DANCING THE SUBJECT OF ‘JAVA’ : International Modernism and Traditional Performance, 1899–1952

Abstract

This article surveys the ‘Javanese’ work of non-Javanese ‘ethnic’ choreographers and dancers of the period 1899 to 1952, including Mata Hari, Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, Ada Forman, La Meri, Ram Gopal, Nataraj Vashi and Michio Ito. I will also consider the work of Eurasians such as Fred Coolemans, Takka-Takka (who danced with her husband ‘Yoga-Taro’) and Ratna Mohini, as well as the Javanese modernist Raden Mas Jodjana, to evaluate how they imaged versions of Java on international stages. I consider further the lasting significance of ‘Javanese’ movement in modern dance and touch briefly on the transformation of interpretive dance to burlesque, and the rise of ‘ethnic dance’, in which dance serves to educate about Indonesia as a foreign culture, rather than merely entertain. The Javanese movement's end coincided with Indonesian independence, when Indonesia began to organise cultural missions to represent the nation.

The opening of Java and other islands of Indonesia to foreign capital, the development of rail lines, steam lines and harbours, and investment in civil infrastructure attracted business people, tourists and travellers from many nations to the equatorial archipelago starting in the late 19th century. Cash crop production was modernised and multinational companies such as Shell Oil and British American Tobacco brought foreign managers and investors. Guidebooks were published, tourist destinations identified, ethnic cultures delineated by scholars and travel writers.

Prior to the 20th century, the Dutch colonisers demonstrated little awareness of the artistic richness of their major colonial possession, and tended to see ‘native’ investments in performance and spectacle, through Calvinist eyes, as signs of Oriental decadence. The splendour of Javanese traditional performance attracted attention at 19th century international exhibitions in Paris and Chicago, inspiring music by Debussy, poetry by Arthur Symons and sketches by Rodin. These early European modernists took an experientially distant attitude to Java. They romanced it as a living classical civilisation. Arthur Symons, in his poem ‘Javanese Dancers’, refers to Javanese music and dance as ‘disquieting’ and ‘unintelligible’ (Symons 1895).

The most intimate moment in the 19th century European colonial desiring of Java might have occurred in 1893 when Paul Gauguin took a girl of about 13 years of age he called ‘Annah la Javanaise’ as a domestic servant. Annah lived in Gauguin's Paris flat and it is believed that Annah was also his mistress. Gauguin painted a nude portrait of her, together with his pet monkey, making Annah resemble classical Javanese statuary. Gauguin also proudly displayed Annah to his circle of intimates, and took her on a trip to Brittany. In Brittany, Gauguin got into a violent altercation with locals who apparently believed Annah was a witch. Annah quarelled with Gauguin, severed their relation, went back to Paris alone and ransacked Gauguin's apartment. She possibly modelled for Alphonse Mucha after she left Gauguin but beyond this no more is known about her (Mucha 1966: 122-23).

Annah was in fact Eurasian (Dutch-Javanese), brought to Paris from Southeast Asia by the opera singer Nina Pack and ‘found’ by Gauguin's art dealer in the streets or brothels of Montmartre. Gauguin was fascinated with Javanese culture, going into raptures about the Javanese performers at the 1889 international exhibition in Paris and collecting postcards and other images of pre-modern Java. But Gauguin showed no desire to see Java through Javanese eyes. The closest he got to Java was to compel a domestic servant to assume its trappings. By inscribing Annah as pre-modern Javanese, Gauguin in effect transposed the rigidly compartmentalised racial hierarchy of late 19th century Java (where mixed race went unrecognised as a legal category) onto the world of post-impressionism. Gauguin had no interest in displaying Annah in her current pathetic condition as a displaced half-Javanese adolescent turned street child and sex worker. For Gauguin, her only artistic interest lay in her capacity to be represented as a token of Javanese antiquity.

In contrast, many 20th-century artists performed Java by themselves becoming Javanese subjects. The first half of the 20th century saw a host of modern dancers and performers enacting versions of Javanese tradition on stages outside of Indonesia. Most of the ‘interpretive’ dancers were not Javanese themselves, and many had never seen actual traditional performances. But they nonetheless identified themselves as ‘Javanese dancers’, and took on the active role of culture bearer. This shift in sensibility, which co-articulates with the penetration of foreign capital into Indonesia and the rise of multinational companies, represents a new way of being in the imaginative space between cultures. Performers were exploring Otherness within a Javanese stage persona that often spilled over into real life as well. By embracing being Javanese as a way of life and art, they provide a model for their audiences and students to attune to dimensions of difference and sameness.

