Melati Suryodarmo and Alessandro Sciarroni Moving Within Patriarchy

Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo and Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni don’t seem to have much in common beyond their shared success on the international artistic scene. Suryodarmo’s conceptual pieces stage restrained or nonprofessional dancing and physically awkward or thwarted bodies, such as in her famous piece Exergie – butter dance (2000) where she danced in high heels over blocks of butter. By contrast, Sciarroni enjoys showcasing the physical prowess of his skilled dancers, an aesthetic that won him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the Venice Biennale. Chance happened, however, that I saw Suryodarmo’s Sweet Dreams Sweet and Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me one after the other at the Kyoto Experiment festival in October 2024. My experience of the two shows could not have been more different. It was painful to endure the three hours under a hot sun watching twenty-eight young women in matching white outfits moving excruciatingly slowly and doing little. Next, it was a half hour of pure joy to watch two colorfully dressed young men dance energetically while smiling and gazing into each other’s eyes. Yet the two shows are not so much opposite as complementary. Both Sweet Dreams Sweet and Save the Last Dance for Me draw on their makers’ cultural heritage in echoing the patriarchal local traditions of Muslim Java and Catholic, Northern Italy, respectively. Suryodarmo and Sciarroni, though, articulate markedly different relationships to their cultural baggage, particularly around the issue of patriarchal domination.

Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini in Alessandro Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me, 2024.
Photo by Ryo Yoshimi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

Sweet Dreams Sweet was staged outdoors, on the Rooftop Garden of Kyoto City Hall, where the twenty-eight performers grouped in duos slugged along the footpaths crisscrossing the benches and well-tended shrubbery. The audience had complete freedom of movement amid the scenery that included the completely silent and barely kinetic statuesque human figures, and were encouraged to take breaks as needed during the challenging durational performance. The performers were young women living in Japan who responded to an open call completed by a contingent of female art students. Suryodarmo trained the performers during a workshop on how to use their bodies as sculpting material. All the performers were dressed identically in white from head to toe: opaque stockings, midi pleated skirt, white long-sleeved button-down, topped by a scarf reaching the midsection that covered the entire head and face, hiding from view all facial features. Reminiscent of schoolgirl uniforms and echoing the full niqab, the costumes erased all physical markers, rendering the women uniform and virtually indistinguishable. Well, almost, because the only piece of visible skin, their hands, hinted at the existence of persons both in their physiognomic variations and in the varied tending to their nails topped or not with different nail polish colors.

With these simple yet loud staging choices, Suryodarmo clearly criticizes patriarchal societies that discriminate against, objectify, and deny women personhood from their early infancy and the school benches. Dealt with in bulk, women are silenced, rendered invisible, denied choice and personhood. The only thing they can all do and are all encouraged to do is hinted at in the one identical prop per performing pair: a little tin tub filled with blue water that they move around, and occasionally dip in a hand, a foot, a corner of clothing as representations of washing, cleaning, and household domestic chores. Besides such movements and the slow walking around and carrying of tubs, the repertoire of actions remains narrow throughout, since there’s nothing much that these trapped and stunted girls can or are allowed to do. There’s slow motion lying down, crouching, stretching, hands reaching towards something that’s not there, out of their grasp. The most dramatic moments, of a hand daring to graze another, of a foot tentatively reaching for another foot, do not add up to develop a narrative, but end inconsequentially as fragile and ephemeral traces of yearning for an otherwise. The blue that stains their dipped-in feet and edges of clothing also does not accelerate into momentous staining of the white in acts of full resistance against imposed purity and anonymity but remains restrained, measured, and demure. The three hours, three decades, three hundred years are suffered in silence.

Sweet Dreams Sweet ushers its audience into the dulled lives, forbearance, and swallowed sorrow of women in patriarchal societies where domination is not just about the overt and covert violence exerted by men, but also the oppression of women by other women, the insensitivity to an outstretched hand, the willed ignorance of others, the compliance into silence and collusion with the silencing. Even though the piece was originally performed in a different country in 2013, more than a decade ago, its relevance sadly hasn’t decreased. Any spectating woman, be they European like myself, or Japanese, or from virtually any other region in the world, can still know and feel in her bones what Sweet Dreams Sweet talks about. On the other hand, however, the discourse around patriarchy has become more nuanced, particularly in considering the intersectionality of gender issues with other forces of oppression. In its single-minded feminist critique, Sweet Dreams Sweet does reveal its age. Some measures were taken to build on the performance’s discourse. One of the Kyoto Experiment directors said that the chosen venue, the city hall rooftop, served the project both pragmatically, given its open air and open space nature, and symbolically. Local and global politics in cahoots with the private business and finance sectors operate with inherent discrimination along divisions across gender, sex, race, and class.

