From Hunting Ritual to Installation Art: Tianzhuo Chen and Siko Setyanto’s “Ocean Cage”

Ocean Cage engulfs its audience for almost two hours in a multi-sensorial, immersive performative installation combining visual art, light design, dance, film, video art, sound design, and music. Befitting its inspiration—the ritual opening of the hunting season performed by an indigenous whaling community—director Tianzhuo Chen enclosed the public inside the large South Hall of the ROHM Theatre Kyoto as within the belly of a whale. The spectators walk freely through the crepuscular, atmospheric space, investigating the objects and assemblages strewn through the space (such as a large, suspended gong and a full, gorgeous sail, or islands of sand dotted by colorful flowers and little objects), angling for a good view of the large, cinema-like screen, sitting down to let the sound and imagery wash over them, or following Siko Setyanto’s precipitous locomotion and dance numbers through the space. The lack of clear demarcations between spectating area and performance area emulates the arrangements of ritual practices unfolding across the terrain of a village’s public areas. With the declared intention stated in the program note to offer “a ritual that is a mash-up of modernity and tradition,” Ocean Cage restages and interprets key moments in the Misa Lefa, a ritual festival performed by the small community of the Lamalera on the 80 kilometers long island of Lembata in East Nusa Tenggara of the Lesser Sunda Islands, Indonesia. While Ocean Cage brims with artistic merits, particularly Setyanto’s tour-de-force performance, it also begs questions related to indigeneity, animal conservation, appropriation, exoticization, and festivalization. Due to my whiteness and Europeanness and lack of expertise in fields like animal conservation, I cannot pretend that I can clear a straight path through the complexities of these combined issues. What I can offer, however, are my reflections on the experience processing negotiations between conflicting positions.

Chen and Setyanto approached their material with considerable care and thoughtfulness. Ocean Cage spends time and effort to communicate the Lamalera history, culture, and worldview. In the first part of the performance, black-and-white archival film footage from early anthropological expeditions show parts of the ritual that have by now disappeared, according to a 2023 journal article on the topic signed by Florence Durney, like the ritual sacrifice of a rooster and the smearing of his blood on the boat, or the offerings to the stacked skulls of the elders.[1] Such aspects of the ritual were adapted to accommodate the institution of Catholicism as the official religion on the island. These historical changes are hinted at in the performance through film footage from the streets and churches of the island, which I imagine Chen and Setyanto shot during their research trip to the village of Lamalera. The projected images intersperse with a recorded narrative in Bahasa Indonesia that speaks of history and modern development in a mix of metaphoric and prosaic speech. The past is referred to as the time of song, while the present belongs to motorized boats. Again, I like to believe that some of this text was put together from interviews conducted on-site.

As the performance progresses, the archival research material and the documentary footage give way to artistic and abstract shots (employing slow motion and superimposition) exploring the beach and the ocean’s expanse. A human figure recurs through the images impregnated with the cosmic import of the liminal spaces between earth and water, human and whale realms: Setyanto playing the same roles as in the live performance and dressed in the same costumes echoing the island’s ritual dress. Striking, surreal images show sperm whales, and Setyanto dancing underwater or posing majestically against the terrifying bones in the whale cemetery on Lembata island. Ocean Cage aims to communicate the sense of awe and reverence of the ocean and the whales ingrained in the pre-Christian Lamalera traditions. The performance channels the indigenous awareness of human dependency on larger forces and the subsistence hunting communities’ consciousness of the inseparability of life and death. Ocean Cage weaves together a warm celebration of life and the living with an elegiac, mournful note deploring the inevitability of hurt and a chilling warning of danger and the limits of human agency and understanding. In sum, it bends its ear close to the pulse of ritual.

Chen and Setyanto’s vision for a contemporary artistic interpretation of the form of an old ritual emblematically materializes in choices such as having two live musicians (whose names I couldn’t locate) play on an island of sand versions of traditional musical instruments electronically rigged to produce all sorts of effects. The resulting sound embroiders a club vibe on gamelan music. The desired blend between archaic and modern manifests visually as adding to the analog feel of the filmic footage segments of video art composed digitally with the help of AI software. The vivid, Midjourney-like colors depicting fabulous settings and creatures contrast with the subdued color palettes of the archival and filmed footage. I understand the desire to use video art to depict aspects of immaterial, conceptual planes of belief (the heads of the ancestors, for example, loom large over us at one point in the show), but for me, the digital art is a good instance that illustrates how the mash-up of old and ultra-new is not something easily achievable (and maybe not even desirable). The tackiness and visual clumsiness of the Midjourney imagery have the unintended effect of trivializing a complex system of belief. I wish overall that Ocean Cage presented traces of a more critical interrogation of such terms as “modernity” and “tradition.” Instead of the always dominant notes of embracing the Lamalera worldview (or a particular understanding of it) and eagerly presenting it within the artistic venues of urban culture, I’d have appreciated a willingness to pose difficult questions. Why, for example, are the Midjourney ancestors all depicted as elderly men?

