Sri Susilowati

Pasadena, CA

Sri Susilowati is a choreographer originally from Java, Indonesia. Her work is grounded in Indonesian art forms as well as training in post-modern dance composition. She creates contemporary works on the subjects of community, gender, and ethnicity through dance and multi-media. Eating Dance (working title) employs contemporary dance and spoken word, along with traditional classical Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese movement vocabularies to tell stories of food ritual for dancers. Using text, video projection, and dance movements, the piece will explore the contrast of how dancers in the United States and Indonesia value food.

Festival Weekend 2 Artist
Performing Thursday-Sunday, November 12-15, 8pm
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“Eating Dance”
Backstage before a recent performance, classically trained Indonesian dancer Sri Susilowati sat eating a large meal. She looked around and saw the other dancers sticking to a few carrots before they hit the stage. Eating Dance is a hilariously clever and exquisitely performed one-woman dialogue that features contemporary dance and spoken word along with traditional Indonesian dance vocabularies to address food rituals and the meaning of food for dancers in Indonesia.

Sri Susilowati is a Performing Diaspora Resident Artist at CountePULSE. See her at weekend 2 of Performing Diaspora, November 12-15. Buy tickets now! As an Indonesian choreographer who has trained in my own country and the U.S.A, I am interested in looking at a social relation from a third world perspective, and in particular a [...]

The process of creating parts of the piece and showing them has been stimulating. At the showing in San Francisco, there were comments on things that surprised me. At one point I finish drinking a glass of wine and someone remarked on the how my exhalation into the glass fogged it up and thought that [...]

The essence of the esthetics of Indonesian dance, and that particularly from the islands of Java and Bali, can be explained through three words: wirama, and wirasa. Wirama means the harmony and internal rhythm of the movement. Wiraga is the intensity and fullness of the movement not in term of its external power, but more along the lines of being filled with chi (in Chinese) or prana (Sanskrit). Soft and delicate movement can be wiraga while movement that is seemingly strong and powerful can lack it altogether. Wirasa is the feeling of the movement. The word “feeling” here is used not in sense of emotion or passion, but in term of the sensation when emotion and mental construct are set aside.