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Overview
Sriwhana Spong is drawn to rumours and myths rather than official histories. She has said: ‘Growing up estranged from my Indonesian heritage, where frustratingly murky details were handed on to me growing up in New Zealand, has given me an interest in the space between official, clear knowable facts and the role that subjectivity and imagination play.’1
Spong’s Costume for a mourner reimagines a scene from Sergei Diaghilev’s 1925 Ballets Russes production of Le chant du rossignol (The song of the nightingale). The ballet is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 tale of a mechanical songbird given to the emperor of China by the emperor of Japan. Diaghilev’s ballet featured an orchestral score by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Léonide Massine and later George Balanchine, and an orientalist set and costumes designed by Henri Matisse. The mourner’s costume is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Spong, herself a former dancer, recalls seeing Matisse’s costume in a book and thinking that it looked like a big, heavy, liturgical robe: ‘I was curious about how a body would move in a costume like this. Usually costumes for dancers are made to enhance the body or give the dancer freedom. I like the idea that an artist had gone, “I’m going to make a costume and I’m going to completely take over the body.”’2
The original choreography for the ballet has been lost, in part because Diaghilev refused to let anyone film his ballets, believing that the medium did not do the art form justice. Working from the original score, rare photographs of the ballet performances and images of the costumes while applying a fair degree of artistic licence, Spong collaborated with choreographer and dancer Benny Ord to recreate the mourner’s dance and capture its elegiac movements in a perpetual loop.
Sarah Farrar
1 Ash Kilmartin, ‘Sriwhana Spong: Loosening history’, Vault, no. 5, December 2013, p. 48.
2 ‘Artist interview: Sriwhana Spong’, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, YouTube, 11 September 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtusBW0ZJaA (accessed 4 December 2017).