Mata Hari and after

It is difficult to state definitively which non-Javanese artist first tread the boards in transcultural Javanese drag. An early contender to this might be Mary Baker, an impostor who hoaxed the elites of Bristol in 1817. Baker dressed in a turban, spoke a made-up nonsense tongue and performed bizarre rituals in her pose as Princess Caraboo from the Indian Ocean island of Javasu. After her exposure, Baker made a brief artistic career of the hoax, performing her own story on stage in the United States (Wells 1994).

Another noteworthy ‘Javanese’ performer was the French dancer Cléo de Mérode, winner of the world's first beauty contest and mistress of Leopold II (Coyners 2003: 229-33). Around 1899, Cléo de Mérode danced an impression of West Javanese topeng based on descriptions and illustrations in a book given to her by one of her lovers. This dance was made into a very early sound film shown at the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre of the Universal Exposition in Paris 1900. Cléo de Mérode herself performed an even more elaborate version of Cambodian dance at the same event.

Figure 1 Cléo de Mérode in her topeng-inspired dance costume (1900). Source: René Maizeroy, 1900, ‘La danse a l'exposition: le theatre Indo-Chinois, Mlle Cléo de Mérode et les danses Cambodgiennes’, Le Theatre 41:20.

Figure 2 Mata Hari in War Dance to Subramanya (1905), brandishing a keris

The first major European artist to embrace Javanese performance was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. Zelle lived in Java and Sumatra between 1897 and 1902 as the wife of a KNIL army officer named John MacLeod (of Scottish descent but Dutch nationality). Zelle separated from her husband upon their return to the Netherlands. After an unsuccessful stint as an artists' model, Zelle reinvented herself in Paris in 1905 as an exotic dancer known as Lady MacLeod and then Mata Hari (Malay for ‘sun’). A likely role model was Cléo de Mérode. Mata Hari traded on dark looks, elaborate costumes – and a willingness to disrobe in public. Following the lead of scholarly Orientalists, who saw Java as a flower of Indic culture, Mata Hari collapsed British India and the Netherlands Indies, and became a terpsichorean purveyor of both Indias, using Hindu iconography and Indian musical accompaniment. Critics accused her of lacking technique and training, but Mata Hari's scantily clad performances were a succès de scandale and attracted many imitators. Her career plummeted with the outbreak of World War I and she was sentenced to death in France as a spy in 1917. The charges were probably trumped up, and related to her itinerant life style and activities as a ‘courtesan’.

Mata Hari distinguished herself from the crowd of unclothed dancers working the boards in Europe at the same time by her ability to draw authoritatively on life in the East in discussions with admirers and the press. Mata Hari had no formal training in European dance, and the stories of her dancing to gamelan accompaniment in Java are likely confabulated. What is more certain is that she participated in amateur dramatics at the soos (European club) in Malang – dressing up in fantasy costumes and enacting Orientalist tableaux. Mata Hari extrapolated an Orient from this. She not only danced the role of sex slave to Shiva, but also wove fictitious biographies and used props and costumes to present herself offstage as a native of Java or even as an Indian temple dancer. After one of her earliest performances at Guimet's Museum of Oriental Art in Paris, for example, Mata Hari appeared ‘in an elegant evening gown, joined the public and, playing with a Javanese wayang puppet which she held in her hands, told us gaily the story of the prehistoric drama of Arjuna’ (La Presse 18 March 1905 cited in Waagenaar 1964: 50). She played the press, presenting herself as a sophisticated and elegant woman. She might be willing to expose herself on stage, but she was no common variety-hall dancer, but a cultured performer who elevated themes such as sexual desire to the level of art. Mata Hari did not settle for Oriental-style music played on piano or orchestral instruments. In 1912, she engaged the orchestra of the Royal Hindu Musicians under the direction of Hazrat Inayat Khan, one of the first professional Indian musicians to tour Europe. Her impressions of the dances of Java and India were credulous enough for Paul Olivier, music critic for Le Matin, to hire her to illustrate a lecture he delivered on Asian temple festivals at the Université des Annales in Paris (Waagenaar 1964).

