Universalism
Dance analysis involves a multiplicity of approaches and is at the core of dance studies as a discipline, in its effort to understand and discuss the dancing body, the choreography, the dance performance, the dancers, the dance audience, the dance institutions: in short dance as an aesthetic, social, cultural and political practice. However it would be more appropriate to talk of analyses rather than analysis. The analyses of dance prevalent in contemporary dance studies seem to be actively engaged in an interdisciplinary dialogue involving critical theory, situating dance within a broader framework that mobilises perspectives on thematic studies of postcolonial identity, multiculturalism, diasporic movements, nationalism, and globalization, and a theory of embodiment which draws on phenomenological approaches (Reeve 1998).
This granted, we also know that in a narrower sense dance analysis is dance movement analysis, and this is what this chapter will focus upon: the discussion will not be extended here to a consideration of the entirety of strategies adopted in a broader analysis of the choreography of a dance piece, the process that led to its making and its broader performance context, though this will not be altogether disregarded. These strategies work intertextually (and hypertextually), on the basis of personal responses, with the overall semantics of the work, thus they do include an analysis of movement but they also go beyond it, establishing cultural and theoretical connections (Miles-Board, Carr, Lansdale, Deveril, Hall 2003, 5). Yet it is precisely the analysis of movement, within this overall endeavour, which can become problematic, for a lot is at stake in carrying it out.
Desmond sees dance movement analysis as a core analytic literacy in dance scholarship, aimed at maintaining the autonomy of dance studies methodologies (1993-94, 58). So far so good, no one could take exception to this. Analytical approaches, however, tend to remain inscribed in an objective formalism, implicitly accepting a duality of mind and body, though the emergence of somatic studies as an academic discipline has provided a challenge to the dominant Cartesian paradigm and its consequent objectification of the body ( Eddy 2002).
By and large, formalist approaches carry with them a certain ambiguity. They tend to proceed on the assumption that analysis of movement should be anatomically based to guarantee objectivity, an assumption that is contained in some of the interpretive models adopted, such as Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), so named from Rudolf Laban who first conceived of it in the 1930s. More recently, Preston –Dunlop and Sanchez-Colberg (2002) have proposed a reformulation of choreology, the scholarly study of dance, beyond the confines of Rudolf Laban’s research, drawing on methodologies derived from practice and from culture studies and merging them with those pioneered by Laban. Their aim is to synthesise a formalist approach with a context-focused one, as already proposed by Jordan and Thomas (1994). Nevertheless, their claims to move beyond Laban do not seem to materialise (Ness 2004,175) as the proposed interrelationship remains inscribed within the paradigm of LMA .
Several writers have warned us against the danger of reifying the dancing body by failing to acknowledge its agency and subjectivity and formalist analysis needs to take this into account more explicitly. Scholars such as Bull (1995)(1) and Ness (1992;1996) are sensitive to the issue of a cultural interpretation of space and how this affects movement, yet studies of movement have not sufficiently problematised the recourse to analytical techniques which are not culturally nuanced but are underpinned by an objectifying universalism. Ideas of objectivity and universality should be interrogated.
It is an issue that remains contentious. The analysis of dance movements is intrinsically connected with the issue of dance (and, more broadly, performance) representation and re-presentation, its mediatization (representation through the media) and performance documentation, which rests upon and simultaneously generates an analysis of the performance event. The act of recording, through different media, aims to create a ‘record’ or ‘document’ of performance (inclusive of dance and musical performance) and inevitably transforms it into an artefact of the process of representation, wrenched from its performance sensorium. The question is: how are we to understand conceptually dance (and music) performance and are there appropriate analytical modes of research which do not objectify them?
In considering this question, anthropologist Mark Hobart warns us of the danger of relying on theoretical approaches with a distinctive “western academic genealogy”. Their applicability to other ways of imagining and evaluating performance is questionable, as it continues to resort to western hegemony: “performance is irreducibly open to commentary and analysis by at least two potentially incommensurate frames of reference – those of the participants and local commentators, and those of academic commentators or analysts – the problem becomes one of an unfinalizable dialogue between several parties” (Hobart 2005).
Such issues were discussed at a recent research workshop which was the outcome of a sustained effort on behalf of the AHRC Research Centre for Cross-cultural Music and Dance Performance (2), to engender new methodologies in the analysis of dance and music performance, interrogating western based criteria for analysis and fostering collaboration between Asian and African choreographers and musicians, acknowledged as agents of interpretation, and the Centre’s own researchers, all from diverse backgrounds, in order to bring together different knowledges for them to collide, engage and interact. The Centre uniquely fosters collaborative accounts of the dance and music performance process.
