Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo

This thesis reads the work of Melati Suryodarmo, an Indonesian artist whose work blends the genre of dance, performance art, and various traditional practices into a visceral expression of the body and its exertion. I contend that Suryodarmo offers a distinctive modification of ideas of presence and...

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Main Author: Kong, Daniel Wei Ming
Other Authors: Chiang Hui Ling Michelle
Format: Thesis-Master by Research
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163949
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author Kong, Daniel Wei Ming
author2 Chiang Hui Ling Michelle
author_facet Chiang Hui Ling Michelle
Kong, Daniel Wei Ming
author_sort Kong, Daniel Wei Ming
collection NTU
description This thesis reads the work of Melati Suryodarmo, an Indonesian artist whose work blends the genre of dance, performance art, and various traditional practices into a visceral expression of the body and its exertion. I contend that Suryodarmo offers a distinctive modification of ideas of presence and sensation that are at the core of performance art and performance scholarship. Suryodarmo centres the body in her work but does so in a less oppositional manner as compared to her forebears. Instead of enshrining the body and the idea of presence as an inviolable principle, her work emphasises the embeddedness of the body in discursive and cultural contexts that are in themselves — essentially shaped by the sensory nature of human experience. In doing so, Suryodarmo crafts a catalogue of work that invests energy into elevating the artistic present and future of performance, drawing in the body’s experience and its ties to more abstract flows of discourse and culture. The thesis charts out Suryodarmo’s method across the themes of body, space, and representation, using a broad variety of critical approaches that sometimes fall outside what is expected of performance scholarship. This analytical diversity responds to the richness of Suryodarmo’s work and her method, which is unafraid to draw from disparate influences and as such demands a degree of flexibility in how she is assessed as an artist and as an articulator of aesthetic concepts.
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spelling ntu-10356/1639492023-03-11T20:16:27Z Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo Kong, Daniel Wei Ming Chiang Hui Ling Michelle School of Humanities michellechiang@ntu.edu.sg Humanities Visual arts and music::Performing arts This thesis reads the work of Melati Suryodarmo, an Indonesian artist whose work blends the genre of dance, performance art, and various traditional practices into a visceral expression of the body and its exertion. I contend that Suryodarmo offers a distinctive modification of ideas of presence and sensation that are at the core of performance art and performance scholarship. Suryodarmo centres the body in her work but does so in a less oppositional manner as compared to her forebears. Instead of enshrining the body and the idea of presence as an inviolable principle, her work emphasises the embeddedness of the body in discursive and cultural contexts that are in themselves — essentially shaped by the sensory nature of human experience. In doing so, Suryodarmo crafts a catalogue of work that invests energy into elevating the artistic present and future of performance, drawing in the body’s experience and its ties to more abstract flows of discourse and culture. The thesis charts out Suryodarmo’s method across the themes of body, space, and representation, using a broad variety of critical approaches that sometimes fall outside what is expected of performance scholarship. This analytical diversity responds to the richness of Suryodarmo’s work and her method, which is unafraid to draw from disparate influences and as such demands a degree of flexibility in how she is assessed as an artist and as an articulator of aesthetic concepts. Master of Arts 2022-12-27T02:36:20Z 2022-12-27T02:36:20Z 2022 Thesis-Master by Research Kong, D. W. M. (2022). Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo. Master's thesis, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163949 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163949 10.32657/10356/163949 en This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
spellingShingle Humanities
Visual arts and music::Performing arts
Kong, Daniel Wei Ming
Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title_full Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title_fullStr Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title_full_unstemmed Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title_short Embodying the performative present in the theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
title_sort embodying the performative present in the theatre of melati suryodarmo
topic Humanities
Visual arts and music::Performing arts
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163949
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