Mata Hari opened a floodgate for a generation of ‘Javanese’ dancers, as well as composers who wrote music inspired by Indonesian melodies and instruments and theatre artists who used Indonesian wayang forms to create new sorts of shadow and rod puppets and rethink relations between human and puppet theatre. Batik Français and later sarongs were fashion rages, Greta Garbo went Javanese in Wild Orchids (1929) and Mata Hari (1931), and young girls and matrons attended fancy dress parties garbed as Javanese dancers and princesses. The subject of ‘Java’ in Europe, the United States and elsewhere was not the distant Java of Southeast Asia but a Java of quotidian imaginations, indexed in the synonymy of Java and coffee in American English and the French use of the word javanais to designate a sort of pig Latin. Like the ‘Java’ invented by the royal courts of Central Java after the fall of Kartasura and defined as an academic subject of inquiry by Dutch, Eurasian and Javanese Orientalists (Pemberton 1994), the self-fashioned terpsichorean Java of European and American popular imagination was an anti-modern phantasm imaging up stillness and order in a time of massive technological, social, and political change.

The European and American romance of Java is emblematised in Wild Orchids. In this film Garbo plays the wife of an American tobacco dealer who travels to Java to visit plantations and set up deals with new suppliers. On the ship they meet a Yogyakarta prince who invites them to stay with him at his palatial mansion. The prince tries to seduce Garbo but she is repulsed by the cruelty he shows his attendant. A key moment in the film is the dance arranged by the prince in honour of Garbo and her husband. The female dancing owes something to serimpi, but while the men are dressed in Javanese wayang wong costumes, their chanting, angular poses, clapping and slapping more closely resemble popular interpretations of Hawai'ian or Polynesian dance than anything else. Garbo is obviously entranced by the dancing, and when she is later offered the opportunity to dress in Javanese dance costume herself she embraces this fantasy moment wholeheartedly. She appears at her husband's bedside in full Javanese costume, but the businessman is tired and uninterested and thinks she looks silly. This is the moment when Garbo realises in full the attraction of Java, where ‘the orchids grow wild and their perfume fills the air,’ and her disenchantment with tepid married life. Garbo was the most prominent sex object in the world at the time of the film's release and we are made to understand that her husband is a fool for not responding to his alluring Javanized wife. Java is depicted as less a bounded geographical entity than as a fantasy object – something one can become by taking on the appearance and structures of desire of the other.

The domestication of ‘Java’ under the sign of the modern was the work of a cadre of international artists from various backgrounds. Edward Gordon Craig collected Javanese puppets for his theatre school in Florence and exhibited them in Zurich, commissioned translations of Dutch writings on wayang and wrote about Javanese dance in relation to puppetry. Craig also created numerous ‘black figures’ that were likely modelled directly after wayang klithik puppets. Puppet artist Richard Teschner adapted Javanese stories and wayang golek puppets he purchased in Holland to form his unique Figurenspiegel in Vienna (Cohen, forthcoming). European and American composers, such as Henry Cowell, Henry Eichheim and Jaap Kool, collected gongs and other Indonesian instruments for experimental use in their music. Many European and North American composers who toured or lived in colonial Indonesia, including Colin McPhee, Leopold Godowsky, Alexander Tansman, Josef Holbrooke, Paul Seelig and Constant van de Wall, adapted Indonesian motifs and themes in music scored for western instruments.

The classically-trained Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier (1885–1958), known as ‘the high priestess of modern lyric art,’ lived in Java between 1910 and 1914 with her Dutch husband, a plantation manager named Franz Knoote. Paul Seelig, a composer who was Gauthier's accompanying pianist and the former musical conductor for the kraton (royal court) of Surakarta, provided an entrée to the world of Javanese culture for Gauthier. Gauthier collected Sundanese and Malay songs and reputedly studied the songs of Javanese sindhenan in the kraton of Surakarta, even singing along with the royal gamelan ensemble. During her time in Java, Gauthier travelled throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, giving song recitals. She later settled in New York and achieved her initial fame as a presenter of Javanese song. In her vaudeville act Song-and-Dance, Gauthier sung Javanese and Malay songs on stage while interpreter of Indian dance Nila Devi danced. A later programme titled from Java to Jazz featured her adaptations of Javanese melodies on the same programme as songs by Gershwin, Stravinsky and Berg. On a 1917 RCA 78 RPM recording, Gauthier sings Josef Dessauer's Le Retour des Promis on one side and the keroncong chestnut Nina Bobo on the reverse. Gauthier decked out her home with Oriental furnishings, had a large collection of batik cloth and characteristically dressed in flowing batik robes and heavy Oriental jewellery. One of Gauthier's accompanying pianists for her North American tours was fellow Canadian Colin McPhee, later to achieve fame for his interpretations of Balinese gamelan music for western instruments. It is likely that Gauthier was a major influence on McPhee's decision to study in Bali (Turbide 1986).