But apart from this commendable work in progress, are there alternative models already available which can counter the universalism of Euro-American analytical systems, particularly in the field of dance movement analysis?
As seen in chapter 2, through their reconstitution, the 108 karanas of the Natyasatra are an embodied text - carefully reassembled from textual descriptions and from visual representations. But karanas are not only reconstituted elements of potentially new dance techniques, they are also categories or codes for analysing a dance and a means to extract its organisational principles (3). The karana-as-dance-codes is an interpretation proposed by Kapila Vatsyayan, who conceived of a model for dance analysis, encompassing a movement analysis but not limited to it, through her meticulous study of Sanskrit texts, and of iconographic representations of dance, feeling that western systems were somewhat inadequate to deal with non-western forms and in particular with Indian dance (4). It is a model which, says O’Shea, “offers a moving body that not only is inscribed within a culture but also plays an active role within that culture” (O’Shea 2000,86), whereas Erdman points out that Vatsyayan’s is “ a paradigm for exploring and understanding dance and dances around the world as an integral part of cultural ideas and values” (Erdman 2000,93). Vatsyayan’s model, in other words, though conceived principally for Indian dance, born out of her dissatisfaction with existing paradigms, has turned into a valuable alternative tool for the analysis of other non-western forms, as will be seen in the course of this chapter.
Vatsyayan takes the idea of dance reconstruction beyond an exclusive understanding of it as movement reconstitution for choreographic reinterpretation and explores the issue of dance representation, taking as her starting point an investigation of how dance can be represented in a static medium, rather than the other way round i.e. how dance frozen in sculpture can be performed. Her analysis implies a bodily engagement with both text and sculpture. Her contribution is therefore of tremendous importance in terms of dance scholarship, as it opens up new spaces. Vatsyayan relies on language as the instrument of her analysis, privileging verbal description of movement. In Euro-American dance studies verbal description and the use of poetic imagery to describe a dance movement has often been viewed, for the purpose of movement analysis as "unscientific…lacking objectivity…ambiguous… an impediment to international communication…" (Hutchinson Guest 1984, 2).
But Ness has very eloquently defended linguistic accounts, in view of their immediate accessibility and their potential “to override whatever negative cultural biases might be at work, inhibiting the reader’s interpretive process” (Ness 1992, 238). The neutrality and objectivity of LMA and Laban notation have been invoked to counter the subjectivity of verbal descriptions. But the conception of the body used in notation systems such as Laban notation, and its parallel system of movement analysis, LMA, corresponds to that of “a modernist aesthetic…{by which} the body attained a new autonomous existence as a collection of physical facts” (Leigh Foster 1995,15).
Thus if we conceive of choreography as theory and, in Leigh Foster’s terms, as “bodily writing”, qualitative description is no longer condemnable – it becomes instead a recognition of body agency (5):
The act of translating physical endeavours into verbal description of them entails first, a recognition of their distinctiveness, and then a series of tactical decisions that draw the moved and the written into an interdisciplinary parlance. Utilising this parlance , the descriptive text can be fashioned so as to adhere to the moved example (Leigh Foster 1995,16).
If we take the karana-as-code as a conceptual kinetic unit (or dance movement unit), it becomes a means for writing dance, providing the dancer and the dance scholar with a tool for analysing the movement patterns of a dance form, and allowing an account of the dancing body which does not rely on a superimposed analytical model but is constituted by the form itself. In this sense, karanas double up as a choreographic device. They can give the choreographer a unique tool to enable the choreographic process, by allowing him/her to divide the choreographic idea into smaller, re-combinable movement segments. This is quite distinct and wholly separate from reconstructing the 108 karanas of the Natyasastra as movement vocabulary which can augment existing dance techniques. Karanas as conceptual kinetic units do not specifically correspond to any of these 108 karanas in particular.
An important difference between this and other systems, is that a karana based analysis does not objectify the body, separating it from the subject. In the discussion of karanas and of the dancing body which we read about in the Natyasastra we get a clear sense of the dancing body as subject: the fragmented body parts are themselves endowed with agency and ontological status, as instruments of expressivity and channels for emotion, which the text carefully discusses when indicating the use of specific body parts in the various types of abhinaya - in the Natyasastra the dancing body is also the acting body and the initial distinction between them becomes, in the course of the discussion, totally blurred (NS, 8;9; 25 and 26).
