SALATIGA PEACEFUL WAACK

So once upon a time, a well-known national waacker came to the small Salatiga city and taught waacking class, she encouraged the students to build their own waacking community. I didn’t experience this background story at the first place, but since Salatiga was a small city, everyone knew everyone. I heard about this new dance community they were trying to build. This happened almost a year after my falling-out with my friends, I had just finished my final exam and all, waiting to graduation day. I missed dancing and I had nothing to lose.

I knew two people from the first meeting, they were my old dancing pals, one of them was also a member of DOS (see previous post). It was pretty challenging for me because even though I wasn’t really bad at waacking, but I couldn’t do freestyle like, bruh, I was so bad at it fr. Our waacking sessions went for 2 to 3 hours every Tuesday afternoon, consisting of basic drilling, choreography (if anyone has one to share) and freestyle session. 

Because it’s a small group, we grew closer, like really close. I became the mum of the group, and we would hang out after practice, talking shits and dreaming about dance projects we would like to do together. Since some of us were considered pretty “senior” in Salatiga dance scene, we also taught smaller groups about the basics of waacking and performed in small showcases in town. 

One of the memorable moments was when Salatiga Movement, one of the dance team in town, invited Safina, a waacker from Jogja, a neighbouring city, to teach a short class. I went and danced with everyone, and truly it was a different feeling to be able to dance in a big team (although we weren’t exactly a team, but some of them were also part of SPW so, close enough), it brought back so much nostalgia on my part, and I enjoyed it very much. After class, we held a small 7-to-smoke, a dance battle, between us. It was my first (and probably last) battle, and I had to say, it didn’t go as bad as I thought it would, I did pretty well. The next day we shoot a short choreography with Safina, in the legendary dance spot in Salatiga.

Sadly, my time was short with this team, since I had to graduate soon. So before graduation, I pushed everyone to make the first independent project of the team, which would be my last. We didn’t have much time, but I was stubborn enough to keep on going. I remember, I picked the song because it was the only waacking-able song on my offline playlist, when I decided to create the choreography with the team. We got help from our friends to shoot and edit the video, did it on the newly built hall, and held a small farewell photo session afterwards. Every time I watch the video, it brings smile to my face because it was perfectly like how I imagine it would be, everyone was slaying and moreover, I could say that all the drillings we did for a year did pay off, our techniques was good and we synchronised well. I was so proud of this team —and I still am.

Dance of Satya Wacana

I’m sorry I know I skipped to many days, but here I’m back with another nostalgia of my dancing days! *sob

In 2014, my dancer friends (or gang) and I were quite undefeated in the University. EDance won competition after competition, well, fair enough, it was the oldest dance team in the University, not many faculties had a dance team. Therefore, my bestie and I came up with an idea of what if, we created a University team, so dancers from different faculties can dance together, and the people from other faculties without any dance team can have the option to join a dance team. Sounds great, right? 

Long story short, we did it! After painful steps of University’s internal bureaucracy to sign it up under the Student Body etc, we created the team! As we were the very first batch, we didn’t hold any auditions —although that was the plan for the next years, and there were tons of students signing up! Sixty people showed up on our first regular practice, even though, not surprisingly, the number kept decreasing over the year —either because of the schedule or people having a hard time following the materials, thanks to our dearest coach who decided to “test the waters” from a high level.

The first year wasn’t the best, we had a pretty solid core team —who were basically the same people from the same two teams, and some others, lol- who had a lot of energy. We went from one performance to another (not including the ones with other teams) whilst struggling to pay our coach and competition fees. The video on this post could be considered the peak of our year —or me, at least. We didn’t win tho, the jury said our choreography was “too tight” without “room to breathe” or whatever he meant by that, I said we stayed the stage.

Unfortunately, my days in DOS ended quite similarly to the ones in EDance. My bestie and I had been drifted apart for some time, she spent a lot of time in the neighbouring city with her bf, and I spent 24/7 with mine (who was also an abuser), in the end we just stopped trying to complement each other again and as we were literally the two leaders of the team, it didn’t go well. On the evaluation day after the term ended, I felt cornered and I did what I did best —runaway. After creating it from scratch, I abandoned my baby because I felt like I had no more comrades in it.