America

The most active domain for inventing Java though was in the work of interpretive dance artists. Many of the ‘exotic’ dancers performed under the rubric of ‘Javanese’ or ‘Balinese’ in music-hall or variety show settings for the masses. These same dancers also worked in film. Most of the exotic dance made little attempt to be faithful to any original sources. Dances mixed cultural signs to present alluring impressions of the strange. The sign of the Orient allowed for the imagination to run wild. Movement, costume and music from many lands, including lands of the imagination, freely mixed.

Not everyone reacted looked benevolently on the Oriental fantasy impressions of Java. Edward Gordon Craig, in a book review of the French edition of Th. B. van Lelyveld's Dance in the Javanese theatre (La Dans dan le théâtre Javanais), registers a complaint against all ethnic dance tailored for the music-hall stage.

What would the Scotch say, for example, who know how to dance their reel, if the silly sort of imitation Scottish dance that we see at a music-hall were to be held representative of their grand national dance? What is the good of having bled with Wallace if, some five hundred years later, your descendants, ‘the Sisters Wallis,’ become a side-show with a dancing bear?

(Craig 1932: 430)

Craig championed the un-westernised authenticity of Javanese court dance, which he held up as a remedy to ‘our fraudulent civilization’ (432). There were precious few opportunities for seeing such ‘authentic’ dance outside of Java, however: Craig's impressions are based entirely on the words and pictures of Lelyveld.

Early purveyors of ‘Javanese’ and ‘Balinese’ dance in America were Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn, who created ‘Javanese’ dances as early as 1915 for their dance company, Denishawn. St Denis was known in her youth as Ruthie Dennis and began her professional career as a protégée of the theatrical impresario David Belasco. Her first major work, Egypta (1905), was inspired by an advertisement for a brand of Turkish cigarettes called Egyptian Deities and the ‘Nautch dancers’ of Coney Island.

The first Indonesia-oriented work created by Denishawn was a short solo work for Ada Forman entitled Danse Javanese, choreographed by Ted Shawn for the 1915–1916 Denishawn concert tour. It was an attempt to convey something of the flavour of Java to an American audience who had read about Javanese dance from European sources but had, almost without exception, never seen any performed.

In the […] Javanese dance, Miss Forman's profile under a curious headgear that emphasized it; her slender body; her skirts now clinging and now parting; and the angular or undulating motion of her arms and hands did summon a little of the illusion that stirred Catulle Mendès and Hugo Hofmannsthal to fervid prose when such dancers descended of old upon Paris or Vienna. Now and again, Miss Forman's small sharp features, her intent glance, her rigid and distended body and the fine angles of her arms – and hands – all in profile upon the air rather than against a ‘drop’ that had no kin with them – did carry the exotic suggestion of a gentle and dreamy dancing in relief rather than in the round. At least it was unusual to see and it bore out what little to Western imaginations the designation suggested.

(Parker 1982: 87)

The history of Danse Javanese reveals much about the ways that ‘Javanese’ work was developed and circulated.

When he [Shawn] choreographed his dance film [Dances of the Ages] in 1913, he created a dance to Hellenick's Marche Indienne and later rearranged it for Norma Gold as Zuleika. After he joined St Denis, Shawn taught the same dance to Evan-Burrows Fontaine and called it Danse Egyptienne, then reworked the dance to add more difficult steps for another dancer, Psychema (Winifred Faire). Psychema left St Denis at the close of the 1915 season, and Shawn passed the dance on to Ada Forman, who performed it as Danse Javanese on the 1915–1916 tour.

(Sherman 1979: 129f )

Some years later, a critic for Variety accused Shawn of having stolen the dance from Faire, who was then performing under the name of Lubowska as an exotic dancer in vaudeville. This trouble was compounded when Evan-Burrows Fontaine claimed she was the dance's creator (Shelton 1981: 130).

Balinese fantasy, created in 1925, provided a striking poster for the 1926-1927 Denishawn tour, and was the basis of a later St Denis solo entitled The Balinese.

Denishawn visited Java in 1926, as part of their world tour. They attended performances and actually studied, for the first time, under Javanese dance masters. A number of dances were created using Javanese motifs and materials, most famously the solo performance A Javanese court dancer (1926), based on the classical serimpi dance. ‘Using traditional Javanese costumes and Javanese music, it ended with a pose most uncharacteristic of Java – Miss Ruth gracefully reclining and languidly tossing her sampur (the ubiquitous Javanese dance scarf) over her shoulder on the final gong’ (Burton 1983: 8). The more authentically Asian dances that Denishawn created after its Asian tour were less successful with American audiences and it was not long after that the company disbanded.