The use of a western inspired anatomical analysis, which is incapable of taking into account expressivity as embedded in movements, may cause a severely distorted perception of those movements (6): western ideas of anatomical objectivity are not compatible with accounts of the body which emphasise the expressivity of body parts and which seem to go beyond a mind/body scission, positing instead a mind/body /feeling continuum.
Vatsyayan’s dance-codes
How was Vatsyayan’s model arrived at? In the early 1960s Vatsyayan, intrigued by the problem of how movement can be represented in a static medium, began to analyse sculptures from Indian temples depicting dance poses in terms of the smallest portions of movement of each body segment, looking at the posture of the figures as a deviation from a central axis, the erect spine of a standing human body. She increasingly referred to the codifications of movements in the Natyasastra and the subsequent texts which were inspired by or modelled onto it, such as Abhinaya Darpana, Bharatarnava and others (Vatsyayan 1968) to refine her analysis. She eventually devised a methodology for working with “static” movement based on these manuals and on existing representations of movement in the sculpture and painting of the Indian subcontinent (Vatsyayan 1983a;1983b; 1982).
By then the study of Indian sculpture and iconography had fully matured, thanks to the writings, among others, of Kramrisch (1946) and Boner (1962) who had acknowledged a connection between Indian dance and sculpture, recognising the attempt made by ancient artists to represent the body in dance motion. An important contribution to the study of Indian religious sculpture – extending this to Southeast Asian reformulations of Hindu and Buddhist iconography – has been the recognition that Indian sculptors consciously represented yogic postures and yogic breathing (prana) in their depiction of the human body, thus infusing their work with subtle movement even in the absence of any apparent motion (Dehejia and Harnisch 1997). In the Natyasastra, for example, the word recaka, literally referring to breath emission, is used with reference to the ‘subtle’ movements which are part of the performance of a karana. Prana in movement logically translates as flow, thus this has some bearing on the way a frozen movement in sculpture can be translated into performed movement (Coorlawala 2004).
This very concept of breath and subtle energy evoked by the notion of prana is at the core of any analysis of dance which remains focused on kinaesthetic intelligence. One is reminded here of the influential bharatanatyam choreographer Chandralekha whose work Angika (1985) specifically addressed the different approaches to technique in the west and in India and, more broadly, Asia. Chandralekha used bharatanatyam, yoga and martial arts such as kalari payattu to make the point that all three bodily disciplines focus on openness and the breath, rather than muscular manipulation and control (Chatterjea 2005, 200).
Vatsyayan’s methodology was well suited to the dance revivalist programme which was taking place in post-independence India, where references to dance in temple sculpture were increasingly being made to authenticate the antiquity of specific dance forms and dance styles. This, as mentioned in previous chapters, took place in the context of national policies that recognized and classicized distinct regional cultural and artistic identities upon which a pan -Indianness was superimposed, through the use of Sanskritic terminology (7) (Vatsyayan 1988,117) .
Classicism, as we know it from Euro-American art and dance discourses, denotes an aesthetic attitude and an artistic tradition (Lopez y Royo 2003; 2004). The aesthetics of classicism in western art is rooted in European re-imaginings of classical antiquity as a model of perfection. Dance classicism does not pertain only to ballet but is seen in modernist reformulations, interpreted as recognition of the existence of “an impersonal tradition” (Copeland 2004). But what does classical mean when the concept is translated and re-located in a non-western context? Chatterjee has discussed the process of classicization as a process of national cultural formation (Chatterjee 1993). The term classical is superimposed on indigenous systems of classification and applied to artistic forms which are turned into canonical models, bringing into existence, in Foucauldian terms, what was silent or non-existent through external powers. Vatsyayan herself, in her double role as scholar and high ranking government officer at the Ministry of Culture and later, director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, was involved in this process of classicization, for which the Sanskrit texts provided an aesthetic model and a vocabulary.
The Sanskrit texts analyse modes of dance performance which are no longer current. Mandakranta Bose, through her scholarly glossary of this Sanskrit dance terminology, has highlighted the hiatus between these ancient texts and dance practice in post-independence India (Bose 1970; 2001; 2005). However, these systematic textual movement codifications offer an indigenous tool for investigating corporeality and for organising dance, supplying a sophisticated body-centred vocabulary for the articulation of the dance experience. As O’Shea has noted,Vatsyayan, through her reading of the Sanskrit texts, has formulated a notion of dance technique which differs from its Euro-American counterpart, referring to the fundamental organisational principles of a dance which seem to emerge from the dance itself (O’Shea 2000,82).
