Murmurations of Our Dancing Bodies

Moving Image and Performance
13 minutes, 52 seconds
2025

Principle Dancer: Victoria Kosasie
Left hand: Or Segal
Right hand: Oishi Dutta
Left foot: Po Yun Kuo
Right foot: Marleigh Belsley
Hips/core: Olivia DiMichele
Neck: Ece Batur

Crew: J Mina, Theo Chen, Farah Aljindan

Murmurations of Our Dancing Bodies is a live performance and moving-image installation that explores the unstable transmission of cultural tradition under colonial, patriarchal, and museological gazes. The work draws on the historical significance of Tari Bedhaya, a sacred Javanese court dance dating back to pre-colonial times, and how it was framed by the New Order regime (1965-1998) as a cultural commodity amidst the wake of independence. A dance originally performed by women, the regime imposed their own misogynistic narratives onto the dance to create a skewed image of the precolonial, Indonesian woman–assassinating any dancer who refused to cooperate.

To understand the evolution of her anatomy and its ancestral echoes, Kosasie trained in classical Javanese dance for a year under the apprenticeship of Galuh Sinta, a professional court dancer from Surakarta. Kosasie performs Tari Bedhaya Pangkur Tunggal in a black-box studio, whilst six other performers each use smartphones to broadcast Kosasie’s respective limbs onto a single channel. The tracked footage is arranged onto a single-channel video, mimicking a museum surveillance room and visually fragmenting her body. The ambient soundtrack features shuffling feet, brushing fabric, and faint Javanese gamelan music, highlighting the physical labour and texture of performance. Through multiple processes of transmission and translation, the tradition becomes recycled, digested, and taken out of context, where the output is but a murmuration of its predecessor.