Tianzhuo Chen & Siko Setyanto, Ocean Cage, 2024.
Photo by Takuya Matsumi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

By contrast, Setyanto’s performance merged more seamlessly and harmoniously a traditional Indonesian with a modern movement style. By “modern,” however, read “Western.” Setyanto’s bio mentions his jazz and ballet training after stating as main inspiration “the diversity of Indonesian culture.” On stage, though, Setyanto’s presence is magnetic. He enters the space riding a scooter bedecked with leaves and flowers: a playful and efficient way of establishing from the start the Lamalera society today, still practicing their culture even as it’s being altered and impacted by today’s technology and global markets. Setyanto begins the performance under the guise of the first in a series of three personas he plays through the show. The initial character evokes, in dress and movement, a priest or shaman engaged in a ritual and channeling a spirit. Chenting Yu’s costume design quotes ritual masks by obscuring Setyanto’s face behind an impressive and forbidding collage of fabrics. A red sarong and red flip-flops complete the bare-chested look. I am not at all familiar with Lamalera culture and rituals, but the jerky and precipitous manner in which Setyanto darted through the space reminded me of Balinese priests embodying Rangda, becoming the physical vessel for powerful and dangerous spirits.

Due to the open space configuration of the space and the large number of spectators that followed Setyanto in his peregrinations, I rarely had a clear view of the performer and couldn’t follow many of his actions. I did hear the occasional guttural vocalizations, hisses, and a few shouted words in Indonesian. The key moments in the ritual opening of the hunt stood out, however, such as the unfurling of the sail. I was also able to observe some iterations of a recurring action when Setyanto singled out and approached particular audience members. Many spectators suffered in silence Setyanto’s confrontational scrutiny, and even touch. I imagine that some might have even experienced a shudder at the proximity to a more-than-human character. Yet I also saw white spectators reacting by making light of the moment, managing their embarrassment through smiles and pantomimic emulation of Setyanto’s movements. So I am not sure what Chen and Setyanto were trying to achieve in these staged tête-à-têtes. If the goal was to make the non-Lamalera, non-Indonesian, foreign, and nationally diverse audience of a high art festival somehow feel the meaning of the Lamalera ritual and sense the reverence facing the larger-than-human forces at play, then I can’t say that such a goal is achievable beyond vague intimations. Ocean Cage’s work of contextualization through the setup, the archival and documentary footage, can only graze the shallowest surface of a community’s heritage and a society’s history and culture.

The second part of the performance speeds up the rhythm, intensifies the aural and visual atmosphere, amplifies the hallucinatory imagery, and takes the trance dance to the next level. Setyanto takes on a different persona, one even less human than the first. His face is now visible, but rendered uncanny through a prosthetic cobra sprouting from his forehead. His other features are dehumanized and rendered terrifying. He has yellow eyes, huge dangling ears, golden hair, and blood-red teeth and mouth stained by betel nut. He is wearing only a sarong of leaves and flowers. If the first character was a priest, Setyanto now plays a god, and dances like one. In terms of an interpretation of the Misa Lefa, if the first part of the performance depicts a community starting a ritual led by the priest who performs the ritual actions and incantations, the second part shows the prayers being answered by the spirits.

In the third and final part of the performance, Setyanto plays a Lamalera fisherman going on the hunt, with the spirits’ blessing. At least, this is Ocean Cage’s dramaturgy as I understand it from the non-verbal cues given to me via the dance, costumes, sound, and imagery. Setyanto now appears in human face and form. At the piece’s climax, air begins pumping in a giant inflatable sperm whale dangling from the fly space. At her full, majestic size floating above us, she sways gently back and forth as Setyanto dances adoringly around her. And then he kills her. We watch Setyanto throw the Lamalera traditional bamboo harpoon. Wind machines blow air through the space, the whale bobs vertiginously amidst screeching sounds and a darkness pierced by flashes. The screen shows the dying creature swimming through the bloodied water from the viewpoint of inside the belly of the whale, her gaping mouth framing the image. I appreciate that Ocean Cage does not shy away from depicting the horror of dying and calls upon us to empathize with the whale by placing our perspective enclosed within her body. In a way, the show suggests that we, as spectators and humans, die too with her.

A reconciliation scene ends the performance. Setyanto communicates both grief and hope through an emotionally heavy and heartfelt dance, while singer Nova Ruth comes on stage to hauntingly fill the space with her beautiful, resonant voice. Projected supertitles translate the lyrics. She sings “a prayer for the blessed universe” mentioning in poetic verses the sun and the earth and how “you rise again.” The dead are with us, human and animal, and their sacrifices for the living are acknowledged. “Such a gift,” sings Nova Ruth, and in that moment I did feel both the Lamalera gratitude and celebration of the whales, as well as a sense of gratitude myself for the gifts of dance and song and communion that Setyanto and Nova Ruth were offering.  Yet once the moment’s intensity washed over me, I wondered whether I should be at peace with this offering and its emotional seduction.

