This is the text of paper presented at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, in New Delhi, on 17th September 2003

Exploring the Prambanan site: dance, archaeology, architecture and computer technology

Alessandra Lopez y Royo

Introduction

Prambanan is a temple complex in Central Java, built in the 9th century CE. Its main deity is the god Siwa, whose colossal statue is housed in the main temple of the complex, rising from a lingayoni pedestal. The Prambanan site belongs to the ‘classical period’ of Javanese history, otherwise known as the Hindu/Buddhist period (Fontein 1990; Klokke 1993). Java is today predominantly Muslim; temple complexes such as Prambanan and the neighbouring Buddhist Borobodur are no longer in worship, but constitute attractive and well kept archaeological parks with amenities and facilities, drawing thousands of visitors everyday.

Prambanan is well known for its reliefs, narrating the story of Rama, a model king – the Ramayana story is known from India, from where it spread all over Southeast Asia, retold in different versions (Stutterheim 1925; Fontein 1997; Filliozat 1994; Phuong 2000). Prambanan is also known for sixty-two reliefs, around the outer balustrade of the main temple, showing groups of three male dancers in action. These reliefs have been the object of research over a period spanning several years (OD 1948; Sivaramamurti 1974; Vatsyayan 1977a; Sedyawati 1982). Throughout the 1990s, I engaged in analysing the dance movements depicted in each relief, reconstituting these movements through a process of re-embodiment, inspired by the practice based model of karana reconstitution formulated by Subrahmanyam in her work on the karanas of the Tanjore, Kumbakonam and Chidambaram temples in Southern India. It was also prompted by Vatsyayan’s very lucid kinetic analyses of the relationship of ancient Indian and Southeast Asian dance with temple iconography (Vatsyayan 1968, 1977b, 1983a, 1983b).

It has been a journey of discovery, not least because through it I have been able to raise questions on the dance past, the archaeological process, body intelligence and archaeology as an embodied practice. The research has had several phases: from analysis and reconstitution of the dance movements (Iyer 1996, 1998) to attempts at recording the reconstituted and re-embodied movement vocabulary using the LifeForms software (Lopez y Royo 2001) to an exploration of the site with a team of archaeologists, architectural historians, animators and Javanese dancers, exploring Prambanan and its dance simultaneously as archaeology, architecture, dance and art history (Lopez y Royo et al 2002) . The archaeological process, usually lived as excavation and reconstitution of an outer reality – the site - here has been internalised, etched in the body, inscribed in corporeality, and translated into bodily writing . The reconstitution of a dance body – the Prambanan dance body, an abstract incorporeal body of segmented movements – has been refleshed in the physicality of the dancer/archaeologist’s body. This has mirrored the reconstitution of the site, activated by the disembodied architectural and archaeological choreography of the buildings at the site.

In this paper, I shall attempt to re-engage with Prambanan as a performance locus – in its broadest sense - in a reflexive mode, viewing the archaeological site through a series of events, whose narratives will intersect. I will discuss the different phases of the bodily engagement with the site from the reconstitution of the dance units, to an account of the exploration of the dance/temple connection, through which the diverse contextual meanings of the Prambanan dance sequences in performance, in architecture, as archaeology and as iconography have been mapped.

The reconstitution of the dance

Having encountered the reliefs during a short visit to the Prambanan site back in 1988, the impetus to the research was given by a desire to make sense, kinetically, of the movements frozen in sculpture as dance postures. While retracing the postures in each relief with my own body, I realised that there was a movement logic: the postures were not random. In each relief there are three figures which stand in a clear relationship which each other: if one executes all their postures in succession, a small movement sequence is obtained, though there will be gaps in between which will have to be filled in going from one movement segment to the other. I felt compelled to see whether the movement segments could be rejoined, eliminating the hiatus between segments, in the best possible approximation of the movements which inspired the sculptors of the reliefs.

