Working as an independent curator/dramaturg in the field of performing arts, I curated two projects in the past six years (2018-2024). The first, Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange: Wandering Asian Contemporary Performance, is a traveling platform designed to connect two cities in Asia through a set of critical questions. The 2018 edition connected Yogyakarta (Indonesia) and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia); the subsequent and the last, took place in Roxas City (the Philippines) in mid-January 2020 and Naha (Okinawa/Japan), forced to go online in 2021. The second project, The Sea Within (2023-24), was framed under Cruising, a new curator’s residence at the Taipei Arts Festival (TAF), introduced by artist/curator River Lin in his first edition of the festival. These two projects followed a certain trope of curatorial inquiry, in the sense that the first informs the latter, by critically turning the gaze from mega "Asia" arts projects in Asian metropolises, to cities, thus questioning the claiming/projection of (so-called) Asianess, to expand it into the notion of island/archipelago that contextualizes parts of Asia into Oceanic discourse. Both employed the modes of collaborative/collective curating which somehow has become one of the key features within a specific context it is practiced.

A practice sans the name/naming

Curating (dance/performance) is something I stumbled upon. Coming from a peculiar context in which contemporary arts practice was (and in many ways remains) a flux that is still finding its footing within a larger experience in society such as Indonesia, curating was an unnamed practice where modern arts infrastructure, and its instruments are still finding a shape (often blunted by bureaucracy). The national arts policy still very much puts emphasis on either forging a sense of national unity or valuing the arts within the logic of creative economy. Artistically and aesthetically, this makes spectacle the ingrained language of arts "events" as reflected in the recently introduced arts funding. In response to this context, curating—in my personal experience—started as an unconscious act, something that I seemingly did rather instinctively.

The curator as a figure first emerged in the field of Indonesia’s visual arts, with artist Jim Supangkat (b. 1948-) declaring himself as one in 1991. He was actually preceded by the late Sanento Yuliman (1941-1992)—a critic/scholar—who was part of the selection committee for Indonesia in the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane in 1993. In the field of performing arts, the closest word for curator is "artistic board"—indicating a collective instead of a single figure—as it was implied, for example, to the triennial Art Summit Indonesia (1995-2016), then the one and only international festival for contemporary performance, funded and organized by the government. Another example is the Indonesian Dance Festival (IDF), an independent dance-community-run event, which employed an artistic board since its inception in 1992, and started inviting international curators in 2006.

The "stumbling upon" happened with the questioning of curating "Asian" contemporary dance, here curating dance itself had been situated in cross-cultural dialogues.  The invitation came when I was in Beijing from Marie Le Sourd to co-curate the 2nd Asia-Europe Dance Forum in Berlin, pairing with Bettina Masuch in 2004. Back then, "dance" curator was an unheard profession in Indonesia, although a deeper look into the past, the practice itself has always been in place—sans the naming. My positioning was exposed in the German dance scene as an "Asian" dance curator while "Asia" contemporary dance was still an unchartered territory. The basic problem is that contemporary dance in Asia was not only well-mapped but also not so discoursed as in Europe; and this created imbalance (at times tension, too) in this exchange-based platform.[1]

A decade later, in 2014, I returned to Jakarta after years of study, reconnecting with the arts scene in East Asia, especially through TPAM: Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama. I revisited the idea of Asianness, a concept representing the desire to center contemporary performance in Asia, which gained momentum in the early 21st century. The Japan Foundation has led such initiatives since the 1990s, and in 2014, they launched a six-year arts grant scheme tied to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, focusing on Southeast Asia. That year, Yokohama also buzzed with the launch of the Asia Culture Theatre (ACT) in Gwangju, South Korea. Curator Kim Seoung-hee invited six regional curators to collaborate on a season, acknowledging, "I can’t curate this all alone. It’s too big." I was fortunate to serve as one of the guest curators.