Modern dancers in the age of Denishawn often had a background in ballet but were not trained rigorously in any particular technique. This allowed them to insert themselves into many possible choreographic scenarios. For example, Joyzelle Joyner (1905–1980), an Alabama-born ‘cyclonic dancer’ along the lines of Loie Fuller, was called in ‘to interpret a Javanese dance to blend with the locale of the setting’ of The Sea Beast, a 1926 loose adaptation of Moby Dick, starring John Barrymore. ‘Receiving the order just two weeks in advance of the run of the picture caused Joyzelle to undergo strenuous training for a dance altogether different than she had ever attempted before.’ Her dance prologue nonetheless ‘scored quite a hit with the record-breaking audiences’ (Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1926).

The extent of the integration of pseudo-Javanese and Balinese dance into modern choreography is evidenced in Martha Graham's notebooks (Graham 1973). Graham's early training was in the Denishawn School, and she performed with the company until 1923, when she left for the Greenwich Village Follies. Ex-Denishawn dancer Ada Forman was already performing in it. One of Forman's acts involved her doing a ‘Javanese’ dance alongside a puppet, representing herself in Javanese costume. Graham did not go to Asia until the 1950s. This did not prevent Graham from choreographing Scene Javanese for a show directed by Robert Mamoulian in the 1920s (Wheeler 1999: 44). Graham's choreographic notes are liberally peppered with phrases such as ‘Bali attitude,’ ‘Bali turn,’ ‘Bali arabesque,’ ‘Javanese steps,’ ‘Javanese foot movement’ and simply ‘Bali’ or ‘Javanese’ for short. She speaks of herself in these same notebooks as a thief who is not ashamed but glories in pilfering ‘wonderful things of the imagination’ (Graham 1973: 303). Ultimately, all of Graham's work might be characterised as what she calls ‘imaginary gardens’ (Graham 1973: 15):

What is an ‘imaginary garden’?

It is a place more wondrous than any actually beheld garden –

There are no limits to the flowers or trees grown there

or

The possibilities of behaviour there.

Europe

‘Javanese’ and ‘Balinese’ dance were also playing significant roles in dance in Britain and the continent at around the same time. Many dances by Mary Wigman, above all Witch dance (1926), bear clear Indonesian traces. Wigman also imported Indonesian percussion instruments, including knobbed gongs, and commissioned composers to create music with them. Wigman was in fact less removed from Java than many American choreographers. One of the teachers in Wigman's dance school in Dresden was Fred Coolemans, a Eurasian dancer and choreographer of Dutch-Javanese descent.

Figure 3 Takka-Takka and Yoga Taro (a.k.a. Ernest Neuschul) in their interpretation of Javanese dance (c. 1922). Photo courtesy Khalil Norland

Figure 4 Raden Mas Jodjana in Surya Thirta, inspired by Javanese and Balinese motifs (1930). Photo courtesy Parvati Chavoix-Jodjana

Another Eurasian dancer active in the continent was the German dancer of mixed Javanese and Dutch descent who performed under the stage name of Takka-Takka. After seeing Takka-Takka dance in a Prague cabaret in 1918, the Jewish Czech painter Ernest Neuschul (1895–1968) became ‘entranced and enamoured’ with this older woman. They married, Takka-Takka would not give up her career, and Neuschul resolved to become her dancer partner. Neuschul had some experience in yoga and took the name ‘Yoga Taro’. Takka-Takka claims to be a ‘Balinese Princess and Temple Dancer’ (elsewhere a ‘Javanese princess’) while Neuschul is billed as a ‘Native Javanese Dancer’. They tour Europe and North America from 1919 to 1926 (Norland 1988). Little is known about Takka-Takka, but it is clear she aspired to be a member of the trendy social set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. An essay published in German in 1926 describes how Takka-Takka frequented the swimming pool of the Romanic Café in Berlin and took ‘the greatest pains’ to appear as a ‘great lady’ (Quinz 1994). Like Mata Hari, she bartered her Javanese connections into social esteem.

The most famous ‘Javanese’ dancer in Europe, though, was Raden Mas Jodjana, a Javanese aristocratic modernist who lived in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Jodjana was celebrated in France and Germany for his choreographies and mysticism. Not everyone seems to have realised how freely Jodjana interpreted tradition – while he applied the principles of Javanese movement, dressed in Javanese dance costume and used a version of gamelan to accompany his works, his choreography was entirely novel. Jodjana's European performances received occasional attention from the colonial press in Indonesia, but after independence his name and accomplishments were little remembered. He and his wife Raden Ayou Jodjana are perhaps more significant today as founding figures of the European Sufi movement (Jodjana 1981; Bonneff and Labrousse 1997).