Now that I think of it, nobody was wrong wrong, we all had faults that led to the pretty shaky end of term. The drifting away between my bestie and I turned us into trying to prove the other wrong, whilst in fact, what tied us together was actually our differences that complemented each other. I was in a really bad mental place and I couldn’t handle any more rejection (or in this case, harsh critiques) and I felt like I had to flee to save myself, which I wouldn’t say a bad choice, but I do regret the justifications I kept telling myself instead of admitting that I fucked up, in some ways.

Back to the dancer days! Honestly, I can’t remember how we ended up forming this group (prolly as a revenge to another group I was once a part of that annoyed many other dancers in the small city, or maybe simply to get some extra cash, lol), but it started off with me and two of my best friends taking dance jobs as “sexy dancers”—quoted, because of possible different interpretation.

So the three of us are from the same batch, we danced together in Eleveners team and joined Dance, we hung out together a lot too. Funnily enough, a lot of people actually mistook us for each other, calling us three as “triplets”, it’s a mystery until the present day for us, but I personally think it was because our same height, hair length and style, and just the vibe we gave. 

Let me give you a little bit of a context tho, back then in 2012, Salatiga was very quiet and reserved. There weren’t any girls brave enough to dance as a “sexy dancer” because you know, in a small city, everyone knew everyone and sometimes they be talking to big about rumours, and the term “sexy dancer” didn’t ring a good sound. Therefore, events like the New Year’s Eve, or other big roadshows in our city had always hired the team from the neighbouring, bigger city. On the other hand, the three of us met in the same dance team and instantly knew that we were made for all the “ladies’ style” type of dancing, on a borderline to be called “sexy dancing”, plus, we didn’t give a fuck. So we agreed to form a “sexy dance” group and snatched all those bags!

As I’ve been describing with quoted term “sexy dancer”, this is what I meant: for many of us, hearing the term will automatically make us think of girls in the pub with bikini-like costumes and stuffs, but actually it was a lot simpler than that. We lived in a small city and people weren’t ready to see girls dancing in bikinis—and sure as hell wouldn’t pay enough money- so we needed to be creative not to betray the sexy title, but also not to sell ourselves too cheap. It was honestly easy tho, because many times, these “sexy dancers” weren’t actually dancing, they were just sexy girls in sexy costumes, on a stage, so people would measure her sexiness from her exposed skin. For us, it was the other way, we showed sexiness from our moves and our (dancing) attitudes, facial expressions and all the stage presence, therefore we didn’t need to reveal that much skin. Well, it worked.

(I’m sorry it’s the only on-stage picture that I still have, for we didn’t usually tape or took footage of our performance—so that we could use the same concept again for other jobs, lol)

SheWolveS also grew into an independent dance group, somehow. It was those days when we were so in love with dancing that we literally dance on every chance, we could be in-between classes and just went to the University common space to practice or made up a new choreography. So on other chances, we tried competing in dance competitions, too.

Ah, those days when we had so much energy. We made our own costume, wore it like freaks—news flash, no one wore crop tops for fun back then- and lured our innocent friends to dance like we were strippers, LOL. There were a couple of weird jobs we took, like when we were asked to dance in a wedding—as sexy dancers!- and all the aunties and grandmas were looking at us funny or dancing with shemales (personally my favourite because they were so extra and I became like a sort of background dancer, so it’s less tiring for me, lol). But we had a lot of fun, we were young and bold, we feared nothing and just expressed ourselves in the way we believed in, not giving a F to the rest of the world.

SheWolveS’ era came to an end when me and my best friend (the one that’s always in the picture, if you can tell) had a clash and stopped talking—the same issue caused by my ex-bf that forced me to quited 3 teams at once. We drifted further and she went to join a new team that later made her busier, and so would I. (Fun fact: we then made up after doing the same real sexy-dancing—in the club and all- one year later) Still, the memories of having to create and lived through this team will always be one one of the dearest for me.

Let’s go back a little bit in time today. It might be slightly difficult to believe if you just got to know me recently, but I’ve always been a huge japan fangirl. I’ve always been infested in anime and mangas, but I think the turning point was when chatroom became a thing. 

I was still in JHS back then and got into my emo phase, but instead of listening to MCR or Green Day, I fell in love with L’Arc~En~Ciel, a japan rock band. So instead of going full-blown emo, I became a J-rock fangirl. (fun fact: I had only went to one concert in my whole life, and it was L’Arc~En~Ciel’s.) Fast forward to my early Uni days, I dated another J-fan, who was also a vocalist of a band that covered japanese songs. I kinda went deeper into the hole.