Having encountered all these projects around "Asianness" in collaborative curating, back home, I joined the Jakarta Arts Council (JAC)[2] as Head of Programme, as one of a kind unlike any other (see Minarti, 2019). It was a form of collaborative curation by peers from various disciplines and experiences, in a way. At JAC, we saw our involvement as a form of activism: how to integrate the importance of our artistic presence through collaboration in the city that operated more and more towards neoliberalism. In contrast, all those new Asia platforms were clearly production-oriented and thus, market-driven. Their birth somehow signalled a desire to go alongside the European model of theater/festival circuit that is operated through a system of co-production and co-presentation. Meanwhile, Indonesia and most of Southeast Asia—even larger Asian—contexts work on idiosyncratic planes of local cultural politics.

So, what can the act of collective/collaborative curation do in the midst of such differences, when it comes to "curating the Asian"?

Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange: Wandering Asian Contemporary Performance[3]

Amidst navigating through this new Asia euphoria, Japanese producer and curator Akane Nakamura at precog, Melbourne-based Malaysian dramaturg Lim Howngean and I engaged in critical conversations of "doing something" in light of the new Japan Foundation Olympic arts funding scheme aimed at performing Asianness. We brought our respective different experiences as well as anxiety to the table.

As for my anxiety, I remember expressing being rather disillusioned with the market-driven development in big cities in Asia. We decided to design a project moving in the opposite direction. If Asia is a canvas, those mega theaters and projects were the ones swaying big brushstrokes across it, while we were more curious to first look at the finer yet bolder lines of the existing artistic and cultural pulses/processes by connecting two (small, preferably not the capital) cities in Asia—through a series of critical questions. By moving from the notion of "nation" to (smaller) cities, we hoped to understand the complexities of a very particular context/connection in Asia. The platform’s name, Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange: Wandering Asian Contemporary Performance, reflects the intent (of discovering) as well as the form (a traveling one).

Acknowledging the intertwined histories from the past to the most recent, we paid tribute to some linguistic affinity in the region. Hence, the word "jejak" shared by Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) and Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysian) bears a nuance in its meaning. In Indonesian, jejak means footstep while in Malaysian, to step. The Chinese character 旅 is shared by Mandarin hanzi and Japanese kanji, pronounced "lu" in the first and "tabi" in the latter, which means to travel/traveling. The "wandering" is a tribute to the practice of a distant past, i.e. the traveling troupe of early "modern" theaters in the Netherlands East Indies that became Indonesia (Cohen, 2006). We also debated whether to put the Asian before the Contemporary or after; and we somehow settled with the first. It’s strange to now think that if I could turn the clock back, I would have chosen the latter.

We managed to pull off two editions: connecting Yogyakarta (shortened Jogja) and Kuala Lumpur (KL) in 2018 and Roxas City and Naha in 2020/2021 respectively. Starting with Jogia and KL[4], we then examined the commonalities to connect both cities, and we came up with a set of questions around the tradition vis-a-vis modernity as interplayed through performance practices for the first edition; and the impact of American imperialism for the second.

The key step was to collaborate with curatorial partner(s) and/or presenters in each city, those we chose from our closest network (at least one of us knows them rather well). For sure, their trajectory which reflects their politics of engagement in the arts, matters most. In Jogja, we worked with Cemeti: Institute for the Arts and Society, an artist-run space. In KL we partnered with ASWARA (Academy of Cultural and National Heritage) and DPAC (Damansara Performing Arts Center), a private-run space in Selangor (in the capital outskirts).

Jogja and KL have a totally different dynamic and logic when it comes to artistic practice shaped by its milieu. Hence, we purposely designed our program to be small-scale so we could observe the minutiae, allowing intimate conversation and close exchange to root in. For example, we opted for a solo or duet work by Pichet Klunchun and Padmini Chettur, arguably two Asian choreographers who then were most presented in Europe but not so much in Southeast Asia—clearly not yet in both cities. We thought these small works were more relevant to our region than those coveted by the international festival circuit. In Jogja, we even managed to build an accompanying archive exhibition for each choreographer to fill in the context. Thus, we had to work with the artists closely; together, investigating their own trajectory and how to lay it out to the public. The other events focused more on presenting work/research in progress by artists and workshops and discussions (public and closed ones).

The second edition is to connect the context of the Philippines and Okinawa, with a set of questions around the impact of American imperialism. This edition proved to be the toughest project I ever carried out. The curatorial partner, Manila-based artist collective Green Papaya, proposed a particular theme and location, which is the annual reenactment of the 1985 massacre in Escalante, a small rural city on Negros island of Visayas archipelago, by Teater Obrero (Workers Theater). Thus theater and activism became the highlight of this edition with some historical revisiting to the influence of PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association) who introduced theater for grassroot activism in Southeast Asia in the 1980s-1990s.