One of Jodjana's students was Julius Hans Spiegel (1891–1974) who performed faux Javanese dances in Javanese masks. Jewish and gay, as well as deaf and mute from birth, Spiegel was drawn to perform Asian masked dance as a way to transform and transport himself on stage. He argued that his hearing impairment did not prevent him from authentically interpreting Asian dance as the correspondence between music and movement was not as exact as in the European dance tradition (Volta Review, 1932).

Japan and India

There were also Japanese and Indian proponents of faux Javanese and Balinese dance.

Michio Ito, a Dalcroze-trained Japanese dancer associated with Craig and Yeats, counted Javanese dance among his specialities. Ito worked as a performer, choreographer and teacher in New York between 1916 and 1929, moved to Los Angeles where he continued to teach and dance, as well as act in Hollywood movies, until he was deported in 1941. Ito's Asian identity made his interpretation of Javanese dance appear more authoritative than other US-based choreographers, and it is likely that Ito's version of Java influenced two of Hollywood's best known choreographers: Ernest Belcher and Lester Horton. Ito founded a dance school in Japan upon his return, and while he never achieved the celebrity he enjoyed as an artist abroad, his hybridised modern-Oriental work is now regaining critical attention in Japan and elsewhere.

Figure 5 Ram Gopal in Javanese dance costume (1946). Photo courtesy South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive

Rabanindrath Tagore visited Indonesia in 1927 and discovered in the court dances of Java (and to a lesser extent, Bali) a model for revitalising Indian dance, which he and other intellectuals viewed as tainted by the morally corrupt influence of devadasi and unworthy of the noble heritage of dance known through statuary and Sanskrit texts. In Tagore's footsteps went a string of Indian dancers and choreographers, all of whom are now recognised as the fathers and mothers of Indian modern dance. Tagore sent Shantidev Ghose, one of the primary teachers and choreographers at his school, to study for two years at the Tejokusumo dance school in Yogyakarta. Mrinalini Sarabhai, also a Tagore follower, studied at Tejokusumo's dance school only briefly, but the experience was significant enough for her to count him among one of her primary teachers.

Nataraj Vashi, also a follower of Tagore, studied dance at the Tejokusumo school as well as in Bali in 1937. One of Nataraj Vashi's dance lessons with I Ketut Mario and his attempt to dance to Balinese gamelan was filmed by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and included in their short documentary film Learning to dance in Bali. Nataraj Vashi later returned to India and choreographed modern dances and dance dramas drawing on ‘dance and music flavours including those from Burma, Java, Bali and Ceylon’ (Kothari 2000: 28). One of those works, titled Nirvana, was set against a backdrop of Borobudur and featured Buddhist chanting.

Ram Gopal was introduced to American dancer-choreographer La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes) in 1937 when she was dancing at Bangalore's Opera House. Gopal had studied kathakali for a number of months at the Kalamandalam school in Kerala and taught La Meri some of the basic elements. She invited him to join her company for the rest of the Asian tour. Gopal studied dance and purchased costumes in Java and Bali. He parted ways with La Meri in Japan, travelled to the United States, and performed a programme of dances that included faux-Indonesian items.

When he went to Europe in 1939, Gopal was introduced to Retna Mohini (a.k.a. Caroline Jeanne de Souza) via a mutual acquaintance from Guimet's Museum of Oriental Art. Retna (or Ratna) Mohini was the Indonesian-born Eurasian wife of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. She had begun studying dance in Batavia in 1933 under Retnowati Latip, a former Rosalia Chladek dancer trained in Dalcroze technique. Retnowati encouraged Retna Mohini to supplement her modern studies with Javanese traditional dance. In Batavia, she studied dance with Kodrat and Wiradat, the younger brothers of Leiden-trained philologist Poerbatjaraka. Ben Anderson, who studied Javanese music with Kodrat in the 1960s, states that ‘Pak Kodrat […] was no less iconoclastic [than Poerbatjaraka], though one of the three most accomplished classical musicians then active [i.e. in the 1960s]. Both were loyal to their tradition, but wholly sharp-eyed about it’ (Anderson 1990: 5). Kodrat and Wiradat were open to working with foreigners; Kodrat had also taught members of Denishawn when the company visited Batavia. It is likely that Retna Mohini also studied at the Tejokusumo dance school.

