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MASKS AND MYTHS IN THE ISLANDS OF INDONESIA
19 november 2003 – 29 February 2004 When in 1933 Rolf de Maré founded Archives Internationales de la Danse (AID), an international dance research institute and museum in Paris, his ardent interest in art and dance, tangibly manifested in the 1920s through the Ballets Suédois, had also taken a more theoretical and scholarly turn. In the space of a few years he contrived to gather such a quantity of source material concerning European dance as could be termed "the initial groundwork for methodical research" on the subject. A different situation applied concerning Asian and Southeast Asian dance, which had not been systematically researched. This was a field which had captivated him ever since the 1910s, when he had gone on his first prolonged tour of Asia and had visited Java among other places. In 1938 he embarked on a research trip to the Indonesian archipelago together with his "excellent and highly qualified assistant Claire Holt" and the photographer and film-maker Hans Evers, their aim being, as he writes, "to collect as much data and material as possible, so as to enable us to undertake a synthetic study of dancelore, assigning to the dance its place in the social life of the natives of today, and, if possible, of past times, and tracing at the same time the history of their origin and development." In the event it was a huge quantity of artefacts, photographs and films that he brought back to his museum and archive in Paris and presented in a widely noted exhibition already in 1939. As a tribute to Rolf de Maré, the Dance Museum concludes its jubilee year by once more exhibiting the Indonesian collection. Join us in retracing Rolf de Maré's journey through the Indonesian archipelago, among masks and myths, gods and demons, war dances, court dancers and shadow-play puppets.
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