Howgean resigned, thus I and Akane decided to spend a year researching—by visiting Okinawa and the Philippines at least once, if not more frequently—with the means we found ourselves from various sources, including personal ones. The Philippines was going through extremely rough patches under the rule of President Rodrigo Duterte during which the controversial EJK (extrajudicial killing) was applied, and the Negros Island of the middle Philippines was severely affected by escalated violence of unspoken nature. For safety reasons, we had to detour from the original plan of holding it in the provincial capital of Bacolod City and Escalante (1.5-hour drive) on the island, to Roxas City on Panay Island in mid-January 2020, when the pandemic was looming over.

Geographically, Bacolod City is only 156 km from Roxas City, but the socio-political outlook of these two cities can’t be more contrasting although both islands are part of the Visayas archipelago. Hence, transporting a specific discourse to a different location was challenging, despite the fact it was still in the same country. Such tension was heightened with the contour of the region itself with our trip being clouded by a volcano eruption and a typhoon—which is also an integral part of the experience working in this part of the region.[5]

The pandemic made it impossible to hold the last edition in Naha, with Masashi Nomura as the co-curator, so we held it online in 2021. Curatorially, we tried to playfully use "Zoom" as the medium, making it more three-dimensional by activating the physical sites—a studio in Jogja run by a theater community, the home/office in Manila, the museum in Roxas City and a theater studio in Naha—as locations, designing them to be more spatially engaging. We also played the featured performance—a theater piece—on an adapted screen for the whole week to give viewers enough time to watch, prior to the Zoom event.

The Sea Within

In retrospect, curating for me is always collaborative—whether with (individual) fellow curators or a collective. In Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange, working with curatorial partners for each of the four cities was an inherent curatorial practice. When fellow curator River Lin of Taipei Arts Festival (TAF) invited me to do the first edition of Cruising, a curator-in-residence program he created for TAF, it was already a collaboration from the onset between him and me. I then proposed The Sea Within as a subsequent curatorial inquiry after the Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange. Informed by the experience of co-curating the latter, I invited Watan Tusi (choreographer, Hualien/Taiwan), Ginoe (visual artist, Bacolod City-Manila/the Philippines), and Sayaka Uehara (photographer, Naha, Okinawa/Japan) to work within this project, with research assistant Lin Chihyu (Taiwan) who acted as an interlocutor of the complex local context. River Lin helped shape the framework.[6]

The Sea Within started off with a month's residency in Taiwan in August 2023. I simply offered my curatorial concept dealing with the notions of island/archipelago, and, both together and individually, we roamed around certain cities in Taiwan, meeting artists and communities, collecting and sharing thoughts, impressions and other critical notes in between. The curatorial objective was set to create a "work," but River Lin and I had earlier agreed that the "work" could be redefined and not limited to a "finished" performance. At the end of the residency, our group did a performative research presentation with arts professionals in attendance (guests of ADAM) designed by River Lin himself.

Upon returning to our respective homes, these key five members started working away from each other—the artists on their individual projects—but with an awareness of a shared concern and findings. We met online regularly for eleven months, updating each other on the progress. I soon added an Indonesian artist Densiel Lebang (choreographer, Jakarta) since she already was doing resonant research on the theme on the South Sulawesi island of East Indonesia. These artists brought up research questions and inquiries particular to each locality vis-a-vis the research residency in Taiwan that revealed some threads connecting the past and present of the region: at times harking back to the entangled colonial past (such as the connection of Okinawa and Formosa—to refer them as island/archipelago) or simply unveiling a more organic past encounter, such as between people of those islands in the north Philippines and southern tip of Taiwan, indicated by linguistic affinity and revived skills of boat-making. Such immediate exchange could only be enabled within a collaborative research experience.

