The Height of Aristocratic Elegance

Music as Court Ritual
New Wayang Forms
Popular Dance and Drama
Sacred and Mystical Dances
Spectacles for the Masses
The Performing Arts Academy

While traditional karawitan music and its associated performing arts can be seen and heard throughout the island, the Javanese themselves feel that it is in the old royal principalities of Solo and Yogya where they have been given their highest and most refined expression. The reasons for this are rooted in Javanese history. Especially after the Great Java War of 1825-30, the Dutch ruled Java through a native aristocracy stripped of political power but made to serve a useful symbolic and also economic function. Lacking other outlets for their great wealth and energy, these former rulers surrounded themselves with grand displays of royal pomp and circumstance in which music, dance, and wayang played a substantial role.

Deep-seated traditional rivalries, and a struggle for status among the courts and their ruling families, were thereafter largely played out upon the stage rather than upon the battlefield. Talented musicians, dancers and dalangs were recruited from outlying villages, while their individual styles were refined and to some extent standardized to conform with court tastes, under the guidance of palace teachers. The rulers vied with one another in producing ever grander and more arcane theatrical productions, culminating in the massive wayang orang productions of the early part of this century, in which a cast of hundreds would perform different episodes of a tale nightly for days at a time.

The Mangkunegaran and Kasunanan styles of Surakarta developed in slightly different directions, partly as the result of a deliberate attempt by the junior Mangkunegaran to distance itself from the Kasunanan, and partly because of different sources that each court drew upon. It is said, for example, that the Mangkunegaran dance bears a greater similarity to Yogya’s proud martial style than to the graceful, flowing style of the Surakarta keraton—the result of Mangkunegara VIPs marriage to a Yogyanese princess, who brought her dance teachers with her.

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