Elaborating further on this idea of organisational principles, one can describe Vatsyayan’s notion of technique as being centred on units of dance, the karanas, which in Vatsyayan’s reading are first and foremost conceptual dance units, rather than being only obsolete dance movements, and which constitute analytical movement codes in relation to the dance(s) from which they emerge: each dance form, in other words, has its own different and autonomously constituted karanas, and they are its dance units. Vatsyayan was convinced that this system of analysis could stand up to LMA(Vatsyayan 1983a, 56) and be used cross-culturally. Indeed she began this kind of cross-cultural analysis in the context of Southeast Asian dance sculptures from Burma, Champa and Java (Vatsyayan 1977a; 1977b), noting parallelisms and continuities in Southeast Asian dance forms. Through this engagement with the Southeast Asian material, she stimulated a new dance scholarship in Asia, as seen, for example in the work of Indonesian dance scholar Edi Sedyawati (1981; 1982) (8). “The impact of {Vatsyayan’s}rigorous and explicit study of ancient dance theories” writes Malaysian dance and theatre scholar Nor “as well as her analysis of the human body in dance through sculpture have been a powerful impetus for Southeast Asian dance scholars” (Nor 2000,95).
On the basis of the karana nomenclature given in the Natyasastra, Vatsyayan reclassified all the 108 karanas into ten categories, regrouping them as per their distinctive features, following their cadence of movement and stance (Vatsyayan 1968, 99-101). In her subsequent study of the karana reliefs from the Sarangapani temple at Kumbakonan, Vatsyayan devised a new classification. This was based more specifically on the movement of the lower limbs and distribution of weight (Vatsyayan 1983b, 12-18). Vatsyayan’s regroupings make explicit what is implicit in the Natyasastra: if the karanas are categories of units based on a definition of posture, hand and leg movements, then the 108 karanas can generate further karanas based on permutations, thus augmenting the given set of 108 karanas at will. Whereas the Natyasastra makes this principle explicit in connection with the angaharas, Vatsyayan’s sophisticated elaborations draw attention to this systematic generative property of the karanas themselves. This is corroborated by the existence of desi-karanas, described in texts other than the Natyasastra (Bose 1970, 147-164; 1991, 225; Raghavan 1965, 119-128).
Vatsyayan’s conceptualisation of technique through her reading of the Sanskrit textual material has greatly influenced the pedagogic structure of the process of embodiment of Indian classical dance forms, as seen today. The principle of movement segmentation has become part of the learning process (for example in bharatanatyam one begins with adavus, moving on to korvais and tirmanas, and learning to isolate movements produced by different body parts) and this is taken directly from the Sanskrit accounts of the body, mediated, though not exclusively so, by Vatsyayan’s writings.
Karana units and the lègong of Bali
As noted by O’Shea and Erdman, Vatsyayan’s analyses seem to be moving away from the objectivist paradigms of Euro-American formalist dance movement analysis, providing an alternative to it, constituting a complex and multivalent scholarship of the body and of movement. But is this methodology only applicable to Indian dance?
I have attempted to explore an application of Vatsyayan’s theories to a non-Indian form through a preliminary investigation of the Balinese lègong dance (9), looking at how a lègong technique has been formulated and codified since the 1960s and what this means, in terms of the twentieth century global discourse of classicization of dance. The overall research, aiming to study how the Balinese have created an epitome of female grace through lègong dance, which both Balinese and outsiders have used in contrasting ways to essentialize Balineseness ( Lopez y Royo and Pujawati 2003) is still work in progress. Establishing the organisational principles of lègong dance, interpreted as a technique, is one of the research objectives and a phase of the research that is nearing completion.
Photos: Lègong, Peliatan
Lègong has had a complex history, beginning, according to the majority of sources, as a late eighteenth century dance performed by pre-pubescent girls at the court of Sukawati, in Gianyar, for royal consumption (Dibia and Ballinger 2004,76). It has been reported that in the early twentieth century a form of lègong called nandir was danced in Blahbatuh by young boys (Emigh and Hunt 1992, 199), though Hobart places the emergence of lègong in the 1920s, urging us to reconsider the official history of Balinese dance (Hobart 2007). Later, lègong became canonized as the classical dance of Bali in the female mode. Lègong is simultaneously a genre, a series of specific interrelated choreographies, (increasingly so) a dance technique and also the name given to the dancers who perform the roles of prince and princess in the lègong narrative.
