by Yuliana Meneses Orduño
Joged Amerta is described as a body movement meditation practice originated in Surakarta, Central Java, by the artist and philosopher Suprapto Suryodarmo. This practice synthesized his interest in philosophy, archaeology, meditation, traditions, rituals, and multiculturalism, amongst other things. Over time, this turned into methodologies of practice and teaching that he called Joged Amerta for his own movement, also known as Amerta Movement in his work with other people. Within the practice, dialoguers, messengers or movers (as Pak Prapto used to refer to them), notice how bodies (movers and material environment) start to develop a form of communication between each other: with affect as a way to interact and perceive the surroundings.
The implications of affect are in our daily life and in the way in which we relate to each other, which means that there is a relation of response between bodies. Also, a common starting point for Joged Amerta is daily life, from the way we move as if it were a response to or an effect of the conditions of the quotidian. Following this, we can say that affect is a primary characteristic and fundamental expression of the human being, that is always developing with others, creating an effect between action-reaction which has an impact on our body movement. I will try to relate the theory of affect and Amerta Movement, in order to understand what happens in the experience of the body when it’s moving.
The term affect has been used in Posthumanism to understand a more sensitive link between the human and the non-human, that implies the recognition of the vitality that inhabits the world. Posthumanism as a contemporary philosophical current opens a debate on the actions that human beings have carried out throughout history and that have had a considerable impact on all aspects of life: political, social, economic, ecological, technological, and others. Thus, it suggests the displacement of the figure of the human to the post-human, that is, a human capable of rethinking his role as the central axis of the world in order to decentralize and put other vital agencies at the center. Rosi Braidotti explains that this posthuman condition is in a “process of becoming”. For Braidotti (2013, 12 and 193): “Becoming-posthuman consequently is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social, psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging, while it enacts the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual coordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self.
Pak Prapto’s practice of movement has much to do with his conception of life and the human in Javanese philosophy. According to Lise Lavelle (2006, 3; 227-228), he “intends to pioneer in Java a new concept of the human being, one based on respecting and re-vitalizing the traditional kejawen outlook of life […] to enter a dialogue with modernity.” She also suggests that he is developing “a humble attitude to Life as a divine force”, “with prayer”; a humble attitude that we can practice to honor and respect Life. I want to suggest that this attitude of humility towards life is given by the affect through movement, as a process that facilitates the perception of vitality creating an effect on the daily life of the practitioner.
Amerta Movement creates an impact on the way bodies perceive their spaces, their history, their “natureculture” environment and relationships with other bodies. The primary way of approaching is through sensitive listening, attention, and observation that acquires subtle forms of movement. This way of moving, seeing, and touching from subtlety modifies everyday perception, arousing affect between the different bodies – both human and non-human – that inhabit space. This way of experiencing the world implies different manners of understanding, inhabiting and being present in a “body” by “moving”. This is something that the Amerta practitioner experiences that definitely will affect their daily life. Everything becomes vital (or alive) and practitioners move with awareness of this. They move not alone, but with the different agencies they inhabit, acting together. In this sense, I will refer to “conjoined actions”, moving together in an “assemblage”.
In this process, the Amerta Movement practitioners’ bodies become more sensitive to other non-human bodies’ agencies. What is interesting to note is that this form of body movement can alter the perception of daily life. Brian Massumi (1995, 97) defines affect as something continuous in everyday life, “like a background perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian.” Our daily life – and the movement that accompanies it – is on a continuous plane of perception. In the case of Amerta Movement, it could be that the decision to understand life as a vital force influences the way we move. The perceptual modification of the vitality and the reception of affect is what gives rise to an extra-quotidian bodily experience.
After a certain amount of time of practicing Amerta, the everyday aspect of the “background perception” will expand to other perceptual layers, unleashing an impact on the way we see and live the quotidian. A practitioner can allow themselves to be affected more by “zoe” – non-human, vital force of life – and vital materiality in a more conscious way. Braidotti (2013, 60) explains why she uses zoe instead of bios in posthumanism. Bios is “traditionally reserved for anthropos”, and zoe is a wider scope of animal and non-human life. This term has a parallelism with vital materiality for New Materialism, which recognises that matter is not inert, but has vitality. For Jane Bennet (2010, 14), “We are vital materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always see it that way”. We can see an example of this not only by practicing in nature but in sites like temples when it is possible to arise affect through their vital materiality.
The “background perception” is transferred to the foreground, which leads to the body’s own experience of the vitality of life in the movement. In Massumi ‘s (1995, 97) words “one’s ‘sense of aliveness’ is a continuous, nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection).”
The experience of the practitioner will be essential as a source of contrast and support of this theory. This is a proposal that I found convenient as a way to understand what happens during my practice. I consider that, since affect is a process of correspondence, we can first invite self-reflection on our perception of the vitality in our daily life and how that influences our bodily experience and our movement.
References
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, London.
Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.
Lavelle, Lise (2006). Amerta Movement of Java 1986-1997. An Asian Movement Improvisation. Centre for Languages and Literature/Lund University, Sweden.
Massumi, Brian (1995). “The Autonomy of Affect”, Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II (Autumn). http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354446
Suryodarmo, Suprapto (2009). Meditation in Dance: “Dance Meditation?” Paper for National Seminar on The Art of Dance in Human Life convened by Jurusan Tari, Fakultas Seni Pertunjukan Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) Surakarta, 19 December. Translated from Bahasa Indonesia by Diane Butler.
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Yuliana Meneses Orduño is a movement artist and researcher whose practice explores the intersection of body, ecology, and culture through transdisciplinary approaches. She began her dance training in Butoh in 2010 alongside studies of Indian classical dances. In 2018, she received a Darmasiswa scholarship to study Javanese dance at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Surakarta, where she also began practicing Joged Amerta under the guidance of Suprapto Suryodarmo. After returning to Mexico in 2019, Yuliana developed BE: Body Experiences, a platform that promotes sensory perception, affect, and relational closeness as essential practices for coexistence—drawing from ecosomatics, ecopoetry, biology, philosophy, indigenous knowledge, and various visual and media arts.
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