‘Passage’: Moving Through a Clash of Cultures : Dance: Sardono, Indonesia’s leader of modern choreography, uses the melding of old and new as an ongoing theme. His company wraps up its inaugural tour of the U.S. in L.A.

Making their grand entrance with melting simplicity, four women--two of them princesses from the Solonese court of Java--arch their toes upward as if stepping on sheets of glass. Crystal pitchers of red wine glow on a small wooden table. And in the background, a live chamber orchestra of knobbed gongs tinkles like a charmed music box.

Serene, yes? But the tranquil atmosphere that perfumes Indonesian choreographer Sardono W. Kusumo’s new “Passage Through the Gong,” which on Thursday opens a three-day run at UCLA’s Royce Hall, soon goes up in a puff of smoke. Without evident provocation, the bejeweled dancers draw revolvers from the camouflage of their batik sarongs, point and shoot.

Listening to one American viewer’s startled response to this collision of ancient and modern imagery, Sardono--who goes by his first name only--throws his head back, scrunches his deep brown eyes shut and laughs with uncontrolled glee.

“It’s very interesting,” he says in heavily accented English during an interview the morning after the work’s San Francisco premiere. “I feel the same as you. I am amazed that the king of Solo created this thing.”

What? The king of Solo created it?

That’s right. Sardono may be the controversial founder and leader of the 19-member Sardono Dance Theater, which is finishing off its inaugural tour of America in Los Angeles, but the most astonishing aspect of his 85-minute “Passage” is not the new choreography, but the century-old classical dance embedded within it. Never previously performed outside Java, Serimpi Sangupati was created by Paku Buwono IX, the sultan of Solo, in the late 1800s when the Dutch controlled the fertile spice islands.

The irony, of course, is that the 19th-Century sultan managed to contrive a contrast so unusual, even by American standards, that Sardono’s additions seem almost conservative by comparison. Among Sardono’s original images are a recurring tableau of Dutch and Javanese historical figures swathed in tintype gray; a quartet of male dancers brandishing whips, and an attempted rape scene in which yards and yards of a sarong are unraveled without revealing an inch of skin.

Still, it is the traditional Serimpi Sangupati that most effectively conveys the culture clash central to the new work. In a program note, Sardono puts forward this interpretation: “This dance, created for a festival held just after a summit meeting between colonial generals, reflects the court’s awareness that the meeting of different cultures is precarious and may bring pleasures as well as violence and death.”

The meeting of old and new is an ongoing theme in the work of the 48-year-old choreographer, who is known in Indonesia as the foremost leader of the “new creation” movement, roughly the equivalent of America’s modern dance. Sardono has earned this reputation by jolting viewers with a combination of sterling classical technique and innovative contemporary staging.

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Born in 1945, Sardono was still a high school student at the royal court when he won ovations for his portrayal of the monkey-king Hanuman in the epic “Ramayana.” His inspiration was characteristically iconoclastic. “I picked a lot of my movement from the comic strip ‘Tarzan,’ ” he says with a laugh.

In 1963-64, he was featured at Indonesia’s cultural mission to the New York World’s Fair, during which time he studied briefly with former Martha Graham dancer (and Joseph Campbell spouse) Jean Erdman. Returning to Jakarta, he found himself in a rich artistic environment that paralleled radical political and artistic movements in other parts of the world during the late 1960s. His activism was spurred by involvement with the indigenous Dayak tribes that dwell in the rain forests of East Kalimantan. Learning their dances “made me feel really alive,” he says.

“And then in 1969 I started making something new,” he continues, explaining his notion of a new dance theater derived from martial arts, tribal dance forms and classical Javanese principles. Replacing the impassive face of classical Javanese dance, “I started using free expressions, and instead of detachment from the emotion, I got into the emotions and started to explode them.”

Tradition-bound audiences, meanwhile, responded by throwing eggs. And in 1971, anxious authorities prevented two busloads of Balinese villagers from traveling to Jakarta to perform Sardono’s revised version of the kecak (monkey dance). The accusation: “cultural corruption.”

But times have changed, Sardono says. Now negative reviews by holdout Indonesian critics are balanced by the generally enthusiastic reception of young audiences, who flock to his performances in the Indonesian capital.

“Within the tradition, there is a kind of free spirit to create,” he says, his hands quivering electrically in the style of the monkey-king Hanuman. “I think a good tradition is always contemporary too.”