Even in Salatiga, I co-founded a Japanese lovers community (which I abandoned soon as I went into dancing, lol) and joined a band as the vocalist, We mostly covered supercells’ album, but occasionally, we also sang popular, mainstream songs.

My interest in Japanese culture grew, and that time AKB48 just gained popularity in Indonesia as they formed the first sister group, JKT48 (which I actually applied into, but too old to get selected). The trend was so big I actually got offered to coach a small, independent group to dance to AKB’s choreo —the group ended up never debuted tho, lol. I enrolled a dance cover competition with my friends as well, we sang and danced to Heavy Rotation and that was probably when I decided to just pick one instead of both singing and dancing at the same time  —  it was hard, lol.

Don’t mind my make up, lol! Speaking about make up tho, the negative effect from being a J-girl was probably that it made me struggle with body issues even more. As if it wasn’t obvious, my appearance was nowhere near the Japanese beauty standard, or any East Asians, really —slim, long, straight hair, fair-skinned, and thin lips. I remember clearly how would try to put so much concealer on my lips, straightened my hair, and put on an “ijstant whitening” lotion everytime I wanna dress up as a J-girl.

I think that was the reason I never got serious with cosplaying —besides the lack of crafting skills and money- I always felt that I wasn’t good enough because I could never have the minimum requirement of any character that I wanted to dress up as. I kept trying to fight my own negativity tho, so I did a few costreet (wearing a costume in an event without actually signing up for the cosplay competition).And eventhough I kinda knew that I was good, I was still very concerned about how people think of me and the fact that not many people actually come up to me on the street to appreciate my costume whatsoever, it made me even more conscious about how I was not enough.

Although, look at that lewk!!! Noting that it was 2011, that gothic make up was so on point that now I kinda want to recreate it!!!

Oh my God, I’m going to get really emotional writing this!!!

In 2012, STiBA merged with FBS (now FLA; Faculty of Language and Arts) of UKSW. For your note, FBS was one of the busiest faculty in UKSW, like, really, they had so many events in one term year, even after excluding the general University events. Two of the biggest faculty events were about ‘battle of the batches” in which each batch had to sent teams to compete in various competitions to determine the best batch of the year. I’m not gonna lie, they took the title very seriously.

My first involvement with this started with the event called LoVED (Loading Via English Days), which basically a series of competitions about the English subjects we had been learning —if I haven’t told you clearly, my major was English Literature- like spelling bee, drama, story-telling, trivia, etc (Idk, I generally only join one competition beside the opening march —each batch marched in costumes according to their theme and screaming their slogans). And there is one particular competition that was only known to be held by this faculty: dance.

So basically, the dance competition is more like a cabaret/musical story-telling, we need to tell a story that reflects our batch theme, through dancing. The students of FBS were told to ask the students from formerly STiBa to join them, as it would also be their events since the merger. Me and one of my friend (I’ll tell you why it was only both of us on the next post) joined the batch 2011 team, as a “token of friendship” they offered me to be the leading lady.

The theme was “Indonesia” so we picked Ramayana as our storyline, with a (lot of) twist. I remember we were a bit awkward at first —for a side note, somehow there was some kind of invisible tension between FBS and STiBA students, lol, dramas!- but after spending so much time together for the sake of the performance, it kind of melted away.

I remember we used to hang out on a small shop until late at night (many times I had to start over because of my boardinghouse’s curfew) and just had fun, like playing cards or talking shit. Oh those times when your biggest problem is how you were gonna wake up for a morning class!

And the rest was history, these people instantly became my best friends. It was a drastic change for me as I used to be so bored in my Uni life, after Eleveners happened, I felt like 24 hours in a day wasn’t enough! I wanted to hang out more, dance more, and just be young and stupid more! I can’t describe how much love I have for every single person in this picture.

Fun fact: there were so many talented dancers in the faculty that we never get to win the dance competition until our last year!!! We went all out for that year and we also (finally) became the best batch. I swear it felt like winning some sort of Nobel Prize or something! So much tears!!! I can still remember the feelings of joy even when I’m only reminiscing like now (and I’m deliberately using so many punctuation marks to show my excitement).

That’s a story of LoVED and there’s another story of EDO (English Department Olympics) which from the name, you can guess, is a sport competition. I’m really bad at sport but y’all know what I’m good at: shaking my ass dancing! There isn’t any dance competition in EDO, but there’s cheerleading.