Tianzhuo Chen & Siko Setyanto, Ocean Cage, 2024.
Photo by Takuya Matsumi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

I am not sure how much I can speak of appropriation. How entitled are a Beijing director trained in the UK and a dancer from Jakarta to use as artistic material the ritual practices of the Lamalera? How entitled am I, a peripherally European, Romanian critic trained in the US, to criticize an urban Indonesian for drawing inspiration from the culture of a rural, indigenous community? As evidenced above, Chen and Setyanto approached the source material with care. Ocean Cage may not have explained and contextualized well the Lamalera worldview for its foreign audience, but why should it take the pains to do so? Why should the performance even address a white audience and worry about how they might receive it? If some audience members go home with vague impressions of an unfamiliar culture, having merely consumed images and dances as exotic material, is that the fault of the performance? Or should the audience put in the work to question their reception of other cultures, particularly indigenous ones, through the colonial filters deeming the non-Western as exotic and underdeveloped? That Ocean Cage sometimes has the unsettling feel of a colonial exhibition is the fault of the white colonizers who shaped the white gaze into a particular relationship with Indonesian culture.

Yet I still cannot shake the feeling that Ocean Cage remains one note in its stubborn avoidance of challenging aspects, despite its sensorial beauty and emotional weight. One such complex issue pertains to the right of indigenous communities to continue traditions of subsistence hunting of endangered species like sperm whales. With a population decimated by commercial whaling over the 19^th and 20^th centuries and an uncertain future ahead in the context of a climate catastrophe, the estimated 300,000 sperm whales left in the world are currently listed in the red zone as endangered.[2] The International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986, but allows the Lamalera to continue subsistence hunting using traditional methods. Japan left the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and began commercial whaling once again, to the outcry of both international and local animal rights activists. The celebratory performance of whale killing performed in Kyoto, replete with the harpooning of a giant inflatable mammal, seems rather willfully ignorant of the larger contexts of animal conservation and human-animal relations.

Another complex issue is related to the Misa Lefa as a growing tourist attraction, increasingly subject to the “external gazes” of journalists, researchers, tourists, and visiting artists that risk transforming it into a commercial fair, as Durney points out (523). The Lamalera welcome international media in their struggle to build a “case for cultural authenticity and thus their right to hunt marine animals” by allowing the documenting of practices revealing a “historical and spiritual connection to the land, to the ocean, and to marine animals that can stand against an ongoing global discourse that portrays Indigenous marine hunters as people who do not care about the environment or animals” (Durney 522). At the same time, media coverage of the Lamalera often trade in “long-standing and often harmful essentializing discourses about how traditional and Indigenous peoples should act and appear” (Durney 525). To what extent do Chen and Setyanto partake in these harmful simplifications, despite their best intentions?

Arguably, in researching and performing Ocean Cage, Setyanto explores and pays homage to a heritage that may not be entirely his, but that certainly resonates with him as part of the larger Indonesian culture. Perhaps Setyanto has as much understanding of and right to stage the Lamalera performance traditions as I, a Romanian, understand and have the right to stage Shakespeare or Moliere. The crucial difference remains that Shakespeare and Moliere wrote for the professional stage, conscious of making a particular, historically emergent product called a work of art for an institutionalized theatrical market, whereas the Misa Lefa is a ritual with entirely different social, economic, and cultural purposes. I wonder what Catholics would have to say if I, a nominally Christian Orthodox but entirely secular person, would stage a performance aestheticizing and “modernizing” the Catholic mass. Kyoto Experiment is one of the many festivals functioning in the global art market. Any performance showcased at festivals or presented within artistic institutions are, invariably, artistic and commercial products. Presenting Ocean Cage as some sort of a modernized ritual willfully ignores the import of ritual and contemporary art. If it’s true that in many cultures theatre and ritual share a terrain, it’s also true that professionalized artistic performance takes institutional shape once it ceases to be ritual. It is not my place to say whether Chen and Setyanto have the right to use the Misa Lefa as artistic material. I merely wish the two artists had given proof of the difficult negotiations they had to navigate when embarking on such a project and performing Ocean Cage in various contexts.

This review was originally published in ART iT magazine on December 23, 2024, and reprinted with permission.

The review was drafted by the author during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and funded by the European Union.

[1] Durney, Florence. 2023. “Misa, Lefa, Puang: Ritual, Piety, and Performance in Opening the Ocean Season in a Southeast Asian Marine Hunting Community.” Religion 53 (3): 508–27. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2023.2211394.

[2] “Sperm Whale”. National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Mammals/Sperm-Whale#:~:text=The%20sperm%20whale%20occurs%20throughout,feet%20(1%2C000%20meters)%20deep. Accessed 03 Nov 2024.