The Performing Arts and Visual Arts Study Program, Interdisciplinary Postgraduate School, UGM welcomes the publication of this New Edition of Kritik Seni Pertunjukan dan Pengalaman Keindahan The book written by Sal Murgiyanto – a performing arts practitioner as well as an academic who has crossed the arena of performing arts and education – contains a number of criticisms of performing arts, particularly dance. In this book, Sal’s expertise in raging inner experiences when experiencing performing arts – both as an audience and as an actor, relates it to heaps of other performing arts experiences, rearranges it as a sequence of thoughts, dialogues it. about academic discourse, and put it into pious writing. Thanks to the discussion process that involved such intense physical and mental activity, the feelings that raged during the show were no longer wrapped in personal experience, nor did they evaporate in the conversation after the show. Through this critical writing, the process of thinking and feeling takes a new form in the form of reflective writing that is ready to meet its readers.
This book is not only useful for performing arts academics, but also for both performing arts practitioners and those involved in organizing performances. For performing arts academics, this book provides examples of applying various important perspectives in performing arts studies to discourse performing arts. Various traces of discourse on performance studies, dance studies, embodiment, aesthetics, and existential phenomenology can easily be recognized here and there. However, this book is not a theoretical contemplation to criticize academic discourse in the field of performing arts studies. This book is not a theoretical critique of the performing arts, but a critique of the performing arts. Instead of presenting reasoning at the abstract level, this book rests on careful and intelligent descriptions of a number of performance events. Some of Sal’s writings in this book can be said to be characterized by critical ethnography. We consider this ethnographic content to be useful for performing arts practitioners and event organizers who are less interested in the conceptual / theoretical dimension. Here, the accuracy of the description of performance events is strongly supported by Pak Sal’s familiarity with the world of performing arts. The performance descriptions can be placed as ‘sparring partners’ for performing arts practitioners and organizers. Through it, performing arts practitioners and organizers can draw on several aesthetic considerations, like the dramaturgic role in performing arts.
Indeed, the role of criticism is to reconcile academic discourse with the realm of practice, both for the purpose of developing knowledge and for the creation of new practices. This book successfully demonstrates this. In such direction of art criticism, we view this book as too valuable not to be republished. Hopefully the publication of this New Edition of Kritik Seni Pertunjukan dan Pengalaman Keindahan will be of benefit to efforts to strengthen performing arts study programs in Indonesia.
This book is discussed by:
G.R. Lono Lastoro Simatupang
Kris Budiman
Sal Murgiyanto (Responders)
Moderator: Dede Pramayoza