View of the Prambanan complex, October 2000
Websites do not last forever, they are as perishable as any other artefact. Our team discovered this when the website hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS), set up in connection with the project Dance and the Temple: interpretation and construction of heritage through a virtual site (henceforth ‘Dance and the temple’), was taken down in early 2008 and was lost in cyberspace. We were somewhat shocked, as we had not so secretly been hoping that our website would last forever. However, soon after the initial dismay, the archaeologist in all of us team members kicked in and we decided to recreate the site. Create anew, not reconstruct. We knew it would have to be a different website – to begin with it would be based on wikis and it would be part of the Stanford Humanities Lab portfolio of projects, rather than following the earlier model.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Let’s have some background. ‘Dance and the temple’ was a project funded by the Getty Research Program from 2000 to 2002, with a generous collaborative grant. Briefly, this was a collaboration between a group academics interested in Javanese art, archaeology, and dance, based at the National University of Singapore, the University of Oxford and the University of Indonesia, and a few other people involved in computer animation, working in London.
The project was, at the time, rather innovative: the idea was to explore the temple site of Prambanan, a 9th century CE complex near the city of Yogyakarta, in Central Java, from an archaeological, art historical, architectural and dance perspective and create a website which would allow a virtual exploration of the site from all these standpoints, simultaneously, relying on computer animation, QuickTime VR and all such new technologies – we are talking about eight to nine years ago, almost centuries in relation to the very fast pace at which technology develops!
The website was duly set up by CASA, NUS, with much fanfare, but then, you know how things go…The whole team disbanded in 2002, soon after the project was completed, no one was there to update the website and eventually NUS took the drastic decision, based on pragmatic considerations, to take it down – what was the point of having an out-of-date website, badly in need of looking after, something no one seemed to be in a position to do, as there were logistic problems?
Now that our project is enjoying a new lease of life on the Metamedia Lab server, some of us former team members have come together again intending to keep the new website going for as long as possible – the use of wikis makes it a much simpler process and it does not matter where all of us are physically located, which was the hurdle in connection with the NUS website.

Scene from Sendratari Ramayana, Prambanan, October 2000

But of course many things have happened since 2002 and our new website is going to take all this into account. For example, the May 2006 earthquake in south Yogyakarta badly affected Prambanan, which is now inaccessible to visitors. We have photographic material from pre-earthquake days, architectural plans etc, stuff that will be very useful to anyone who is interested in Javanese archaeology, art and architecture. Some of us – Pinna Indorf in particular, an architectural historian formerly based at NUS – have done more work on Southeast Asian temples, connecting Prambanan to a whole Southeast Asian temple ‘network’ and we cannot wait to share these research results with the broader research community.
Dance was an important component of the 2000-2002 project and will continue to figure fairly prominently in this updated version. Why is dance involved in an archaeological project? I am summarising below the reasons why this is so, though you can read in full my first defence of dance at Prambanan, written in 2002, on the new wiki archive.

The burning of Lanka scene, Sendratari Ramayana, October 2000
Dance plays a major role at Prambanan, which is regularly used to stage performances of sendratari Ramayana, in its open air, purpose built theatre. Sendratari Ramayana is a dance which was created in the early 1960s specifically for the Prambanan site, famous for its reliefs of the Ramayana story, for tourist consumption. The innovative element of this new dance genre was that the Javanese dialogue of Javanese court genres involving dance and acting, such as Wayang Orang, had been eliminated, the intention being that the story should be accessible to anyone, through a ‘universally’ understood language of dance and music.
The Ramayana reliefs of Prambanan – as well as the reliefs of other central Javanese sites – show quite clearly that dance was an important activity in the religious and social life of java in the 9th – 10th century. Dance is seen in all such reliefs as integral part of the narrative in a ritual and celebratory context. But, uniquely, dance also appears as a stand-alone ‘dance narrative’ in the dance panels of candi Siwa, the main temple of the Prambanan complex, in other words, constituting self contained dance phrases which can be strung together to create a choreography.