Retna Mohini's partnership with Ram Gopal involved a two-way flow. Retna taught Gopal Javanese and Balinese choreography, and danced tradition-based Javanese and Balinese numbers to the accompaniment of phonographic recordings in some of Gopal's shows. Retna in turn studied Gopal's adaptations of kathak, bharatanatyam and kathakali. When Gopal went to India in 1939, Retna and Cartier-Bresson followed him, and Retna and Gopal went to Kerala together to study kathakali movement techniques at the Kerala Kalamandalam. Gopal writes in his autobiography that ‘with her extraordinarily pliant and supple body, trained in the strict and hard school of Javanese dance, Retna found that she could quickly master […] lasya, or feminine movements’ (Gopal 1957: 91). Critics recognised that Retna, despite her Asian-sounding name, was not quite an ‘authentic’ dancer. A critic of Ram Gopal's show at the Vaudeville Theatre in London noted that Retna gives an ‘authentic impression of the Orient and works wonders with her arms and fingers’ (Times, 14 November 1939; my emphasis). Nonetheless, Retna was embraced by the public. There is even a story that Jean Cocteau knelt down before Retna after a performance with Ram Gopal at the Guimet Museum in Paris.

Retna's career as a dancer did not flourish after her initial success as Ram Gopal's partner. Her last major public appearance as a dancer seems to have been a 1947 performance of four Javanese dances with Soekaro and Pamoedjo to Balinese tradition-based music by Colin McPhee as part of a programme by the Ballet Society at the Hunter College Playhouse in New York, under the direction of George Balanchine (Helmi 1997).

Ethnological dancing

‘Javanese’ and ‘Balinese’ dance created by Mata Hari, Denishawn, Yoga-Taro and Takka-Takka, Michio Ito, Nataraj Vashi and even Raden Mas Jodjana were intended to be appreciated as theatrical dances. Occasionally these artists were integrated into educational contexts, as when Mata Hari was called upon to illustrate a lecture for Paul Olivier. But above all they performed in order to entertain. The dances were fantasies or impressions of the Orient fitted to the tastes of the time and were not intended to be taken as bona fide cultural objects.

This attitude to Asian performance underwent an important shift starting in the 1930s as Javanese, Balinese and other Asian dance forms were being seen increasingly as educative windows onto other cultures that could serve to bring understanding of the lifeways of other people. This was marked institutionally by the ethnological dance programme ‘Around the World with Dance and Song’ founded in 1939 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a related 1942 New York seminar on the function of dance in human society directed by Franziska Boas.

The practitioner at the forefront of this shift in sensibility was the Texas-born dancer La Meri, whom we have already met in relation to Ram Gopal. La Meri claims to have coined the terms ‘ethnological dance’ and ‘ethnic dance’, linking embodied participation and representation of foreign cultures to the social science of anthropology. She pursued dance studies in many cultures over the course of her long career. Her greatest expertise was in Indian and Spanish dance, but she also had dances from Java, Bali, China, Japan, Burma, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico and other countries in her repertoire. She reproduced more-or-less faithful reproductions of dances she learned during her touring as well as adapting techniques from them to create her own works. Her appreciation of dance was not purely technical, and her aim was not to entertain, but rather to open doors for intercultural communication.

Can you watch the Javanese dance without feeling a strange, new calm envelop you? This is a choreography with an unequalled power, for it carries a quasi-hypnotism in which watcher and dancer seem to leave themselves behind, and lift their astral bodies to move in some suspended place between heaven and earth. But we are afraid of this hypnotism, and we squeeze our eyes shut like frightened children and whine, ‘I don't like it! It isn't exciting!’ It is exciting; but exciting on a far higher plane. But our fear has made us intolerant and unfriendly.

(La Meri 1951)

Figure 6 Xenia Zarina in Javanese dance costume (c. 1940). From Xenia Zarina, 1967, Classic dances of the Orient. New York: Crown, p. 128. Courtesy Crown Publishers

Figure 7 Xenia Zarina in Balinese dance costume (c. 1940). From Xenia Zarina, 1967, Classic Dances of the Orient. New York: Crown, p. 152. Courtesy Crown Publishers

La Meri wrote prodigiously and was arguably more important as an educator than as a performer herself. At her first appearance in London in 1936, the Times noted that there was some ‘ethnological interest’ in her reproductions of traditional dance.

An average audience asks, however, for other interests than that, and they are inadequately provided for, partly because, in spite of the care with which she has obviously studied the dances, she has not sufficient personality to give them individual character, and partly because many of the dances are community dances and not solos. A Sioux Indian war dance becomes meaningless and silly when executed by one dancer.