Photo: Lègong, 1920s (Courtesy: Leo Haks)
Jennifer Lindsay has explored the notion of the classical in the context of modern Indonesia, especially in relation to Javanese court traditions of dancing and music making (Lindsay 1985; Moro 2005). The adoption of a notion of dance classicism in Indonesia is the outcome of the Dutch-Indonesian colonial encounter and the resulting academic training it engendered and, as elsewhere in Asia, it is linked with the middle classes aspiration to reform, providing an appropriate content for a nationalized cultural identity (Chatterjee 1993, 27). Its impetus was renewed during the Indonesian New Order of Soeharto , during which classicization went hand in hand with an explicit Javanization of Indonesian culture, achieved through increased mass media representation.
In Bali lègong was identified as a Balinese equivalent of dance practices such as bedhaya and serimpi of the courts of Central Java, becoming a tari klasik (classical dance), promoted worldwide. Thus from being a set of local dance practices, lègong was reformulated in the light of its mass mediation, political status within Indonesia, and tourist representation, as synecdochic of Hindu-Balinese culture as a whole and as an ahistorical entity. The dissemination of the dance, through the media in particular, is for local, national and international consumption, and is epitomized by the creation of a classical dance mode(s), for which the dance academies have set a performance standard.
legong.mp4 Opening dance of the condong (maidservant) in lègong
*MP4 File 5.3mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
The transformation of lègong into a tari klasik seems to have been achieved through an overall process of technique systematisation of Balinese dance. In the 1970s and 1980s reports on Balinese dance were compiled at the Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) (formerly Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia or STSI), the Academy of Performing Arts in Denpasar, Bali, supported by the Directorate of Culture in Jakarta. Their purpose was to provide a classification of Balinese dance movements, for pedagogic use, establishing a notion of a unified tari Bali (Balinese dance) to which lègong and other forms would aesthetically conform, yet retaining their individual character. Edi Sedyawati, like Vatsyayan in India, a scholar and a high ranking government officer in charge of a number of research initiatives at a national level, led investigations into Indonesian dancing. But these government-led and government-funded research efforts did not address the specificity of the dancing body, its agency and subjectivity (10).
Among the national Indonesian projects, the Balinese effort in particular became an exercise inscribed in an overall process of codification of Balinese culture (Picard 1996). Rather than discussing the specificity of lègong and other dances, dealing with issues relating to the performers and discussing the impact of colonial appropriation and representation, such studies have been primarily descriptive, emphasising the “spirituality” of Balinese dance, and have tended to focus on the general principles of Balinese dance, differentiating only between a male, a female and a bebancihan, the cross-gender or androgynous dancing mode, objectifying the body and reifying the dance experience. Significantly, the Indonesian reports (laporan) use Sanskritik terms such as mudra to refer to hand movements and gestures but do not engage with aesthetic issues, firmly limiting themselves to listing technical principles. The state funded Academies for Performing Arts have also been quite eager to use Labanotation, strongly encouraged by distinguished performer/academics such as Soedarsono and Madé Bandem, both former rectors of ISI Yogyakarta and STSI Denpasar respectively, in an effort to be scientific, persuaded by Labanotation’s promise of neutrality. Soedarsono has used it in his own writings (Soedarsono 1990) and more recently Suprihono has published a Labanotation score of Klana Topeng, a masked Javanese dance (Suprihono 2000).
In the early 1990s, at the Balinese Academy of Performing Arts in Denpasar, Ketut Rota engaged in a project through which she attempted to analyse the ègong kraton Lasem, the best known of the lègong choreographies, with reference to the Tandavalaksanam of Naidu, Naidu and Pantulu (1936). The choreography was broken up into short segments, indicating positions of the hands and fingers and stances for each choreographic segment, using what the author calls the Tandavalaksanam “notation system” and the drawings in Miguel Covarrubias Island of Bali (1937) to distinguish between different hand gestures and body positions and illustrating each segment with a photo of the dancer taken frontally (Rota 1991, 37). Rota does not explain what the Tandavalaksanam “notation system” is and does not make any specific reference to karanas as units of dance movement. She is conversant with Sedyawati’s writings and with the reports of the Department of Education and Culture, compiled by a team of Balinese dance experts, including Professor I Madé Bandem. Though satisfied that the technique of the dance should be analysed through verbal description and photographs (1991, 65), she regrets the lack of videoing facilities for her project.