/pəˈteɪtoʊ/ - /pəˈteɪtəʊ/ (if you’re an English major, you’ll get this joke)

Long story short, I became cheerleader once a year for three years.

Again, we never won the competition for three years. On our last year, the rule suddenly changed —I seriously can never understand how the most annoying people ALWAYS get their way to be in a committee and fuck things up???- we couldn’t perform cheerleadance (which is hard cheerleading-half dancing) and it had to be pure cheerleading. We were pissed off, like really pissed off.

I mean, how do you expect 10 amateur girls or more who mostly can’t even do the splits (including me) to do pure cheerleading, which consists of many difficult gymnastic moves and dangerous manoeuvre for straight 10 minutes??? I wouldn’t even last for three, honestly. And it was our last year, too!!! Our only chance to win the fucking thing once and for all!!!

But sis, oh how we snapped! We hired a cheerleading coach, and we said, fuck the rules, we’re fucking doing the cheerleadance. And it was the craziest, most intense training I’ve ever done in my life! I mean, physically, I was pretty strong already from all the dancing I did, but mentally, it was on another level. And I am still trembling with pride remembering how much we were determined to win, and kept going on trough those hellish training! (I wish we had the same excitement to study, but, lol)

The craziest part of that was: we were training with the whole song on slower tempo until D-2!!! And we couldn’t get it right. On D-2, our coach came with a happy face, saying, I finished the song!! And it was twice the tempo we had been training. It was chaotic. Yet it turned out so good on the performance day!!! I wish I had the video and can show you guys the golden era of my physical abilities!!!

AND WE FUCKING WIN!!! FINALLY!!!

I couldn’t get any prouder of these girls (including myself —girl, I fucking cartwheeled! It was bad, but still, I did it!)

And yes, we also won the best batch that year. That was crazy. We finished our last active year as students —since most of us would be busy individually with final projects afterwards- REIGNING AND PROUD!!! I always remember how resilient my fellow eleveners were, we were the batch with the least number, there were prolly not even 20 boys —they worked extra hard since they had to enter more competitions with no subs. And no shit, we had to work extra hard for almost everything in the battle of the batches, and it was all worth it in the end. We took the crown once, and once was enough to remember for a lifetime.

DAMNNN I GOT THE CHILLS!!! I MISS ALL OF THESE MFS!!!

My second entry to the performer challenge is not an easy one to put into words. 

Fast forward into my Uni life, I transferred to UKSW when I was 21, it was still STiBA back then, a smaller college under UKSW’s umbrella. Honestly, I only enrolled here because it was way cheaper than the main campus. Moving from Bandung to Salatiga could be very overwhelming—esp to note that at that time I was burdened with an immense amount of guilt towards my parents (for not studying well in Bandung)- I felt out of place most of the time.

Then one my friends, asked me if I wanna join a dance team that she was planning to create. There weren’t many students in our campus and she needed at least 10 people to keep the extracurricular going (and to pay the coach in a fair share). I was probably still in my 2nd semester, feeling bored with the repeating materials and almost no close friends, so I agreed. Little did I know, that moment was a big turning point for me.

It was my first time learning hip-hop. I had been dancing almost all my life, but it was mostly traditional dances —the only one that wasn’t a traditional dance was when I created a modern dance for my primary school graduation, lol- so the whole thing was very different for me. In traditional dancing, I needed a lot of self-restraints: my poses, the length of my steps, my facial expressions, almost all of them has their own rule to follow, very precise and constant. As for hip-hop, the movements were huge and sloppy —I danced the female parts in traditional dances, which requires gentle and small movements- if I may describe. It was very rough and basically the complete opposite of the dance I had been learning so far.

However, dancing freed me. I was probably pretty depressed and stressed by the things happened in my life and I honestly couldn’t feel the joy as liberating as when I was dancing. Then we did our first performance as a team, and it was all history. I fell in love again with dancing, this time, hard.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit sad that until recently, I was in a big denial regarding the full story of how I fall in love with the street dance world. I was greatly affected by shallow thoughts and unhealthy relationships, even though I was indeed to young to notice. Today, I wanna embrace the truth.

Despite of how this might sound as a humble-brag, I was good, probably the best one in the group. Then I became an arrogant cunt (sorry, the Australian culture is rubbing on me). I started to feel superior between my team mates, and although it might be true, I wasn’t supposed to be like that.  