Questions around indigeneity as perceived, and culturally politized in the respective national context surfaced too, calling for further inquiry. Island/archipelago sometimes becomes the point of self-identification, such as in the case of Ginoe (of Visayas archipelago) or an embraced worldview such as the case of Uehara (of Okinawa). For Tusi, the relatively new shift of policy that privileges indigenous people in Taiwan doesn’t blur the fact that the subsequent wave of colonization by the American Christian ministry, Japanese and Han Chinese deeply ingrained both in the consciousness of "I and the self " as woven into the daily cultural fabric.

Exactly a year later, at the next edition of ADAM, the three original artists—and Lebangirst joining in the flesh—met in Taipei during the TAF. This time, for two weeks, we were preparing each individual work-in-progress presentation. Like in the previous year, my curatorial proposal was just something to stimulate a conversation for the artists to respond to and expand.

As a result, we transformed a studio to be an imagined archipelago between which the audience could do island-hopping. My role was simply to create and hold the space for in-depth conversation—including in the social space—to take place if not rooted in. This proved to overcome not only the language barrier (English, Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian) but after a year spent working "together," it was almost second nature for us to connect our larger, idiosyncratic contexts of the island/archipelago (of Taiwan, Okinawa, Visayas, South Sulawesi).

It started with Watan Tusi’s solo. He collected the post-typhoon debris on the Hualien beach, from under which he dragged the mythical giant as a metaphor for a hidden if not erased Indigenous narrative. We then moved to the performative photographic installation of Uehara, who extended her travel to southern Taiwan during this trip, retracing Japanese or Okinawan past trails. Towards the end, the signature tune of budots music of the Visayas filled the room, with Lebang volunteering to be a budots dancing girl to accompany Ginoe’s interactive choreography stamp installation, a reference to his growing up learning folk dances through dance notation. It closed with Lebang’s makeshift "ship"—a metaphor for the Phinisi, the Buginese iconic sailing boat of South Sulawesi. She dragged it around, on which top dancer Daniel was balancing. Alongside these performative works, we decided to compile our writing into an accompanying e-book[7], for those interested to know an in-depth context.

In hindsight, my curatorial projects outside Indonesia have always been collaborative (with other fellow curators) since the aforementioned Asia-Europe Dance Forum in 2004. It has been morphing into collective practice in latter cases - more in an organic manner than intended—and Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange (2018-2021) is one of those, especially the Roxas City (2020) edition in which I and Akane Nakamura invited the artist collective Green Papaya to co-curate from scratch. The Sea Within (2023-2024) marks a different turning, firstly from a previous deliberation of the notions of Asia as in a Lacanian desire into Oceania discourse (still) at work. In terms of "collaborative/collective curating," perhaps what was differently exercised in The Sea Within—as a kind of sequel of Jejak-旅 Tabi Exchange—is the fact that the nature of the project started with a collaboration between two curators who created a base for the engaged artists to collectively embody the curatorial framework. If the act of curating is not only about caring for the content but also caring for the context (Fredman as in Eckersall and Fredman, 2021:3), The Sea Within relied on the experience of sharing a common space/time, doing it as a micro-, impromptu collective, since there were various entangled contexts at work with Taiwan’s as the site for the encounter. Naturally, this makes the caring for the ‘structure and the form’ (ibid, 2021), less crucial, at least at that stage of artistic inquiry.


References

Cohen, M. 2006. The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903. Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Eckersall, P., and Fredman, B., eds. 2021. Curating Dramaturgies: How Dramaturgy and Curating Are Intersecting in Contemporary Arts. London and New York: Routledge.

Minarti, H. "Curating Dance in Eur(Asia): Reminiscing 2004." In TURBA (Journal for Curating Live Arts), edited by Dena Davida, 3:2, Fall 2024. New York: Berghahn Journals. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/turba/3/2/turba030202.xml.

Minarti, H. 2019. "Arts versus the City: The Curious Story of Jakarta Arts Council 1968–2017." In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan. London and New York: Routledge.

Minarti, H. 2006. Review of "Eurasia: Second Asia-Europe Dance Forum: Mapping Some Sites of Mis/Understanding," in Wacana Seni: Journal of Arts Discourse, July, vol. 5. University of Penang.

Helly Minarti, Jakarta-born dance scholar/curator in Yogyakarta, rethinks radical strategies connecting practice & theory. Her work explores choreography historiographies & eclectic body knowledge.