeology-performance/Arch_HomeFS.html

(4) These are genres of Javanese court dance, usually performed by female dancers.

(5) Sardono W. Kusumo, e-mail communication, March 20, 2002.

(6) An account of Sardono’s work in Bali can be found in Diyah R. Larasati, "Kecak Rina, Sardono W. Kusumo dan ARMA (Kerja Kreatif Seniman Tradisional dan Modern)" Pertunjukan Perjalanan VIII 1997, pp. 47-56.

(7) A German painter who lived in Bali in the 1930s and contributed to the birth of modern Balinese painting, cfr. Michael Hitchcock, Bali the Imaginary Museum. The Photographs of Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete (Oxford University Press, 1995).

(8) Personal communication, 2002.

(9) Sardono Dance Theater, Passage through the Gong (United States tour brochure, 1996).

(10) Sardono no longer lives in Solo, having returned to Jakarta as rector of the Institut Kesenian Jakarta (the Jakarta Institute of the Arts) but the Kemlayan studio is in use by his students and is often hired at low cost by Solonese performers for rehearsals. It also acts as an arts centre, with guest artists residencies and performances.

(11) This ebook is an example of re-write, as a number of its chapters has previously appeared as self –contained essays in different journals; moreover, it continues to be rewritten every time I feel that a particular paragraph (or paragraphs) or section is, for whatever reason, unsatisfactory – unlike conventional books, fixed on paper once they are printed, an e-book can continue to grow and change. The purpose of each re-write is, evidently, to recontextualise the ideas already expressed in any of the earlier versions, on paper or online (since January 2006). However, the Change button facility which can be seen on the lefthand side of the webpage allows readers to keep track of the process of writing, noting each time what has been changed.

(12) In Japanese literature a haibun is a combination of prose and haiku poetry. As a literary form, whose greatest exponent was the poet Basho, the haibun has been influential in English contemporary writing, adopted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick among others.

(13) This is of course not applicable to dance notators, especially active in Europe and America and often employed by dance companies to notate choreographies with a view to instigate, at some future time, faithful revivals.

(14) Undoubtedly, the modernist notion of copyright and protection of intellectual property are the reason why ownership of choreographic works and issues of originality and authenticity of any such material are of great importance, as also the question of who has the right to make changes to the works. Legal battles have been fought over the right to perform specific works and how, the Martha Graham Company versus Protas 2002 trial being a case in point.

(15) The four year Stanford/Essex/University College London Presence project is in the process of exploring what presence and the performance of presence might be. Significantly, one of the questions the project asks is how the live and present event can be documented and archived.

(16) Evidently this does not apply to the Metamedia lab projects (among which is this ebook), as a quick look at the Metamedia mission statement will reveal.

(17) These observations reconnect to a well known philosophical debate pertaining to the ontology of the dance work, prompted by Goodman’s distinction between art which is “autographic” (such as sculpture and painting, where there is only one instance of the work) and art which is “allographic” (such as music and dance, potentially reproducible on the basis of their notation, whith each reproduction as authentic as the other) (Goodman 1976; but cfr. Margolis 1981 for his critique of Goodman). Peggy Phelan's now famous statement about the ontology of performance - performance’s only life is in the present…{it} cannot participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance (Phelan 1993, 146) - has been taken tout court to be an opposition to documentation; but it seems fairer to say that it simply reiterates that performance is something other than its representation. I would like to link this understanding of (dance) performance to choreographer’s Merce Cunningham’s statement that the dance does not exist without the dancer, that the dance exists in the flesh (Cunningham 1980, 27): it is precisely this that makes each dance performance unique. Sanchez-Colberg has further commented on the “t/here-ness” of the body and its relationship to possible representations in her work “Now we are no longer…” and the ensuing “Futur/perfekt” whose aim was to “ discuss, expand , extend recent debates in how the body ‘matters’ (as a verb) in performance and how the body matter (as a concrete being) affects that process” (Sanchez-Coldberg 2002, 166-168).

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