Creating work means following feelings as far as one can as well as using accumulated technique to express those feelings. There is an interaction between the feeling and technique, and each feeds the other. Unless it is a set classical piece, learned technique may not match the feeling/meaning/expression that is desired. So, one has to […]
Sometimes I’m asked what village I grew up in. The answer is a little village of (what is now) 7.4 million people. The idea that I grew up in a ghetto area in one of world’s largest cities seems to shock many people. How can the art that I learned and practice be from that […]
A Choreographical Investigation I am currently deep in the process of creating the piece to be performed in October. As I do this, I think about what my intentions are, what I want to convey, and what I use to embody (a good word for a choreographer) those intentions. Intentions exist on the level of […]
Sri Susilowati is a Performing Diaspora Resident Artist at CountePULSE. See her at weekend 2 of Performing Diaspora, November 12-15. Buy tickets now! As an Indonesian choreographer who has trained in my own country and the U.S.A, I am interested in looking at a social relation from a third world perspective, and in particular a […]
The process of creating parts of the piece and showing them has been stimulating. At the showing in San Francisco, there were comments on things that surprised me. At one point I finish drinking a glass of wine and someone remarked on the how my exhalation into the glass fogged it up and thought that […]
The essence of the esthetics of Indonesian dance, and that particularly from the islands of Java and Bali, can be explained through three words: wirama, and wirasa. Wirama means the harmony and internal rhythm of the movement. Wiraga is the intensity and fullness of the movement not in term of its external power, but more along the lines of being filled with chi (in Chinese) or prana (Sanskrit). Soft and delicate movement can be wiraga while movement that is seemingly strong and powerful can lack it altogether. Wirasa is the feeling of the movement. The word “feeling” here is used not in sense of emotion or passion, but in term of the sensation when emotion and mental construct are set aside.