Artists Report: Mugiyo Kasido
LUANG PRABANG REPORT
For the last three years, I was really interested and concerned with children world, especially in dance field, although our participation in this field was only in the improvement program of children appreciation toward dance world. In Indonesia, students from the elementary school to the junior high school were learned about art subject consist of dancing, playing music, and painting. Even though the portion of time for this subject was so limited, yet they would be able to learn it outside the school times. However, I could see that this subject was oriented in delivering the dance material only and most of these materials were in the traditional art. I strongly believe that such kind of condition could be worse day by day if there was no balancing effort to reconstruct such situation. Regarding such background we tried to establish a balancing activity in improving children appreciation in art by introducing and inviting them to know better about stage world, and collecting new insight about the outer world beside what they have already got from their own school.
Luang Prabang is a new place for me which is fully completed
with art _expression. Here, I could see the perfect combination of the daily
life, spiritual and art life into a perfect traditional harmony. Although
their traditional life strongly influenced their character, yet I did not
see any kind of primordial feelings appear in their attitudes either for
the common people or the art community here. I strongly believed that this
condition would play very important role in the continuity of the exchange
program in Luang Prabang.
When I was joined with the exchange Program in Luang Prabang, I was not
really sure that this program would be success since our action was still
limited in how do we improve children appreciation in dance.
I began with the agenda that have been already settled before by the committee by conducting a dance workshop for the children. I was really surprise with the fact that they have amazing capability in appreciating the art. In fact, they had great enthusiasm and curiosity in art. They even were able to play mask characters with their own interpretation and courage in their free and natural _expression. Considering such kind of condition, I had an idea of creating dance performance in the theme of children. For the story ideas, I probably considered with the Indonesian original children tales adapted with Luang Prabang culture. I strongly believed that these tales would be adaptable in Luang Prabang culture since the substances of the stories were about moral and life education.
However, I could not deny that it was not an easy thing to get involve in children world. It would need a long period of time to understand their world and I believed that not all people had such talent.
Singapore, 10th April 2003
MUGIYONO KASIDO