Rota’s project is one of the many reports that students at the Academy of Performing Arts are required to submit as a requirement for graduation. But this report is unusual in that the dancer is trying to find a way to articulate verbally a process of movement pattern segmentation which exists in practice as part of the choreographic endeavour, but is never explicated. Rota’s attempted choreographic segmentation is an implicit subdivision into dance units, even though she does not have recourse to any of the discussions about the notion of dance unit. In current lègong accounts, movements are not systematically broken up into units, even though teachers may attempt to isolate some movement clusters to facilitate the learning process, especially when teaching non-Balinese pupils. But this process of segmentation will vary from teacher to teacher and be wholly ad hoc, often involving dance phrases, rather than units. The transmission and embodiment of the dance usually follows the pattern of the student learning to dance the whole piece, copying the movements as performed by the teacher, in a process of embodiment that relies on a bodily interaction, with demonstrations of ‘correctness’ and corrections which are often done through touch, especially in the case of young learners (11).
Sang Ayu.mp4 Sang Ayu teaching young girls in Peliatan, Bali
*MP4 File 4.0mg download (Quicktime 7.0 or later recommended)
Lègong movements are however increasingly being used by Balinese choreographers to create new dances, which are themselves becoming crystallized into genres, such as olèg, panyembrama and others, with variations on the choreographies. Therefore further awareness of how these new dance techniques and new genres are being constituted is needed. The starting point for this kind of investigation is lègong itself and its technique.
Photo: Panyembrama. Ni Madé Pujawati (Hobart)
As part of my research, I engaged in a learning process of embodiment, an important phase in the overall project. Through this process lègong revealed itself as an epistemology instantiated in practice by way of organisation of movements and of the body concepts that pertain to the dance (12). As a result of this experiential engagement with the dance, it has been possible to establish that:
the lègong dance body can be described in terms of medians and deviations from a central median – there is asymmetry in the way the body is held;
the Balinese concept of angkiang, breath, is fundamental to understand how complete mastery over the different body parts is achieved (cf. Hobart 2007) - there is a parallel here between angkiang, the notion of yogic prana and the recaka mentioned in the Natyasastra;
an analysis centred on articulation of the joints is more helpful to make sense of the articulation of lègong movements than one centred on body muscles and their lines, as more usually applied to western dancing (Vatsyayan 1968,27-28);
lègong dancing is based on shifting positions and involves little leg extension, thus there is no continuous covering of space, though it involves walking following an s-shaped path . This walking across the stage is known as the ngumbang movement and it occurs at regular points in the choreography.
One can begin to break up the movements of the dance into self –contained dance units - or karanas, to use the Indian term – which are normally recombined in permutations in lègong choreography. In this kind of analysis, attention is paid to body segments separately and together, as components of the units of movement of the whole body in lègong; once assembled the units are glossed using as far as possible the Balinese indigenous dance terminology already available for Balinese dance genres, through the classifications of the 1970s and 1980s – or one can devise new terms, if preferred, based on the imagery utilised by the dancer to explicate the dance action. To give a specific example, using this karana -based method, one can identify as lègong dance units what are commonly known as agem kanan (right), agem kiri (left), ngegol etc. By agem Balinese dancers normally mean a ‘key posture’ (13) but in practice agem kanan and agem kiri constitute a dance unit respectively, and so does ngegol , in some accounts glossed as a mere ‘movement of the hips’. These are dance units involving movements of the lower and upper limbs, stances, and smaller movements of eyes, hands, wrists and fingers – in other words, they are equivalent to a karana, and are reassembled entirely from within the dance.
It goes without saying that the above mentioned project is not about using Sanskrit nomenclature, nor about identifying the lègong dance units as any of the 108 karanas of the Natyasastra. In using the notion of karana to investigate lègong, its technique can be systematically studied, extracting it from the overall movement patterns of the dance and this is relevant in terms of how the lègong dance body, the dance and the dancer, are inscribed within Balinese culture.
