Taman Tirto, village portrait
It’s been a while that Scotia Monkivitch and I wanted to take time to work on performance/movement material. So we jumped at this opportunity to have a residency in Yogyakarta to do some studio work. Training in the morning: kalaripayatt for Scotia and James who accompanied us and is working on his own project, and swimming for me as I am still recuping from my both knees arthroscopy. The first 2 weeks we visited lots of cultural places, galleries and artists and took a guided walk along the Code river.
We are staying in a traditional Javanese wooden house next to a paddy field in the South of the city, in Taman Tirto, Kasihan Bantul. Children helped us to connect with the village life. We invited the community to come on a Sunday afternoon to gather, meet us and make a video portrait, which we used in an installation performance later that week. But first, we gathered again in a former Gamelang room used a hall now, to show the edited video and get people’s feedback.
