Kekompakan [Cohesiveness]: Togetherness and Entrainment in the Sitting Dances of Aceh, Indonesia

Abstract

From origins in coastal Aceh and the Gayo highlands, the sitting dances of Aceh have exploded in popularity, spreading to schools, universities, embassies, and festival stages across Indonesia and the world as a well-known ‘cultural peak’ in the Indonesian national cultural pantheon. Requiring intense rhythmic co-ordination between participants’ singing, body percussion, and dance movements, they are seen to convey a powerful image of cohesion, linked to the famously strong social ties of Acehnese and Gayo society.

I conducted participant-observation with an Indonesian dance group and recorded conversations with 91 participants across Aceh, in Jakarta, and in Sydney and Melbourne, generating a body of discourse which reveals associations between concepts of togetherness and synchronised movement in the dances. This thesis centres the embodied experiential and traditional knowledge of these “dancer-musicians” (Kartomi 2004, 1), using ethnography to explore issues which have mainly been examined using social and cognitive sciences methodologies. This evidence is examined in relation to and in tandem with existing literature on joint musical synchrony (i.e., mutual entrainment) drawn from history, psychology, neuroscience, and behavioural biology.

Frequently recurring in these conversations, kekompakan, borrowed from the word ‘compact’, is often translated as ‘cohesiveness’, ‘harmony’ or ‘solidarity’. Seen as an important value and necessary for successful performance, it is used to describe both the ideal shared timing accuracy of the movements and the required social closeness of the group. Examination of the dual senses of this term, related to both physical and social cohesion, is at the heart of the analysis in this thesis, which presents participants’ experiences of synchronised rhythmic movement to illuminate how such practices relate to connection and togetherness on inter-personal, communal, regional, national and international scales.