Acting
A dance film that explores the role of women in the domestic space.
Darta, a man from an impoverished family, is rejected by the wealthy parents of the woman he loves. Desperate, he strikes a bargain with the Monkey King, performing a dark ritual to gain wealth. However, in doing so, he accidentally curses his wife and child to a life of suffering. Rooted in Indonesian mysticism, this universal narrative explores the insatiable hunger to become something one is not and the boundaries one is willing to cross to achieve it.
Groh Goh re-imagines performance lineages surrounding the mythological figure of Rangda: Bali’s queen of the graveyard and patroness of black magic. The story of Rangda, and her alter incarnation, the legendary witch widow Calonarang, occupies a central role within Bali’s spirit cosmology and frames a narrative around an undesirable woman as a dangerous and deviant social disrupter. Alongside her feared otherness, Rangda is also conceived as a balancing force for spiritual order, and a powerful matriarchal protector. The film centres upon a matrilineal building and passing of knowledge around Rangda, channelling her presence through different bodies, performance genres and landscapes.
Tantra and Tantri are inseparable. When they secretly steal eggs from the family’s sacrificial offering, Tantri always gets the whites and Tantra the yolks. One day, however, the yolk is missing, as is Tantra. Her brother gravely ill and in hospital, Tantri starts slipping into magical parallel worlds, approaching the inevitable farewell through costumes, body paint and dance. When at one point Tantri’s mother washes the paint from her face, it is as if tenderly to expel the illusion that things can remain as they are. In long dream sequences and against the background of the Balinese philosophy of sekala – the seen – and niskala – the unseen – Andini relates how one ten-year-old girl deals with parting and grief.
