Indonesian Dances

Abstract

It is a great burden to me to present a paper dealing with the history of Indonesian dances in a complete format. I won't be able to talk about the dances of dozens of ethnic groups of the Indonesian people who live in more than 13,000 islands which spread from Sabang in the west to Jayapura in the east. Each ethnic group has its own style of dancing. Briefly speaking, however, all the dances of the Indonesian people can be divided into four major divisions in accordance to the contact with foreign cultures, i.e., dances of the primitive people which have never got any influence from other culture, dances which got influence from Indian culture, dances which got influence from Moslem culture and dances which got influence from western culture. We still have many primitive dances which can be seen in the inner parts of islands such as Irian Jaya, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and many small islands in the eastern part of Indonesia. Dances which got some influence from Indian culture have developed in Java and Bali where there were Hindu-Javanese and Hindu-Balinese kingdom in the past. Dances which got influence from Moslem culture have spread out all over the Moslem kingdoms of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi. While modern dance which got some ideas from the West began to develop in big cities like Jakarta and Yogyakarta since the 1950's.