A dance relief from the Prambanan complex, October 2000
Art historians have looked at these reliefs in some detail, analysing design and composition; several Javanese contemporary dancers/choreographers have examined them carefully, the movements and postures providing an inspiration for creative work – a reconstruction/recreation which is ‘archaeological’, without necessarily being proposed as such.
The reliefs put across the subject of dance as integral part of a contextual study of the site, allowing us to look at the many landscapes of dance, past and present, and the movements of its practitioners within those landscapes. The dance past constitutes a complex narrative with images and symbols which have a powerful grip on the present.
Dance at Prambanan, throughout the second half of the twentieth century and well into the 21st century, has been national ritual and spectacle. Sendratari was the Indonesian version of the ubiquitous 20th century ‘drama-ballet’, first invented by the Soviets, later adapted to Indonesian conditions, through a complex trajectory of movement across Asia. As a form of commissioned state art, Sendratari reflected the new nation’s self-image and subsequently became one of the best subsidised artistic expressions of the Indonesian former New Order of president Soeharto.
A site such as Prambanan underwent a profound transformation in terms of its use, until the 2006 earthquake put a stop to all activities, as the site is currently in danger of collapsing and has been declared too dangerous for the general public, on grounds of health and safety. People can still visit but can only view the central court from a distance, by climbing on a wooden platform.
Surrounded by amenities, between 1950 and 2006 Prambanan attracted thousands of visitors everyday, becoming an important source of revenue for the local community – less so today, because of the accessibility problem. The Sendratari Ramayana performances at the open air theatre – these have now resumed as they are not taking place on the site proper – have been for decades the highlight of a visit to Prambanan during the dry season. Through Sendratari Ramayana the century old story of Prince Rama, a model ruler, is told in the idiom of representational dance. The dance is a contemporary re-embodiment of the Ramayana story, a tale which stresses a message of just rule, triumph of good over evil through overcoming adversity, and through loyalty, steadfastness and self sacrifice, conjugal love, filial piety and abnegation.
The Ramayana story is an older import from India which inspired, for centuries, literary works and the visual and performing arts of the Javanese courts. It is possible that the Ramayana would have been a source of inspiration for the performing arts also when the temple complex was built. Its use as subject matter for today’s Sendratari is thus significant, as through this an unbroken continuity with the past is conjured up and re-established, reinforced by the presence of the Ramayana reliefs around the main temples of the site.
But apart from the scope it gave us to investigate present day associations of dance and the complex , dance assumed an even greater significance in the context of the overall ‘Dance and the temple’ project by turning into a metaphor for the whole archaeological process.
One of the questions we asked in the course of our research was whether a 9th century dance could be reconstructed. Indeed this was the general expectation of everyone when they first heard about the project – would we be reconstructing 9th century dancing? Actually, no, not quite, was our answer.
The reliefs of Prambanan are extremely clear in the way movement and stances are outlined and they are helpful reference material for any attempt at movement reconstruction/recreation. We used a variety of tools in the context of the ‘Dance and the temple’ project for recreating the dance techniques seen in the Prambanan reliefs. But the main point, which we could never lose sight of, was that reconstruction as an attempt to restore the past, filling in gaps, is an interpretive encounter based on plausibility. Therefore whatever attempt was made at ‘reconstructing’ the dance of Prambanan had to acknowledge its dependence on interpretation and had to distance itself from one-sided views of tradition and heritage.
Re-embodying dance movements makes them come to life as movements in the present, performed by contemporary bodies. Movements are not choreographies and those of the 9th century have long been lost. What we achieved, though the help of a dancer, Mugiyono Kasido, who participated in the project, was a re-embodiment of movements conceived in the 9th century and represented in 9th century reliefs.
This was no other than an archaeology written through the body, an archaeology which became choreography. And as such, firmly inscribed in the present.