Salt

Salt is a mesmerising solo dance performance by leading Indonesian choreographer Eko Supriyanto. His fascinatingly different choreography is accompanied by music by Dimawan Krisnowo Adji- a blend of traditional gamelan and synthesised music. This music, which at times was disturbingly staccato and jarring, was integrated perfectly by Supriyanto to create a sense of unease and rapt attention by the audience.

At opening, the stage is set with bright lights, focused on the audience, with a strip of white cloth which appears luminescent as a fourth wall to the performance area. Supriyanto appears nude, emerging from the depths of the stage, shuffling effortlessly to appear ethereal, weightless and gliding. His rhythmic movements and ability to isolate the muscles of his body is quite transfixing. We see the dancer as a blank palette with which he proceeds to ‘paint’ his journey. As the light fades, Supriyanto appears in a phosphorescent white skirt perched atop a mound of salt.

Here the dance style changes and we see, throughout, his ability to blend classical dance, Jatilan (traditional folk dance) and war dancing, into a journey of his own dance style experiences. This second dance gradually appears harsher as he kicks the white powder in deliberate patterns across a black stage. Supriyanto creates chaotic scatters of white and a haunting cloud of salt that hangs in the air, captured as if in time, by the clever lighting angles. Lighting-red to highlight the harshness and causticity of salt as a substance-also creates a particularly exciting moment within short, sharp, staccato isolations of movement in the dance.

In his final dance, Supriyanto returns dressed in a blue loincloth, dripping with perspiration. This dance is reminiscent of the sea as he beautifully transforms the stage in his shuffling style to a series of life-journey tracks in white.

At the end of the performance, Supriyanto walks behind the stage slowly as the lights begin to dim and the audience breathes back into reality after our time in a dream-like state.

Salt is unlike anything I have seen and whilst difficult at times to interpret the exact meaning of Supriyanto’s choreography, it is certainly an experience. One is carried along through an almost tactile experience, drawn in hauntingly to the dance and at the end left isolated, pondering the journey on which we have been taken.

Shelley Hampton

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