As part of the same project, in keeping with more recent dance scholarship’s historicization of the dancing body, the possible connection of lègong with specific Javano-Balinese textual sources has also been considered, to investigate issues of body materiality and performativity and their relationship with historical and ideological practices, as recorded in such sources. One of these is the Old Javanese (Kawi)(14) Nawanatya. Nawanatya is a book of behaviour and body etiquette – somewhat reminiscent of those Renaissance court manuals from Italy, such as the Book of the Courtier by Baldassar Castiglione. As such, it presents various sets of rules of conduct through which the perfect male courtier (the servant) is moulded. Disciplinary practices (diet, fitness, adornment, posture, mental attitudes) are highlighted throughout the text, which produce the bodies of their concern; primarily male bodies. The female body, the female presence, is marginalised, but is not absent: it is a presence felt in the silent gaps of the text and in the allusions to amorous encounters and to special areas of the palace, clearly inhabited only by women.
The work was made popular by the Dutch philologist Pigeaud who translated excerpts from the text in 1963, linking the work with Majapahit Java. The Majapahit dating is however only an assumption, based on Pigeaud’s authoritative reading. On reflection, Nawanatya is more likely to be a late work recast in the language of Majapahit to lend to it greater authority, using Majapahit court terminology (15). Helen Creese makes this point:
the Balinese courts of Lombok in the mid-eighteenth century …were given Javanese place names. The creation of new courts was also marked by the relocation and recopying of texts designed to encapsulate the earlier moral, social religious and political universe shared with Bali and Java. For this reason the elaborate descriptions of Javanese landscapes and courts in the texts, had their very counterparts in local communities both in Bali itself and in Lombok (Creese 2000, 32-33).
The text is found only in East Bali and there is no reason to doubt that it was a Balinese text composed in Bali/Lombok. There are very few copies in Bali of the original manuscript and the only ones available are all from the Karangasem regency; there are no copies or similar works in Java (16). Nawanatya has been thought to be variously connected with the Indian Natyasastra and to be particularly valuable for an understanding of ancient Javanese performance (17). But the links which have been drawn between Nawanatya and Natyasastra are rather tenuous. Unlike the Natyasastra, Nawanatya does not, for example, provide a classification of dance movements. Its performance vocabulary has a Sanskritic component, as the text is in Kawi language, but this in itself cannot help to identify movement patterns nor indeed performance genres – though in terms of the “India –Java – Bali axis”, to borrow Wright’s phrase (cf.Wright 2002,175) it could be read as providing evidence of some prior knowledge in the Indonesian archipelago of the tradition of the Natyasastra, and its related texts, which also engage in discussions of courtly behaviour (18) .
However, how Nawanatya relates to Indian material is not the issue here. The content of Nawanatya directly impinges on Balinese performance, which seems to have a deep connection with it. In saying this I am not proposing a reading of Nawanatya to provide a new genealogy of Balinese dance and validate the antiquity of lègong in particular. I am aware that lègong is likely to have been totally reinvented in the 20th century. As Hobart comments
The serious study of dance in Bali encounters the problem of how to extricate it from more than a century of European – and now Balinese and Indonesian – fantasy… The idea that dance was ancient, widespread, popular and demotic and the defining feature of Balinese culture is, I submit, largely a western fantasy driven by its own imperatives. Rather, there was, in most European senses of the term, almost no dance in Bali until after conquest and the arrival of tourism in the 1920-30s. European colonialists and tourists expected the natives to dance. And the Balinese obliged their conquerors brilliantly… Retrojection, anachronism, partisan claims, plain invention and simple muddle are the hallmarks of the written history of Balinese dance. Such exercises in naïve realism are quite distinct from the critical interrogation we need and which requires both an understanding of the lived worlds of Balinese at the time and equally of the background, motives and interests of their subsequent commentators (Hobart 2007).
The world evoked by the Nawanatya actors seems to be sufficiently close to the world of gambuh theatrical performance by which it is evoked and thus relevant to the world of baris and lègong dancing, both connected, at different levels, with gambuh(19). This is not a manual prescribing or describing steps and giving specific stage directions – but the codification of behaviour and conduct one finds in it establishes a connection with Balinese living performance practices and ideas of the body as “inscribed by meaning and as a tool for its re-enactment” (Desmond 1998,161), enabling the tracing of a connection between politeness and politics (Stallybrass 1986,123).
Photo: Gambuh, Batuan
gambuh.mp4 Gambuh,Batuan,opening dance
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Alternative representations
Why would one want to use a karana-based analysis of a dance genre such as lègong when there are already numerous classifications of Balinese dance movements which clarify the standard terminology for all Balinese dancing and thus purport to instruct on correct execution? There are several reasons for doing so.
