The stately bedhaya dances of the Central Javanese courts represent an ancient tradition of the House of Mataram. As they were considered an heirloom of Javanese royalty, the esoteric songs and choreographies accompanied by special gamelan music have almost fallen into oblivion. The present discussion on their form and content provides important information on the development of the Performing Arts in Java. It aims at preserving this beautiful tradition for future generations.
The ritual bedhaya dances of the Central Javanese courts form a highly valued expression of Javanese culture. These stately dance forms, comprising complex choreographies executed to the accompaniment of archaic songs and gamelan music, are part of the cultural tradition of the Mataram dynasty. They have been preserved in the two main court centres of Central Java: Surakarta and Yogyakarta. The contents of the book range from a relatively general introduction to a detailed analysis of structural, formal features of the dances. Included are theories on the origin, social context and esoteric meaning, as well as 19th and 20th century scores of performances. The two main components of the art form, choral singing and group dancing, have each been discussed in a separate chapter. A number of song texts and choreographies, transcribed from palace manuscripts, are published for the first time. These songs represent an archaic singing style, which holds important information on the development of Javanese vocal and instrumental music. An analysis of bedhaya choreographies which are seldom performed nowadays may serve to prevent the impending disappearance of this beautiful and stylized art form. The choreographic discussion has been visualized on a 60 minute video-tape, produced from research material which was filmed between 1983-1985. This video-tape may be ordered from the author.
Despite the world-wide association of music and dance with religion, this is the first full-length study of the subject from a global perspective. The work consists of 3,816 references divided among 37 chapters. It covers tribal, regional, and global religions and such subjects as shamanism, liturgical dance, healing, and the relationship of music, mathematics, and mysticism. The referenced materials display such diverse approaches as analysis of music and dance, description of context, direct experience, observation, and speculation. The references address topics from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, medicine, semiotics, and computer technology. Chapter 1 consists of general references to religious music and dance. The remaining 36 chapters are organized according to major geographical areas. Most chapters begin with general reference works and bibliographies, then continue with topics specific to the region or religion. This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in music, dance, religion, or culture.
From healing, fertility and religious rituals, through theatrical entertainment, to death ceremonies and ancestor worship, World Dance Cultures introduces an extraordinary variety of dance forms practiced around the world. This highly illustrated textbook draws on wide-ranging historical documentation and first-hand accounts, taking in India, Bali, Java, Cambodia, China, Japan, Hawai’i, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Africa, Turkey, Spain, Native America, South America, and the Caribbean. Each chapter covers a certain region’s distinctive dances, pinpoints key issues and trends from the form’s development to its modern iteration, and offers a wealth of study features including: Case Studies – zooming in on key details of a dance form’s cultural, historical, and religious contexts ‘Explorations’ – first-hand descriptions of dances, from scholars, anthropologists and practitioners ‘Think About’ – provocations to encourage critical analysis of dance forms and the ways in which they’re understood Discussion Questions – starting points for group work, classroom seminars or individual study Further Study Tips – listing essential books, essays and video material. Offering a comprehensive overview of each dance form covered with over 100 full color photos, World Dance Cultures is an essential introductory resource for students and instructors alike.
Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance's role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance's significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.
The studies in this book examine traditional performance genres in the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali. They cover puppet and human theatre, dance, sung narrative, narrative temple reliefs, and vocal and instrumental music, span a period of more than a thousand years, and range over four cultural complexes: Sundanese in western Java, Javanese in central and eastern Java, Chinese in eastern Java, and Balinese in Bali.
This book is a wide-ranging study of the varieties of gamelan music in contemporary Java seen from a regional perspective. While the focus of most studies of Javanese music has been limited to the court-derived music of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, Sutton goes beyond them to consider also gamelan music of Banyumas, Semarang and east Java as separate regional traditions with distinctive repertoires, styles and techniques of performance and conceptions about music. Sutton's description of these traditions, illustrated with numerous musical examples in Javanese cipher notation, is based on extensive field experience in these areas and is informed by the criteria that Javanese musicians judge to be most important in distinguishing them.
Indonesian court dance, a purportedly pure and untouched tradition, is famed throughout the world for its sublime calm and stillness. Yet this unyieldingly peaceful surface conceals a time of political repression and mass killing. Between 1965 and 1966, some one million Indonesians—including a large percentage of the country’s musicians, artists, and dancers—were killed, arrested, or disappeared as Suharto established a virtual dictatorship that ruled for the next thirty years. In The Dance That Makes You Vanish, an examination of the relationship between female dancers and the Indonesian state since 1965, Rachmi Diyah Larasati elucidates the Suharto regime’s dual-edged strategy: persecuting and killing performers perceived as communist or left leaning while simultaneously producing and deploying “replicas”—new bodies trained to standardize and unify the “unruly” movements and voices of those vanished—as idealized representatives of Indonesia’s cultural elegance and composure in bowing to autocratic rule. Analyzing this history, Larasati shows how the Suharto regime’s obsessive attempts to control and harness Indonesian dance for its own political ends have functioned as both smoke screen and smoke signal, inadvertently drawing attention to the site of state violence and criminality by constantly pointing out the “perfection” of the mask that covers it. Reflecting on her own experiences as an Indonesian national troupe dancer from a family of persecuted female dancers and activists, Larasati brings to life a powerful, multifaceted investigation of the pervasive use of culture as a vehicle for state repression and the global mass-marketing of national identity.
Stephen Headley's new book explores contemporary religious change in the Surakarta region of Central Java. In his analysis of the Durga ritual complex, the author sheds light on one of the most unusual court traditions to have survived in an era of deepening Islamisation.
