DANCE REVIEW : L.A. FESTIVAL : Javanese Court Provides Delicious Interpretations

So much to see, so little time. “The Court Art of Java” so dazzles us with its revelations about Jogjakarta classical tradition, we remember the helpless awe we felt the first time we visited a library, a museum--any place where the artifacts of a culture stood in intimidating profusion before us.

Some of us spent much of the company’s second Los Angeles Festival program, Saturday at the Arboretum, trying to learn the rudiments of palace dance drama, where merely entering and leaving the stage formed an illuminating ritual:

Repeated continually during the evening, the process involved the dancers kneeling just inside the playing area and then concentrating or meditating (or establishing a point of focus) before slightly inclining their heads--”switching themselves on or off” in the description of a friend.

Another textbook for American neophytes: the feet of principal dancer Y. Surojo. Watch the infinite expressive choices they reveal and especially how they appear to merely brush (barely touch) the floor as he dances--the technique of using denial of weight and extreme turnout to shape an ideal of male refinement.

Surojo’s nobility and Jogjakartan male prowess proved central to the Wayang Wong version of “Arjuna Wiwaha” (Arjuna’s Wedding), a narrative retold three different ways in the company’s touring repertory. Cast in the title role, Surojo played someone aloof from worldly strife yet needed to restore divine order.

In the Friday Bedhaya version, women symbolized the characters and issues of this drama--and fought battles of their own in another piece that night. On Saturday, however, they merely decorated the action--except for a major choreographic set piece early on. Here, as Surojo sat meditating on a bench, (his right hand diagonally crossing his chest to touch his left shoulder), seven “celestial nymphs” hovered over him, softly rising and sinking, their beckoning hands inches from his face.

The sung text tells us that “they pose and posture, tempting him each in her way; some toss a flower, some a teasing smile, but the hermit’s heart is firm. . . .” However, choreographer R. Rio Sasminta Mardawa and his dancers went much further than that, creating a kind of holographic illusion of temptation: the perfume of it rather than anything we recognized as living women.

Among the platoons of gods, demons, heroes and comic servants who inevitably lost stature or complexity in the two abridgement-for-export being performed, we glimpsed major artists making delicious interpretive choices. As the fierce Mamangmurka, for example, the masked dancer Sunartomo added an edge of sweet, comic bewilderment to his character’s vicissitudes--especially the moment when Mamangmurka realized he’d been transformed into a wild boar. (“Moi?”)

If some of us thought of Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at this point--or the “white” acts of 19th-Century ballets during the women’s temptation ensemble--please forgive our Eurocentric impurity. Wayang Wong makes us reconsider the principles and achievements of Western classical tradition by showing us a luminous alternative. Immediately engaging as dance-spectacle, it repays the closest attention any of us can give.