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 through performance, surveillance, and fragmentation. Performed and conceived by Victoria Kosasie, the work draws on tari Bedhaya—an Indonesian court dance historically performed by women—to question how traditions are reshaped under colonial, patriarchal, and museological gazes.

Trained under the apprenticeship of Galuh Sinta, a professional court dancer from Surakarta, Kosasie performs Tari Bedhaya Pangkur Tunggal, a variant of Tari Bedhaya. In a black-box studio, two master cameras document her performance. Simultaneously, six other performers each use smartphones to track and broadcast one of Kosasie’s limbs, visually fragmenting her body. The installation mimics a museum surveillance room: all footage is live streamed to a remote space (e.g a gallery) with multiple screens, and once the performance ends, the recorded footage loops continuously.

The ambient soundtrack features shuffling feet, brushing fabric, and faint Javanese gamelan music, highlighting the physical labour and texture of performance. Kosasie navigates the dual role of colonial subject and object—those who act and those who are acted upon.

Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the work embraces the distortions caused by mediation, translation, and distance. The ‘Museum’ is presented not as a vessel of stable knowledge, but as a collection of murmurations—echoes of preservation, authenticity, and identity in flux.