Classical Javanese Dance: The Surakarta Tradition and its Terminology.

• Author: ROSKIES, D. M.
• Position: Review

Classical Javanese Dance: The Surakarta Tradition and its Terminology. By CLARA BRAKEL-PAPENHUYZEN. Leiden: KITLV PRESS, 1995. Pp. vii-xii + 252 and plates. HFl 60.

Upon first witnessing an instance of the spectacle denoted by the title of this book, Rabindranath Tagore was famously prompted to remark that it is in the Indonesian Archipelago that India's genius lives and has its being. True enough, as a statement of delighted recognition; but deserving, nonetheless, of qualification. The origins of the phenomenon are sub-continental, to be sure, but its character is sui generis and its many graces are idiosyncratically, unmistakably, Southeast Asian. As does no other tradition of dance in Indonesia or elsewhere, it unites a mesmerizing delicacy of manner to a thrillingly improvisatory freedom of motion, albeit that, as in Indian dance, the former quality may, to the untutored eye at any rate, seem regulated almost to the point of hypertrophy. The nature of this tradition, of the narratives upon which it draws (the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, in the main), and of its involuted and elaborate local refinements, have long been subjects of inexhaustible interest for stud ents of Indonesia and of dance, in general. In Clara Brakel they have at last found, in English, their authoritative interpreter.

Miss Brakel, a performing artist in the field who is also a teacher of Javanese at The Hebrew University, enjoys, as well, an established reputation as a scholar of Indonesian performing arts. This, her latest book, a welcome successor to The Bedhaya Court Dances of Central Java (1992) and like it the fruit of doctoral research, mines a rich lode of knowledge acquired over the years and with enviable diligence both in situ and in the libraries of Leiden. Her truly admirable command of the secondary literature (Becker, Kunst and Kraemer, Pigeaud and Holt, among an earlier generation; Kartomi, Koentjaraningrat, Poerbatjaraka, Hatley and Lindsay, among the moderns: each given his due, though not without reservation where warranted) and her sovereign control of the instruments of scholarship are a tribute to Leiden Indologie at its best and make it more than probable that the book will become a locus classicus for study and research.

Its cynosure is an encyclopedia of terms in Javanese for particular dance positions and movements, eked out by exquisite line drawings for which we have the talented Marjolijn Groustra to thank. The lexicon used to...