This was a tall order. However, it was possible to analyse the figures in terms of very small portions of movement and look at their posture in terms of deviations from a central axis. This was a system of analysis which I had come across in the writings of Indian scholars, notably the very lucid kinetic analyses by Vatsyayan (1968, 1983a, 1983b). Vatsyayan had forged a flexible methodology based on the movement categories of the Natyasatra (a Sanskrit text which codifies music, dance and dramatic performance), for working with movement as seen in sculpture. Written in the early centuries CE – its date is uncertain – the Natyasastra describes a mode of performance which is no longer current. What makes it particularly interesting is that it analyses bodily actions systematically, and in great detail, offering a viable tool for investigating corporeality. Through the categories of the Natyasastra one can formulate a specific notion of technique which emerges from the dance itself - any dance - around which the dance is organised, centred on conceptual dance units called karanas. The karanas of the Natyasastra are simultaneously elements of an obsolete dance technique (Subrahmanyam 1978; 1979) and categories for the analysis of movement.

Thus to reconstitute the dance movements seen in the reliefs as dance units, I used the concept of karana as dance movement unit. This unit, in the language of the Natyasastra can be subdivided into smaller segments such as cari, hasta, sthana (movement of the lower limbs, movement of the upper limbs, stance) and even smaller segments, such as the movements of the different angas and upangas (primary and secondary limbs). It is very important here to be aware that the dance units retrievable in this fashion from Prambanan may not have been regarded as dance units as such in the 9th century: we do not know how the technique was conceived of at that point in time and where its caesurae were. But they can be reconstituted as dance phrases, which we can categorise as dance units, creating an alphabet of the Prambanan movement vocabulary .

Therefore I distance myself from the lure of those views, to which I initially succumbed, of Prambanan and Indian dance as historically intertwined, with the dance reliefs assumed to be faithful representations of the dance units of an obsolete Indian dance technique. Instead, I emphasise the importance of the Indian codifications as an analytical tool in a crosscultural context (O’Shea 2000), 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. A search for origin is not viable; what is important, in my view, is the concept of dance unit and how this can be adapted to the analysis of dance, rather than seeing the Prambanan dance units as an obsolete, Indian or Indian- derived body movement technique.

I have given a full account of the process of segmentation and re-assemblage of the movement fragments in earlier writings (Iyer 1996, 1998; Lopez y Royo 2001), however, for the sake of clarity, I will briefly explain how the missing movements have been supplied. A karana categorises the level of movement (lower, middle or upper plane) . In her study of the dance reliefs of the Sarangapani temple at Kumbakonam, Vatsyayan has classified the karanas regrouping them according to the cadence of movement, giving the predominant aspect of the stance and movement: “the stance of the body changes with the equal and unequal distribution of weight and the nature of foot contact... {which} determine the movement of the upper limbs. Thus we have taken the lower limbs movements and positions as basic…The reliefs of Sarangapani can be regrouped from the point of view of the dominant kinetic feature of the lower limbs and disposition of weight…The differentiations rest much more on the articulation of limbs in relation to the central median” (Vatsyayan 1983b:12-18).

The name of each karana in the Natyasatra and its short description gives a clue on the path of the movement cadence and in what plane it falls.

The Prambanan dance reliefs show three different phases of a cadence of movement and its plane, representing them as static poses. In the context of a cadence - one for each dance phrase/unit depicted in each relief – the missing segments can be supplied on the principle of the shortest route from one point to another, following the overall dynamic pattern of the cadence. Iconometric measurements are 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 of the missing segments. Occasionally, more than one choice is possible: when this is so, alternative interpretations should be given.

Re-embodying the reassembled movements brings with it a new set of problems, ranging from the mechanics of embodiment to what one can do with a reconstituted dance technique to issues of recording the reconstructed movements to issues of authenticity and heritage preservation/conservation in relation to the reconstituted dance , all to be viewed in a broader context. These issues were addressed, though not necessarily in that order, in the course of the three successive projects through which the research unfolded, from 1992 to 2002.

Bodies of the past, bodies of the present and issues of style

An adult body is scripted upon by a variety of markers: gender, class, race, culture, age. The body of a male Javanese dancer of today is not the same as that of a 9th century male Javanese dancer. An adult dancing body is, in addition, marked by the previous dance training (or lack of it) – dance movements are embodied and somatised and the training in different techniques is layered upon a dancing body. The Prambanan dance units look considerably different , for example, when danced by me and when danced by a Javanese dancer previously trained in Javanese court dance, even though the basic pattern is the same.