There is, in practice, differentiation in how the movements of tari Bali, itself an abstraction, are performed. The agem of lègong is not the same as that of olèg not to mention the difference when it is performed in a male mode. In her study of the condong (maidservant) character in the genres of gambuh, arja, wayang wong and calonarang Ni Madé Wiratini lists the movement vocabularies for this character in all four genres and we see not only a quantitative difference – the vocabulary of the condong gambuh comprises more movements, but we are also told of difference in execution of what seem to be the same movements, as for example in the agem kiwa of gambuh and arja (Wiratini 1991,93; 62-63).
Photo: Queen Galuh, Arja (Hobart)
Karana- based” analysis does not mean that the analysis follows a pattern of set karanas which are a given. I have used the term karana charting its historical trajectory but emphasizing throughout that a karana is a conceptual dance unit, whose appearance can infinitely vary, inspiring new dance movement units. In this discussion it is paramount to distinguish between the 108 karanas described in the Natyasastra, the starting point for endless permutations, and karanas as movement concepts: a karana is not a specific movement known a priori that is superimposed on a dance for its analysis, it is a movement obtained from the segmentation of the dance, a segmentation which occurs through the process of embodiment (20).
Body agency and subjectivity are involved in breaking up a choreography into units. This fragmentation, followed by reassemblage is what occurs in practice when Balinese performers choreograph a new dance borrowing and transforming movement patterns from an existing dance, except that this process only occurs intuitively at the creative stage, to be intellectually surmised from the finished product. The now numerous classifications of Balinese dance, which extrapolate movement categories from existing practice, standardize them and then turn them into a normative, against which the learning of dance should be measured, are insufficient as an analytical tool precisely because they elide body agency.
Dance learning in Bali does not rely on verbal instruction but solely on imitation of the instructor’s movements; on memorizing the drum patterns – sound is an important component of the embodiment process; and, particularly in the case of younger learners, on body manipulation by the instructor. Yet it is important to be able to engage with Balinese dance practices critically in order to grasp fully the complexities of the Balinese dance body and this can only be achieved by adopting a system of analysis which does not project, inflexibly, a Euro-American model. Vasyayan’s karana-as code methodology, in this instance, seems to have the required flexibility, opening the way for further tailor-made approaches to the analysis of Balinese dancing.
Recent research which combines dance and cognitive psychology has highlighted the advantages which a notion of dance movement unit brings to the choreographic process. Unlike the notion of a step, a dance movement unit has a sense of impulse, time (rhythm and duration) and closure; it is through closure that the viewer perceives and grasps the scope of a single movement unit - loss of closure or its delay causes the viewer to lose a sense of the unit and creates confusion in perception (O’ Conchuir 2001). Thus engaging with a choreography through dance units allows the viewer to get a sharper sense of closure – alternatively, a choreographer can knowingly play with dance units to destabilise the sense of closure, for effect, through manipulating the resonance or trace which a unit leaves behind.
Vatsyayan, through her engagement with the Sanskrit discourses on dance and the body, has indicated a new sense in which the notion of karana retrievable from the Sanskrit texts can be re-constructed, turning it into an alternative representation of dance, countering the widespread aesthetic formalism of much Euro-American analysis of movement and dance techniques. Her semiotic- indebted approach (karana-as-code), married to a phenomenological account of the dance experience, has also stimulated newer analytical attempts which embrace the idea of dance movement unit segmentation, coupled with a study of the energy and breath of the dancers in the process of movement making, and simultaneously paying attention to the imagery used by the dancers themselves to describe the proprioceptive epistemologies of their body – the work I have been doing together with Ni Madé Pujawati is but an instantiation of it. This has far-reaching implications for the understanding of dance cross-culturally, which can thus be extricated, through Vatsyayan’s paradigm, from the hegemonic Euro-American-centric modernist thrust of contemporary understandings of analysis and representation.
- Portions of this chapter have appeared, together with a section of chapter 2, in an abridged form, in the article “Issues of dance reconstruction: karanas as dance texts in a cross-cultural context” Dance Research Journal, CORD, New York, 36/2, pp.64-79. An earlier discussion of such issues was presented at the Study Day “Text , Context, Performance: Reconstruction and Reinvention in African, Asian and European dances” 8th May 2004, University of Surrey, Department of Dance Studies.
- The discussion about Nawanatya, again in an abridged form, can also be found in the “New Introduction to Prambanan: sculpture and dance in ancient Java”, available in . pdf from the webpage Archaeochoreology, a project of Archaeology/Performance
Forward to: 5. Dance and site: choreographing Prambanan
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