Melati Suryodarmo, Sweet Dreams Sweet, Rooftop Garden of Kyoto City Hall, Kyoto Experiment 2024.
Photo by Yuki Moriya. Courtesy of Melati Suryodarmo and Kyoto Experiment.

After the ordeal Suryodarmo put me through, merely walking into the air-conditioned, spacious room at the Kyoto Art Center and hearing the first accords of Save the Last Dance for Me’s musical score brought me relief. Two performers, Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, entered the wooden, lacquered square space delineated on all four sides by the audience, and began dancing, clasping each other in the classic European heterosexual ballroom dancing position, taking the preset, repetitive steps along the four lines of a smaller square within the stage. The program notes inform that Save the Last Dance for Me explores a nearly vanished popular tradition that emerged in Bologna in the 1900s: the polka chinata, or crouched polka. The dance’s distinguishing trait is the fact that it is performed by two men within the context of a rigid patriarchal morality that forbade unmarried men and women from dancing together. As such, the dancing pair of eligible bachelors would dance a polka together that differs from other polkas mainly in the added acrobatics of inserted moments of vertiginous spins. The dancers clasp each other’s arms tightly, bend their knees, and whirl together at a dizzying speed. The display of this physical prowess was designed to impress the virgins watching from the sidelines.

Borzillo and Giannini entered the performance space dressed in costumes, styled by Ettore Stagni, paying homage to twentieth-century Italian masculinity: form-fitting, thin wool pants paired with flowy, silky button-down shirts, elegant, leather shoes and outfit-matching socks. An enjoyment of style and adornment manifest in the color coordination (both for the individual outfits and their complementarity, one being dominated by warm earth tones, the other one by cool, sea colors), the discrete ruffles on one shirt and the Versace-like print of the other shirt, the belt buckle studded in turquoise. Thus, the two young men strutted in confidently and gloriously and took their positions. As an encore, after the audience applause, Borzillo and Giannini danced for a couple of minutes the polka on the traditional lively, boisterous music. The coda showed that the performance employed exactly the same moves, but the way in which they were explored and built up over half an hour resulted in a different feeling performance.

Key to the transformation is Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou’s musical score. It begins with a strong beat that updates the polka rhythm to contemporary soundscapes and underscores the dancers’ repetitive steps along the inner square’s four lines. The sound’s starkness underlines the steps’ calculated precision and repetitiveness. The rigidity of the first scene and the performers’ concentration and aloofness in Save the Last Dance for Me echo ballroom waltz. Yet the dramaturgy of the piece stories how the two figures turn the strictness of the rules into the terrain in which they find freedom. When the piano dropped onto the beat along with the first smile on their faces, the moment hit me so hard I teared up. As the music builds and swells, so do the dancers look at each other and smile at each other more, their movements remaining just as polished and acrobatic, but less stiff and rigid, as pleasure in the dance and in each other takes over. It’s as if they truly discover the dance only together, as an affectionate couple. The dance first allows them to discover their partners, which in turn leads them to discover themselves and their desire. Uncloseted desire morphs the patriarchal dance into a celebration of gayness.

Needless to say, the prolonged close bodily contact, the deep physical reliance on each other to perform the spins, the clothes, the panting and sweating, the intense gazing into each other’s eyes and the flirty smiling mount an atmosphere of sexual tension. Sciarroni, however, chose not to diffuse the tension in any physical fulfillment of gay desire, such as a kiss, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. The obvious denouement of this dramaturgy is missing, perhaps to make the piece palatable to a wider audience. Such as practicing Catholics. Maybe it is a strange gesture of respect towards a tradition steeped in policing affection. It comes as no surprise that intensely patriarchal cultures and subcultures that loudly proclaim and impose official heteronormativity are simultaneously steeped in homosociality and homoeroticism. By amplifying the latent homoeroticism that was there in the tradition, but not going as far as making it fully explicit, Sciarroni still respects to some extent patriarchy’s double-speech. Or perhaps undercutting overt manifestations of queer desire, the joy remains “untainted” by sex (hint at Catholicism again) and thus more infectious across phobic lines. Like many in the audience, I couldn’t help smiling along with the performers, deeply touched. If the performers had kissed, I wonder how many spectators would have smiled more and how many less. Sciarroni avoided this emotional scission and conceptual amplification.

Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini in Alessandro Sciarroni’s, Save the Last Dance for Me, 2024.
Photo by Ryo Yoshimi. Courtesy of Kyoto Experiment.

In the talkback immediately following Save the Last Dance, Sciarroni, Borzillo and Giannini again curiously avoided discussing anything related to homosexuality. Instead, they talked about the polka chinata and gave a few technical indications of how they extended a few minutes of a folk dance into a half-hour performance. Sciarroni said that the gaze helped construct a dramaturgy (of a love story, I assume, but that part wasn’t mentioned) where there was none in the source dance. I find it hard to believe that Sciarroni is not fully aware of the polka chinata’s obvious dramaturgy as a wooing event in a deeply heteronormative and patriarchal culture. The multiple erasures, historical and cultural in nature as well as sex and gender related, operative in Save the Last Dance for Me need to be enforced in order to render the performance somehow celebratory both of a homophobic tradition and of gayness. The detournement of a patriarchal mating tradition into a homosexual love story is beautiful and moving, but if this concept is not tended to and recognized as such, but stashed away behind the pure emotional power of the piece, the performance remains rather glib. The attempt to portray this love story in universalizing terms that anyone can relate to by wiping away the particularities of twentieth-century gay relationships dishonors those very lives finding love on the margins of the society that danced the polka chinata.

Other figures on the margins instrumental to the dramaturgy of the polka chinata ignored by Save the Last Dance for Me are the young women. In introducing the adsorptive gaze into each other, Sciarroni instituted a dramatic fourth wall that replaced the traditional heterosexual, interactive gaze between male performer and female spectator. Sciarroni went against the tradition to introduce sustained eye contact between the male dancers, but also severed the eye contact with, the reference to, and the implied presence of women. As such, the historical women watching the performance are once again reduced to the ghostly, silent figures revealed by Suryodarmo in her piece. Sweet Dreams Sweet and Save the Last Dance for Me are complementary pieces because, despite the cultural differences, they depict a similar patriarchal world, but from a feminine passive role on the one hand versus a masculine active position on the other. Suryodarmo and Sciarroni’s pieces feel opposite not only because of the starkly different appearance of the performers, the antipodal movement styles, and a building-up, action dramaturgy versus a flat dramaturgy where nothing ever happens. A crucial contrast appears between the young women’s feeble, continuously thwarted attempts to connect against the young men’s possibility for intense and sustained physical connection and mental accord. Suryodarmo presents isolation and marginalization as systemic, whereas Sciarroni depicts them as surmountable. The triumphalism of the latter seems unearned because of the multiple omissions.

My experience of Suryodarmo’s Sweet Dreams Sweet and Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me wouldn’t have been as stimulating if I had experienced them separately. The two performances magnify each other’s strengths as well as weaknesses. Save the Last Dance for Me is a feel-good story that’s almost embarrassed with its lack of sustained interest in a conceptual, social critique. Sciarroni overcompensated in the talkback by discussing tradition as inspiration and defending his aesthetic approach to it as not necessarily reactionary. Suryodarmo, by contrast, occupies by default a politically conscious position critical of tradition and societal practices. Sweet Dreams Sweet’s concept is so crystal clear that I didn’t need three hours to connect my understanding of it to the experience woven by the piece. In serving the needs of a straightforward, familiar concept, perhaps too well-known by 2024, Sweet Dreams Sweet’s rather bland emotional texture offered nothing particularly new to chew on. Yet whereas Sciarroni enclosed his performers so well within the opaque four walls of the performance, Suryodarmo’s open space staging remained permeable from the outside. The margins became visible, and these margins were populated by men. As parts of the Kyoto City Hall were in renovation, for large stretches of Sweet Dreams Sweet audiences could hear and see a group of construction workers laboring on the adjacent rooftop. Inadvertently, the occurrence enriched the piece with considerations of race and class, encouraging reflections on how artmaking positions itself in a never simple to parse social field.

This 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.