Melati Suryodarmo, Indonesian Performance Art Pioneer: A Poetic Mind Reconstructing the World through the Body

Melati Suryodarmo was born in 1969 in Solo, Indonesia, a historic city known for its rich cultural traditions. Her practice is rooted in Java’s deep animist heritage, yet she expresses it through a highly contemporary body language that has sparked profound reflection on humanity, ecology, and social structures within the global art world. This has earned her recognition as one of the most influential contemporary performance artists and choreographers from Southeast Asia.

Melati’s talent in performance stems from a strong family background: both of her parents were dancers, and she herself trained in dance from a young age. Later, she also studied Taichi and Javanese meditation. In university, she majored in International Relations and was active in the anti-Suharto student movement. Her exposure to Western art began when she studied at Braunschweig University of Art in Germany (1994–2001), where she trained under performance art pioneer Marina Abramović and Butoh master Anzu Furukawa.

Melati Suryodarmo and Marina Abramović (Image provided by the artist)

This cross-cultural experience helped shape her distinctive creative methodology: she blends Butoh’s “dark bodily aesthetics” with the critical lens of European conceptual art, developing a cross-disciplinary practice situated between dance, performance art, and installation. In several interviews, she reflected on how her time in Germany helped her distill Java’s ritual aestheticism into a contemporary artistic language, while also reshaping the philosophical role of the body in performance —an approach art critics often describe as using the “body as a carrier of thought.”

In her 2001 piece Why Let the Chicken Run?, she chased a live chicken around a room in circles, questioning life’s endless pursuits. In The Black Ball (2005), she sat motionlessly for eight hours on a chair mounted high on a gallery wall, holding a black ball in her hands. And in her 2012 work I am a Ghost In My Own House, she wore a plain white robe and stood amid piles of charcoal, using a heavy stone to grind it on a table until it turned to powder. Over twelve hours — without food or rest—the black dust slowly stained her clothes, skin, and face. As she grew visibly more exhausted, audience members came and went. Some stayed with her; others left, unable to bear the intensity. Regardless of their reactions, each viewer became an integral part of the work. Through the act of crushing charcoal—a substance that holds energy—she metaphorically addressed the unavoidable losses and regrets in life.

I am a Ghost In My Own House  (Image provided by the artist)

Another of Melati’s most iconic works is Exergie-Butter Dance (2000), premiered at Berlin’s HAU Hebbel am Ufer. In the piece, the artist wears red high heels and dances gracefully atop a giant block of butter to traditional Indonesian music. At first, her movements are elegant and composed, but as the butter begins to melt, she repeatedly slips, falls, rises, dances again, and falls once more—laying bare this raw, visceral cycle. The work speaks to a deeper truth in life: falling is inevitable, but what truly matters is the courage to stand up again. In 2012, this performance video went viral after being remixed online with Adele’s Someone Like You, gaining millions of views. The New York Times featured her as “one of Indonesia’s brightest artistic stars.” This unexpected viral fame brought performance art into public discourse, prompting broader conversation around what defines the genre.

Exergie-Butter Dance (2000) (Image provided by the artist)

In Melati’s performances, ritual is transformed into a contemporary language and manifested through two central threads of her creative journey: first, a continuous exploration of the body’s physicality, often through long-duration endurance performances—such as Why Let the Chicken Run?, which questions the limits of the body and societal discipline; second, a contemporary interpretation of traditional Indonesian culture, drawing on narrative structures from shadow play and translating Hindu temple sacrificial rituals into performance art in public spaces.

Melati’s artistic footprint spans major contemporary art platforms around the world—from the Venice Biennale in 2003 and the Venice Contemporary Dance Biennale in 2007, to the Singapore Biennale in 2016. But she is more than a creator; she is also a key advocate within Indonesia’s contemporary art ecology. In 2007, she founded PALA and the Undisclosed Territory Festival in Solo, transforming her hometown into an incubator for experimental performance. In 2012, she launched the Studio Plesungan Arts Collective, continually pushing the boundaries of experimental art. As Artistic Director of the 2017 Jakarta Biennale, she introduced the concept of jiwa (“soul”), exploring life force, energy, and the interrelations among individuals, society, objects, and nature—challenging human-centric narratives in art history. From 2022 to 2024, she led Indonesia Bertutur, a state-supported narrative arts biennale, where she continued to foster dialogue across performance, dance, and cross-cultural practices—bringing the spirit of social participation to the forefront as a cultural activist.

Premiered in 2023, LAPSE is a collaborative work between artists from Indonesia, Taiwan, and Singapore. It began as two experimental films before evolving into an immersive performance combining live dance and acoustic installations. At its core is a metaphor of systemic collapse: through the body’s loss of control and subsequent reformation, the piece illuminates the moral decay and ecological crisis of the technological age. If the universe is destined to move from order to chaos, Melati counters this with a refutation—chaos might be a necessary condition for creation. Dancers, with twisted torsos and twitching limbs, press themselves into the floor and represent the fractures of social mechanisms. Meanwhile, Singaporean sound artist Yuen Chee Wai constructs an auditory “orderly chaos” that echoes with the physical tension of the dance.

In LAPSE, Melati weaves a distinctive cross-cultural body language. Indonesian dancer Razan Wirjosandjojo plays a white-furred beast; Mekratingrum Hapsari embodies a human woman; I Komang Tri Ray Dewantara portrays a Tin person, while Taiwan’s Lai Youfong performs as the human male. Each dancer brings their unique bodily practice and flow, intertwining with the unique texture of Java dance. Together, they create collisions of multicultural body languages through the shamanic ritualistic energy.

For Taiwanese audiences, the inspiration of LAPSE lies in its re-definition of “Asianism.” It refuses to orientalize Eastern bodies and instead explores a shared aesthetic nurtured by island geographies. Dancers deconstruct linear time with electronic rhythms, presenting sci-fi soundscapes and weaving shape-shifting relationships between body and environment. The result is a poetic atmosphere suspended within an absurd reality, immersing the viewer in an experience that feels both virtual and tangible. Melati notes, “I want audiences to deeply experience something unique—a true sense of Rasa.” In Indonesian, Rasa encompasses not only feeling and emotion, but also a profound connection between lived experience and the natural order, highlighting the resonance between the audience and the work.

Melati’s work always lingers between the dialectics of destruction and rebirth, tradition and pioneering, the individual and the collective. LAPSE, as a metaphorical theater of contemporary society, invites us to confront the ruins of collapsed systems while offering a glimpse of potential reconstruction. As the global art scene falls into the frenzy of technology worship, Melati uses the body as the medium to prove that the oldest form of performance can still sharply question the most urgent contemporary issues. As she said in an interview: “We don’t need to restrict ourselves to the false dichotomy between tradition and contemporary—the issue is not about two competing parties.” Even LAPSE, she explains, uses animals as symbols rooted in ancient Indonesian cosmology. For instance, the Garuda—a key image in the performance—is both a national and power symbol in Indonesia. She concludes: “Tradition is not exotic, nor is it the enemy. It has always been with us. We should not be restrained by mechanisms—we must reconnect to our tradition, understand ourselves through our cultural heritage, and from there, develop the future of art.”