Hello, Dadya Zhenya! Oh, god, please don’t ask if I’m making friends. You know I hate dinner table talk. How are the cousins? Still very loud and bouncy? Oh. Um… college is going well, I guess. Having my own space is amazing, and my classes are incredible. Oh, I’m taking Japanese I, Foundations of Contemporary Psychology, Techniques of Fiction, and Indonesian Dance. Yes, I know that’s a weird spread. Don’t judge. It’s a lot of work. And by ‘a lot’, I mean about six hours of homework a day… but it’s worth it, because I’m choosing what I study. The most interesting one is definitely the dance class. You know how I’ve been dancing for ten years? I really hope Mama didn’t show you videos… anyhow, this is so different. They don’t change facial expressions while dancing. At all. I could never do that. I’ve watched so many videos for class, and it’s absolutely amazing. They all have that same calm face.
I’ve been doing jazz, hip-hop, and modern dance for ten years. Listen, that’s longer than you spent in college and med school. Don’t tease me. Yes, I know I need to eat more… Anyway, in my dance styles, facial expression is one of the ways we express the dance’s emotion. Besides, all that movement puts so much strain on the body that keeping one expression is difficult. Here, can you pass the salt? So, I watch these videos for homework, and all of the Indonesian court dancers have these serene, calm faces, and they don’t change. That’s honestly crazy to me. Listen, you were the one who asked, so now you have to let me talk. Anyway, the music changes, and their movement quality changes; they’ll pull out daggers and bows, they’ll change positions, stand up and sit down, but they’ll still be smiling in the exact same way. So I did some research, because you know me, I can’t not, and I saw so many examples of this fixed expression.
There are so many dances we’ve already studied, but those first three videos of Pura Mangkunegaran, Srimpi Pandhelori, and Golek Lambangsari were definitely the most intriguing to me. I had never seen anything like that before. Here, let me show you. Look: do you see that? Watch their faces. Now this one. See? In every video, all of the dancers have “a soft smile, with eyes relaxed, unmoving and lids slightly lowered” (Morrison, 33). However, that is not something common to Southeast Asian dance. In Indian Bharata Natyam, a dance which influenced Javanese dance to a certain extent, “the dancer is trained to make strong facial and eye movements to express emotions such as fear, serenity and anger” (Morrison, 33). One South Indian dancer, Rukmini Devi, even said there was no way to express emotion in Bharata Natyam except through the face (Morrison, 33). So, I get curious, right? And I start looking for the origin of that constant facial expression.
Well, it turns out that the history of Javanese court dance is really intricate, so I won’t get too deep into it. To sum up, in the Hindu-Java period, from 400 – 1000 C.E., god-kings, or dewa-raja, would sponsor these massive spectacles for both religious and political purposes, and these performances included ceremonial dances (Hughes-Freeland, 30). We don’t have many records of ancient Javanese dance, but the use of ceremonial dance for political and ceremonial purposes continues from the Hindu-Javanese period, through the Islamic state and sultanates, colonialism, and into post-colonial Indonesia. Then, dance started to be used as a tool for education. With the evolving nationalist movement, Javanese court dance helped to define modern Javanese identity and culture, and it was used as a model of character building. Modern Javanese character values are directly related to the lack of expression in court dance (Hughes-Freeland, 45).
In modern day Java, restraint in movement and gesture is an everyday thing. People don’t usually express strong emotions through their faces or their gestures, and a lot of people carry themselves with a pleasant expression. They want to project a feeling of well-being, and court dance helps to cultivate those inner individual qualities that make a Javanese person cultured (Morrison, 36). Those qualities include smoothness, grace, lightness, flexibility and fluidity of movement, awareness, emotional detachment, and self possession in the realm of action (Morrison, 36). That’s why a lot of young people are sent to learn court dance, because it helps them learn those “controlled sensibilities”, or perasaan halus (Hughes-Freeland, 82). Even foreigners can be considered socially “Javanese” if they learn these qualities through court dance. Javanese people put a lot of emphasis on perasaan halus, and consider themselves “alus”, which means refined or restrained (Hughes-Freeland, 83). The fixed facial expression in Javanese court dance is linked to that way of being in the world, to being “alus”. Instead of showing the audience a dancer’s fluctuating emotions, that fixed expression allows the dance to show the eternal condition of the dancer’s character (Morrison, 36). That’s why the unchanging face is so important in Javanese dance: it’s directly linked to cultural values, to that inner poise that Javanese people seek.
So, basically, to summarize, since I know you zoned out halfway through, court dancers in Java have a fixed expression because it reflects cultural values of poise and centeredness. Even though it’s a dance style influenced by other countries and forms, such as Indian Bharata Natyam, the fixed expression persists, that somewhat eerie, pleasant smile and half-lidded eyes. It’s a symbol of being “alus”, or refined, a way of teaching Javanese values, and one of the key features of Javanese court dances. That’s why- what do you mean, I’m rambling? Okay, fine, I’m done. Happy now? Pass the salt, please.
