Going from the Traditional to the Contemporary is a Responsibility as Well as a Way of Life
Interviewee/ Ljuzem Madiljin
Interviewer/ Wang Yu Cheng (Coordinator of Text Records)
Translator/ Artist Translation Service 譯術家專業翻譯工作室
Note: The discussion with Dakshaji, Ljuzem Madiljin, and Baru Madiljin was very focused and brilliant. This article is a polished and retouched transcript from the discussion.
The rich affection for traditions
When I was in junior high school, zemian was well-organized, with everyone standing on his own spot. About 20 years later, suddenly I couldn’t find that order, making me very nervous at that moment.
I remember one time when I was a child I danced next to a friend who was an aristocrat princess. However, I was no aristocrat. During the dance, I was pulled away from my friend to a place on the back. Back then, I didn’t understand the tradition very well. I was sad, thinking “it is necessary to be so inflexible?” I was thinking about the order of the circle dance and the position of the person sitting in the center. During these 2 decades, the tradition has been disappearing gradually. Now everyone seems to be doing things according to his own will. The order in the traditional society is gone. And the traditional culture is gone with it. Everybody is looking for the spot where they “are supposed to” be standing instead of knowing where to stand in the first place.
Teaching children about “respect” using the traditional culture of the Paiwan
When people go outside of the tribe to study, they may learn a lot of knowledge that is different from what they can learn in the tribe. As a result, their “socioeconomic status” may become higher. When they see the tribe from their socioeconomic status, the traditional tribal class seems less important. I once talked to my husband’s families about this issue. I was very touched as they told me that “chiefs and aristocrats are meant to lead their people to create a peaceful society together.” Nowadays, the inherited traditional status is useless when it comes to economical support in reality and thus is on the downgrade. This is a seesaw battle between the traditional status and the socioeconomic status nowadays.
When I started to learn more about the traditional culture, I saw its beauty. And I realized that we can teach children with it. I have always been thinking about how to help children understand “respect”. According to the traditional of the Paiwan people, a vusam is the boss at home. This is how I told my oldest daughter about the job of this role: “not just to own the family assets, but to keep them, to manage them, to distribute them, and to take care of the whole family with them. As my girl grew up, she has gradually understood this responsibility. Modern parents may think that it's important to be fair to all their children. However, I told my second oldest daughter that “your sister needs this power in order to take care of you. So you should help her.” She could understand that “being fair is not about taking everything equally. Power comes with responsibility.” If one day, the older sister would like to be relieved of her duties, she can pass this power down to her younger sister, who can have the power of the vusam if she wishes to. But then, the younger sister must take the responsibility to take care of the whole family. When we talk about being fair, we often forgot that the foundation of fairness is mutual respect.
Searching for the limb and body movements that represent the Paiwan people: Traditions come from daily lives
I think traditions are quite important in terms of spirit and lifestyle. When I was creating a contemporary body work, I also thought about what “contemporary” means, but I couldn’t come up with anything. However, when I walked into the traditional lifestyle, I found the meaning of being contemporary. The traditional culture is related to people’s lives in the old days. The resulted body movements are highly correlated to their lives. I remember when I was a kid, I saw the elderly dancing. It was beautiful with their body movements. They sang while dancing. They led their body movements with their voices, and their body movements indeed went with their voices.
But now, when I watch tribal dances, I see traditional clothing with modern high heels. Traditional body movements are gone. And we forget how to sing. When you don’t know how to sing, your body wouldn’t be able to move with music. This “inability” is actually closely related to body movements, singing voices, and living conditions. So, when I am working on a contemporary dance piece about the Paiwan people, I would tell myself, “You can be yourself in this age if the dance piece you are working on is simply a contemporary dance piece. However, when it is about the Paiwan people, you are responsible.”
In the recent years, I have been working on the body movements for a happy get-together song. I remember my dad told me that no one danced to this song before. But I was deeply moved when I heard this song. And I just started to move my feet with the music, creating the body movements for this song. Finally, when I presented my work before a stone slab house, surprisingly, the tribal people were ok with it. This experience made me more confident that traditions are produced based on the lives of that time. If I want to do a contemporary dance piece about the Paiwan people, I would need a Paiwan context. Therefore, while learning traditional folk songs, we begin to find the steps of our own in our voices, movements, and breath and further transfer them into something contemporary, something that belongs to this age.
What is being traditional? And what is being contemporary? The feelings brought out by Odissi Dance
I remember in India we talked to Dakshaji about being traditional and being contemporary. Take the physical performance of the 12 constellations in Odissi Dance for example, in my opinion, the idea is contemporary, while the form is traditional. Yet, when I saw Dakshaji dance, Yet, when I saw Dakshaji dance, I actually saw the contemporary body. I can only say that the contemporary body must live in such a environment and lifestyle, and must absorb all the traditional culture before it can produce, then extract your own taste, and this taste is contemporary.
Considering the traditional culture of the Paiwan people, we don’t need rehearsals for our traditional dances. People just live their lives, get together, and naturally they know what to do and how to implement tribal activities. However, when these things leave the tribe, they are no longer a part of the traditions, but “deducted” from the tradition.
When I saw Dakshaji’s two new pieces, I saw them as merely “deducted” from the form. There are very specific symbols in the style of the physical performances of Dakshaji’s works. But probably the dancers hadn’t digested all the cultural elements. It is like putting a traditional Paiwan dance on the stage outside the tribe. It’s just a deduction of the tradition. I didn’t see any body-performance that had been through the process of internalization. However, when I saw Dakshaji’s solo dance performance, I saw something contemporary. In other words, I saw Dakshaji with all the traditional elements absorbed into his body. These elements were truly internalized. I think if you want to present a contemporary body, you must understand traditional cultures and lives very well in order to grow some kind of contemporary nature of your own times with a connection to the previous generation. So, for me, developing something contemporary is really difficult. To achieve it, one must go through the traditional life, traditional learning, and traditional processes.