(Times, 3 March 1936)

At La Meri's second London appearance, in 1939, the Times admitted that she was ‘undoubtedly clever in her versatility’ but that she lacked ‘authenticity and conviction’ (Times, 25 January 1939). La Meri nonetheless succeeded in demystifying the dances of ethnic others, and had a remarkable ability to break down complex dance sequences into steps that could be learned and taught (Ruyter 2003).

La Meri paved the way for many other dancers. One of these was the Russian-born dancer Xenia Zarina (1905–1967) (Zarina 1967; Aulestia n.d.). Zarina started studying dance as a child in Russia and continued her studies after her family migrated to the United States when the Russian Revolution broke out. She danced with the Chicago Opera Civic Ballet and moved to Mexico in the early 1930s. Between 1936 and 1947 she travelled to India, Thailand, Cambodia, Java, Bali and Japan, and studied traditional dances of each land. In Java in 1938, she studied serimpi at Tejokusumo's dance school. In Bali the same year, she focused her studies on legong. One of her main teachers was I Nyoman Kaler, who achieved fame after independence as one of the founders of KOKAR (Denpasar's conservatory for the arts) and the creator of diverse new dances such as tari badminton – the badminton dance (Ayu Kusuma Arini 2004). With her in Indonesia was S.M. Milevitch, her pianist-composer, who notated Javanese and Balinese dance melodies so that Zarina could perform to live musical accompaniment away from Indonesia. Like La Meri, Zarina was perhaps more important as an educator than as a performer, but she continued to perform actively as a soloist and with her students in Mexico under the stage name Seiko Zarina until her death.

This shift from theatrical dance to ethnic dance did not occur overnight. For some two decades both theatrical and ‘ethnological’ Javanese and Balinese dance could be found in the same movie theatres and stages.

The year 1952 represents a watershed. It was in 1952 that a large-scale Balinese dance group toured the United States, produced by John Coast, an Englishman who had worked for the Republican government during the Revolution. While Coast rounded up many of the principals of the famous Balinese troupe sent by the Dutch to the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, every step of the tour was freighted with Indonesian government involvement who wanted to insure that the new nation was properly represented.

The group arrived in Hollywood during the filming of the Hope and Crosby vehicle, Road to Bali, and spent a day on the set. Photographs and John Coast's account of the visit indicate the group thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Representations of Balinese dance in Road to Bali are hokum, and though Devi Dja appears in it as an uncredited extra, the only dance scene that has any clear trace of Balinese traditional movement is Dorothy Lamour's first entrance. This was intended by the film's producer, who was sensitive that postcolonial politics made the sort of ethnic spoofing of previous Hope-Crosby films unacceptable.

‘They're always “On the Road” to Bali, but Bali itself won't be shown,’ he explained. ‘The reason is that our political relations with Indonesia are too touchy. We don't want the picture to do anything that would make them worse. Likewise the villain, played by Mervyn Vye, will be a native of unidentified nationality. Censorship has gotten to the point where the only villain you can identify on the screen is an American’.

(Associated Press, 1952)

This was in fact the last of the Road films: the only place left that the film's producer imagined possible for a setting was outer space. The Balinese dancers coming from Indonesia entered into the spirit of Bali-but-not-Bali fun, cutting a rug with Hope and Crosby on set. The fun was not shared equally by Coast, however, who was being plagued by Indonesian politicking and the loss of his authority over the troupe. Some weeks later, he withdrew from the project and handed the troupe's reins over to an Indonesian national (Coast 1953).

Love Island, a film that came out the same year as Road to Bali, tells the rather more melodramatic story of an American pilot who crashes on Bali during Word War II and falls in love with a local girl (played by Eva Gabor). There are Balinese dance sequences and depictions of Balinese ritual in this movie – but all of them are actually documentary footage filmed in Bali inter-cut into the film, allowing I Ketut Mario to appear as a character! The grain of the film stock is noticeably different – a strange interpolation in an otherwise very conventional melodrama. Juxtaposed with Road to Bali, the melodrama sends a clear message. It is acceptable to pretend to dance Balinese in a ludic manner, but any serious representation of Bali must be handled by absolutely authentic performers.

Exotic dance of the sort that freely imagined Bali and Java continued to be performed in Europe, North America and other parts of the world after 1952. The most important site of this might be the burlesque dance, where exotic plumage is used to market titillation. But Indonesian independence brought about a decline in the presence of ‘Java’ in international modernism. Critics frowned, for example, on the ‘Java’ of Leticia Jay and her West-East Dancers. From the early 1950s on, Java is now firmly a part of Indonesia, and it can be less freely imagined as a subject of performance by non-Indonesians (and perhaps Indonesians alike).