Produced by Sydney Dance Company and Monica Lim
Creative Concept by Rianto & Monica Lim
Choreographed by Rianto
Dramaturgy by Carol Brown
Performed by Rianto, Sigit Kurniawan, Tamarra & Suratno
Sound & Visual Design by Suratno, Patrick Hartono & Monica Lim
Costume Design by Tamarra
Lighting by Giovanna Yate Gonzalez
Supported by Australia Council, Sydney WorldPride 2023, Sydney Dance Company, Project Eleven, Rumah Lengger and the University of Melbourne.
Special thanks to Daniel Clarke, Konfir Kabo and Dobrin Bugov.
QUEERS OF JAVA
Premiered at Sydney Dance Company for Sydney WorldPride 2023 on 4 March 2023. Queers of Java is a ritual to dispel dichotomies, a prayer for survivance. In this work, performed and choreographed by acclaimed Indonesian dancer Rianto, the cross-gender Lengger is set free from the binaries that society has constructed to symbolise nature – male or female, day or night, happiness or sadness - to encapsulate the concept of indang, a spiritual dimension that is neither male nor female. By placing the body once again at the epicentre, Rianto reclaims the lengger body that has undergone the long journey from the spiritual, to the material and through to the digital. New possibilities of the lengger body are imagined by an Australian-Indonesian team of dancers, performance artists, sound and video technologists to collapse division between sound and movement, real and unreal, analogue and digital. What is traditional and what is contemporary are indistinguishable. The body becomes a topology through which the Lengger becomes inverted, stretched, deformed, unlimited.