The superior feelings was also supported by the fact that I was the girl coming from the big city, and I felt like I knew better of the world from everyone else. I had the better fashion sense, I did make up better, I knew how to act on stage, and so on. Not a single bit I care about others’ journey and appreciate their effort to “level up”. I remember I kept being defensive, refusing to “tone myself down” for others because I believed they were the ones needed to step their game up. Whoa, I was a bitch.

No wonder no one liked me. LOL. It was pretty obvious that I was an outcast in the group, only there to even out the numbers instead of truly being a part of the team. I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be bothered to try to blend in because I didn’t wanna change my self —which, I think, is not entirely wrong, but needed to be added more perspectives, I mean, being nice to others don’t always mean you gotta create a whole new personality to match them.

I was young and I had no life —like literally, I lived in online world for 2 years prior to my transfer to UKSW- and they were also young and inexperienced. We were all too naive to perceive a complex thinking manner that, it doesn’t always need to be black and white —as a matter of fact, there can never be only black and white. Our world was too small to see things in colours.

For many years, I considered this part of memories with this team as a “bad” one. I felt out of place, I didn’t like most of the things we did as a team, I didn’t like the costume choices, heck I despises the entire experience being in this team. But now I grow older, and I look at the pictures, and honestly I wouldn’t change a thing. This was the team that introduce me to the passion of my life, the thing I couldn’t think of living without, the biggest source of joy in me.

So today as I sit here and write this post, I laugh at our adolence years. How we liked to make simple things complicated even though we couldn’t handle the complication. But I also want to swallow my pride and say thank you, for the opportunity of making memories with you all. Years later, in the present day, all the black colour I thought I’ve poured all over that time, has faded away. What’s left is just memories.

The memories that makes me who I am today. And I will be forever grateful.

Love,

So for a bit of context, I was mentioned for a new challenge on Instagram called artist/performer challenge, in which basically I need to post 10 pictures of me every day for 10 days in a performance situation with no explanation to bring awareness to the arts. However, because my annoying self don’t wanna ruin the aesthetic of my instagram feeds, and I need to really start my writing habits again, instead of only posting the picture without context, I wanna post a whole ass story. The next 10 days will be my own journey in art.

Growing up in a conservative Javanese family, my grandfather held the traditional value of teaching arts to the children to train their “emotional brain” —which I actually appreciate, even though I know it’s a pain in the ass for some people- since he was a traditional dancer, all of his children were taught to dance. So my mum tried this on me and my brother, she enrolled me in traditional dancing course when I was super small, like 4 or 5 yo, then a violin course when I was 15. 

My parents, esp my mum, knew from the beginning that I inherited the art blood. I liked dancing, singing, acting, drawing, even when I didn’t really like playing the violin, my teacher was fond of me (not in a creepy way, ofc). I was quite an art prodigy. I have been getting on stage since young age too, my parents —who were quite often in charge of Christmas/Easter celebration in our church- always tried to make me perform, in every way: Balinese dancing, Javanese dancing, semi-ballet musical, theatre, singing, playing the violin, and even the picture above was from when I did a monologue.

The problem was that I had always been a big rebel. I didn’t like to be told what to do. I love going on stage and I know I’m good at it, but the more people push me to do it, the more I’d be hiding in the crowd. Unfortunately, my parents still have a hard time unlearning their old ways of “telling me what to do”, so we always end up fighting. Most of the time, our fights never has any closures, and just left hanging without any clear result of what each parties should and should not do. 

I also overestimated myself, I quitted playing violin, I stopped drawing, my band was breaking up, and I only act when I was really needed to. Without hardwork or training, raw talent will only be “talent”, and nothing more. I might have started as a 10 yo with a 15 yo talent, but as soon as I neglect my training, I became a 20 yo with the same 15 yo talent. It wasn’t good enough.

There are times when I regret my stubbornness, like, why???

But oh well, what’s done is done. I made my choice and no matter how poor that was, I ought to live up to it. I’m happy enough to be able to be aware of myself, the actions and consequences I had in the past, even my weak and strong points, also what I aspire to be in the future (haven’t figured this out quite yet tho). However, life never runs out of chances, I know I can —and I should- try to keep going at the things I love, including my passion for art, no matter how many times I gotta fall and restart all over again. I learn and manifest this in dancing —which I will be talking a lot on the next posts.