Beyond Sugarplum Fairies

Eko Supriyanto’s show at Highways last summer was in many ways an experience superior to his mid-November concert in UCLA‘s Kaufman Hall -- not least because the insulated space cast everything into the mold of student work. Appropriate, perhaps, given that it was Supriyanto’s last degree hurdle for the Department of World Arts and Cultures MFA program. That program encourages students to mine their cultural heritage while studying with two of the best and most daring choreographers in Los Angeles, superpostmoderns Victoria Marks and David Rousseve. While such fusion work presents a host of questions often volleyed back and forth among critics (does employing the trappings of culture constitute artistic advancement, or is it simply fetishizing ethnicity?), the program has recently produced a spate of young choreographers (including Sen Hea Ha and Parijat Desai) who are infusing the local dance scene with intriguing possibilities.

This concert, Mata Hati (Mind‘s Eye), hewed close to Supriyanto’s roots in classical Javanese court dance, with an onstage Balinese gamelan that often competed with the dancers while providing a dramatic arc for the dances. These were cut from the same compositional cloth, with long threads of movement unspooling along geometric patterns only to retract again to a central still point. In the solo From the Time Piece, an old man‘s reflections on his lost youth provided the figurative frame from which sequences unfurled; in A Year Book, two women played out an ambiguous relationship around and atop the central point of return, two chairs from which they vaulted themselves or pushed each other. Again and again, brief, sudden explosions of activity erupted, then subsided into meditative calm, marked by a subtle glance, a gentle unfolding of a palm. While the work as a whole left much to be desired, Supriyanto is an arresting performer and is worth watching as he continues to develop a unique voice.