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Sardono Essay

Decent Essays

The Physical Turn and Improvisation in the Seventies
Cultural imperialism, in a form of New York’s World Expo in 1964, stands on the background of this part of the story. A young Javanese dancer, Sardono W. Kusumo was a member of the Indonesian dancer contingent for the expo. Extending his stay in the city that had become an adopted home or, depending on your viewpoint, a thrift store of world culture, there he met another young Indonesian, just a couple years his senior, an emerging poet cum theatre artist by the name of Rendra. The following six-months of his informal residency would be brief and memorable for Sardono and its significance to Indonesian performance field would continue to resonate until a few decades later.
In 2003, I was involved in organizing a gathering of a hundred performance artists from all around Indonesia, a rare week of retreat for a convivial sharing, and workshop …show more content…

For Sardono, not the more cynical of the two, Jean’s workshop was basically a hatha yoga session. While the workshop’s main contents were not new in their respective performance vocabulary, Sardono was illuminated by Erdman’s ability to appropriate the approach with a contemporary framework that he found useful for developing a performance work. In the workshop, Erdman also introduced them to her principle approach of improvisation. It is important to note here that Rendra’s introduction to the notion of improvisation as a modern theatre vocabulary might occurred earlier, especially during his time studying at the American Dramatic Arts. Nonetheless, Sardono underlines how Erdman taught her improvisation method systematically, which encouraged him to think more about abstraction, imagination, spatial contact and bodily deconstruction, as he would eventually develop as his working method in the seventies

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