The dance reliefs can tell us a great deal about bodies of the past through the performativity of the frozen, segmented movements themselves. Some movements, though performable by contemporary bodies are nevertheless unusual and are definitely not part of a contemporary dance movement vocabulary – here I am not referring only to western bodies and western dance, but to Javanese bodies of today, having worked with Javanese dancers in the various projects involving the Prambanan complex. Leaving aside for a moment specific differences that exist between western and non-western bodies of today and differences between male and female, young and old, healthy and unhealthy bodies which further compound the issue, the effort involved in getting a contemporary body to perform such movements revealed the need for training little used muscles and for acquiring uncommon levels of flexibility.

An instance of this is in the flexibility required of the elbow joints, often shown in the reliefs as being fully rotated, and in the accentuated bends of the sides of the body. Even allowing for idealisation in the representation of the human body (Lopez y Royo 2003), with an imagined flexibility which did not correspond to practical ability, the reliefs nevertheless show the body aesthetics of their period, in all likelihood reflected in the aesthetics of the dance. Thus replicating/approximating that body aesthetics involved retraining the contemporary body. This intersected with another problem pertaining to the re-embodiment process : the style of execution of the movements. In the act of re-embodying a movement pattern in oder to complete the re-embodiment the question of style and quality of movement arises . A style is a way of doing rather than an inherent property of an object (Shanks 1999, 18). This is even more so in the case of movement execution .

In re-contextualising the past dance as dance in the present, a distinct Javanese dance quality was given to the movements by having the dance units of Prambanan interpreted by two Javanese male dancers, Didik Bambang Wahyudi and Mugiyono Kasido, trained in different modes of Javanese court dancing– the performers in the reliefs are all male, thus the identity of gender was preserved. The units were overlayered by the dancers’ previous training which affected the execution in stylistic terms.

How ‘authentic’ was this ? Authenticity is contextually assigned, it is not an absolute value. Shanks and Tilley have discussed the relative value of authenticity (Shanks and Tilley 1992 but see also Taruskin 1989 and Naerebout 1997 ). Their arguments are equally valid in the context of re-constructing dance: the difference is that here the archaeological process involves embodiment and is therefore corporeal. Embodiment involves an exploration of corporeality which occurs in a particular spatio-temporal location.

Thus I would submit that it is the present day Javanese spatio-temporal location which authenticates the Javanese style of the reconstituted dance units: their stylistic quality is consciously borrowed from contemporary living traditions of Javanese dance, on the basis of contextual appropriateness. I could have given the dance units a hip-hop or a balletic style but though this would have been no less authentic than a Javanese court dance style of execution, would it be appropriate?

Performing Prambanan as a virtual site

A one-off performance of the dance units was not the end goal of the project. The issue of communicating the reconstitution of the dance units preserving its kinetics, without relying on live performance, needed to be addressed. Rather than using a more traditional means for recording dance, such as notation, 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 we were envisaging a web output and in particular we wanted people unable to read notation to be able to access the information. The animations were based on the execution of the units as performed by a classically trained Javanese dancer. They 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. But they could not record stylistic nuances. Thus they needed to be complemented by video clips of the performance which visually captured those nuances in the performer’s execution (Lopez y Royo 2001). The dancer involved was Didik Bambang Wahyudi.

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 of Prambanan. The new project had very ambitious aims. The temple complex would be reconstituted in cyberspace. The dance units could 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 Prambanan visitors and a diversity of users, specialists and non-specialists. Animating the dance units in the Prambanan reliefs therefore led to rethinking Prambanan as a virtual site (on the web and later as a CD-Rom, though the CD-Rom idea had to be eventually abandoned because of intellectual ownership problems) 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 .

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.

Our project allowed the visitor/computer user to reconnect with the dance past of the temple site through a different route. Supplied with basic information about the reliefs, the computer users 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 being 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 1998: 23-31). On the basis of this information, through an interactive animation of the dance units in the reliefs, users could provide their own choreographic input, manipulating the relief sequences, using an imaginative approach anchored in disciplinary knowledge. In addition, the animation would 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.

In technical terms this phase of the project was exciting. The animations were no longer done manually but were obtained by using motion capture. A Javanese dancer was 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 . 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 thus 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. 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 NUS in 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 of the interior of the temples (Ramayana and Krisnayana) and their relationship to the dance reliefs on the exterior of candi Siwa.

