AHRC Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance
This project is shared between Roehampton University and SOAS. All performer-researchers for year 1 and 2 of the project are based at SOAS and are working with the SOAS gamelan students. In addition Lila Cita Gamelan and its director Andy Channing are involved in rehearsing and performing.
The project explores the complex and shifting landscape of Indonesian dance and music heritage and its contemporary reconstitution – including notably its openness to different interpretations – through focusing on choreography. To approach the choreographic process, practice is being investigated as the object of study. The project prioritises practice-based research and acknowledges performers as primary agents of interpretation and theorisation.
Project’s objectives are:
- to investigate the dialogue between choreographer and composer in the framing of a new choreography through the creation of new pieces;
- to explore issues of movement quality and technique, the cultural basis of movement, and embodiment in relation to dance;
- to evaluate the suitability of various recording tools used in western dance analysis to represent the shifting nuances between first conception,
- performance, and transmission, and what is understood to be technique in the context of Indonesian dance forms;
- to explore interpretation, as applied by performers, audiences, and analysts.
