An Unexpected Public Performance

Rebecca Selin, meukeusat, 10.01.14 and 11.01.14

On Saturday afternoon, our group performed a synchronized seated dance for an extremely energetic (and I mean that very seriously--this was like a rock concert level of excitement) crowd of two to three hundred Indonesians, mostly Syiah Kuala University students and some of their parents. We had rehearsed it only twice before, and never without a leader showing us the movements, so we weren't surprised by the unbridled laughter of the crowd at some points in our performance. Overall, though, the applause outweighed the laughter, and even the latter was all in good fun.

Just one day before our big debut, we were first introduced to meukeusat, an Acehnese performance tradition that integrates movement, body percussion, and song. Mbak Jeni had thought we would be learning a similar dance known as saman, but our instructor let us know otherwise as soon as she began teaching us: saman is only appropriate for men to perform, while meukeusat can be performed by men or women (but never both together).

As the director of Syiah Kuala's music and theater school said during a Q&A session on Saturday morning, Acehnese music and dance are always rooted in Islam. Meukeusat is no exception. The lyrics in the song accompanying our dance (if we had performed it fully, we all would have sung the responses in call-and-response sections while dancing) asserted both regional and Islamic identities. After marching onto the stage in a line (girls and boys separate, of course!), the dance began with a salam (a ritual greeting) after we all kneeled together. The dance gradually sped up, and began to include clapping and floor-slapping. The lyrics of the song (with my very limited language skills...) included references to Allah and to Aceh. Even the individual movements in the dance carried specific meanings.

I wish we had had more time to learn meukeusat before performing in front of so many people, but it was an amazing opportunity to learn a distinctly Acehnese music/dance form. The way in which it integrated movement, song, and body percussion was new to me, and it was fun to learn for everyone (not nearly as far our of our comfort zones as seudati!).

 

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