Dance and architecture: embodying the site through isomorphic analogy

The main drift of the discussion has been , so far, the re-embodiment process, focused on the dance reliefs and the dance units retrievable from them through an archaeological process inscribed in corporeality, and how this was enhanced by the creative use of new technologies. But the work done at Prambanan with the architectural team has given yet another sense and another dimension to the re-embodiment process . Re-embodying the reconstituted Prambanan dance units is in itself a ‘site embodiment’. The ‘embodiment’ is homological. In reconstituting the units a new incorporeal dance body is created from segments and fragments of movement and the foregoing discussion has highlighted the problem of style in the execution of these movements when the incorporeal body is actually embodied, coinciding with a living human body. For convenience, I have called this incorporeal dance body the ‘Prambanan dance body’. This is analogous, in dynamic terms, with the architectural structure of the complex; it coincides with the ‘body’ of the main temple. Prambanan, and the Siwa temple in particular, follows a classic Hindu temple model (Hardy 1995; Indorf 2002; Nanda 2001). The reference to a temple ‘body’ is common in the Indian indigenous architectural literature, where the temple is conceived of as a replica of a human body and its parts are named after bodily parts:

“the cosmic diagram ritually traced on the ground before a temple is built, is mythologically linked to the sacrificial body of a primeval giant – one aspect of the Hindu version of the microcosm-macrocosm, body-universe parallel. More concretely, the temple is seen as the body (embodiment or manifestation) of the deity, as well as the deity’s house, and the names of certain temple parts are anthropomorphic … The ascending chakras visualised in the practice of yoga are analogous to the stages of ascent up the vertical axis of the temple tower, marked by corresponding levels in the exterior” (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002) .

It is in the patterns of movement expressed by Hindu temple architecture that the symbiosis with the dance body is to be experienced. Prambanan seems to adhere to the classic Hindu temple model (Indorf 2002, Nanda 2001). Here the two cardinal axis (longitudinal and the transverse ) intersect with diagonal axes which run throughout the superstructure (or body) of the temple. A vertical axis joins the top finial with the centre of the superstructure and a centrifugal movement is conveyed by the superstructure, going from the finial outward along the cardinal directions, following a dynamic pattern of by emergence and expansion (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002).

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 metaphysical concepts which underlie the architecture of the Hindu temple - the dance body is surrounded by a circle within a square (Vatsyayan 1983a:52-53) . Nothing escapes from the circle: “between the centre and the circumference of the circle there is the indissoluble connection to 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 as quoted in Nanda 2001:55).

Linked to these concepts of emergence and expansion is the geometry of the square, whose underlying principle remains the circle: the square manifests the circle in the cardinal directions, whereas the circle symbolises the cosmos (Nanda 2001:56).

The dance body can thus be divided into planes around its longitudinal and transverse axes; 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 being a 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. Conceptually an aedicule is the equivalent of a karana and in the case of Prambanan, the aedicules of the Siwa temple are analogous with 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. This corresponds to the metaphysical point of origin known as bindu, ‘the infinitesimal, all-containing source of cosmic manifestation’. In the dance body “the point of origin is the navel conceived as the mid-point of a circular diagram positioned frontally and vertically, divided into four quarters by vertical and horizontal axes passing through the navel...{In the temple} the circular diagram is both horizontal, aligned with the four cardinal directions, and three-dimensional, with a vertical axis rising from the intersection of the cardinal axes, in the sanctum, to the top of the superstructure. The bindu lies at the top of this axis, somewhere beyond where the finial of the physical temple tapers into nothing” (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002).

The ‘embodiment’ of the site occurs therefore through the embodiment of the dance units, at the level of underlying abstract patterns: which, when expressed through bodily means become dynamic and unfold in a spatio-temporal continuum. “Temple architecture, conceptually, also has a temporal structure, of which a given spatial arrangement is a momentary glimpse, or rather a succession of such glimpses. A series of elements, or of configurations of elements, is sensed not as a chain of separate entities, but as the same thing seen several times, at different stages, evolving and proliferating…The dynamism is conceptual, but also often illusionistic” (Hardy and Lopez y Royo 2002)

Taking the aedicule as his module, 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). In dance terms, if we take the standing posture, with the weight equally spread on both feet as the basic mode (seen on the Siwa temple in the reliefs showing three figures in a standing posture, which alternate with the actual dance reliefs), 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. There are five principal planes along which this can happen : the neck, the shoulders, waist, knees, and ankles” (Nanda 2001:61; emphasis mine).

The archaeologist/dancer therefore embodies the site through an “isomorphic analogy” (Holyoak as quoted in Nanda 2001:7) of dance and architecture, seen in the parallelism of the dance units with the aedicular units of the superstructure. At Prambanan dance is both contained in the inherent dynamism of the temple structure and is projected on the surface of the main temple structure through the dance reliefs. Re-embodying the dance units is equivalent to re-embodying the architectural dynamics and the temple complex itself. The site is thus ‘embodied’ and choreographed.

Dance as archeological heritage: the future of the Prambanan dance units

In the context of the project, dancer /choreographer Mugiyono Kasido began to think of ways in which he could work with the dance units and his own dance movement vocabulary, based on classical Javanese dance forms, on a piece which configured some of the basic architectural patterns of the complex. He played with permutation and transformation and choreographed a short dance which was at times representational, hence iconographic – with fleeting images of devotees circumambulating the shrines and images of Siwa and of Sakti. But the imagery was a suggestion, quickly turning into abstraction. The piece is still work in progress, an idea to be further developed. It could have been turned into a site specific performance whose videoclips could be uploaded on the website but in the context of the two-year project this was not an achievable goal. The piece has however been videorecorded in the studio and can be regarded as the beginning of a work which will probably involve more dancers and will need separate funding to be completed.

The choreographic experimentation which has occurred in the context of the Prambanan project opens up a new space but not without engendering controversy.

Archaeological sites , once restored, usually become protected monuments but they also become enmeshed in the complexities of heritage discourses, as shown by archaeological writings of the past three decades. All the problems discussed by archaeologists in such writings in terms of the relationship of past and present – see for example Thomas 2000 - are more sharply in focus if we substitute the reconstituted dance to the reconstituted building or site.

How should we deal with these reconstituted dance units ? They can only truly exist as dance in a living dancing body, it goes without saying. If practised and refined over a period of time, the units can be turned into a full fledged dance technique. New combinations of dance units can be created and new dance phrases, through permutation can also be devised. Units can be merged to create further units. Or the units can be used to augment the dance vocabulary of existing dance forms – I say this tentatively as already such a suggestion is bound to provoke the wrath of purists. In other words, they can be used to choreograph.

There are no choreographies as such left from 9th century Java. We can only conjecture the subject matter of some of the dance performances - perhaps the Ramayana, since this is a prominent narrative of the temple reliefs, but perhaps not. One can see among the Ramayana panels one which shows dancing in a celebratory context. The panel in question shows movements arrested as static poses closely related to those seen in some of the dance reliefs, with female drummers squatting on one side of the dancer. Beyond this, we know nothing about the music utilised and nothing about the modalities of performance practice in 9th century Java.

The questions which the work done at Prambanan raises are many. Should we use the dance units only in the context of recreated Ramayana performances, perhaps reabsorbing them in Ramayana ballet compositions which are a feature of the present day activities of the Prambanan complex? Should we give vent to our creativity and use the reconstituted movements in the context of new choreographies, as Mugiyono ventured to do in the context of our project, and for dance compositions with contemporary themes other than an eternal Ramayana? Is reconstituted dance meant to be treated as a museum piece and reverentially tiptoed around? Should a system of policing be instituted to protect the ‘authenticity’ and ‘ethnic identity’of a reconstituted dance? At a time when the whole museum culture is undergoing massive changes and museums are shedding the image of heritage temples , it seems incongruous to adopt very conservative attitudes with regard to reconstituted dance.

Dance is a bodily activity in the present and the dance past is danced in the present, not as past, but as present. We need to remove any misapprehension of what defines a dance past : “ the truth of the past is metaphorical. It is to be found in the traces of the past, it is present in-itself in the past, present with us. At the same time the traces of the past point to an absent truth, a truth outside the past found in the reception of the traces of the interpreting archaeologist… We find our affinity with the past through our difference to it, through practice which links past and present. ” (Shanks and Tilley 1992:20). Thus a dance past is found in the reconstituted dance movements, actively recreated in the present from the traces they have left in the reliefs, their archaeological record.

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