‘the idea for receiving the idea, that is the seed’: percolating and steeping in somatic music

Abstract

Javanese dance artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto) led a keynote workshop as part of the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference 2017 at Coventry University. This workshop took a ‘wave’ format that involved different groups of participants flowing in and out of the durational workshop over three hours. The ‘somatic music’ created by Tim Jones and Adrian Lee accompanied and supported this flow, bringing the Amerta Movement practice into conversation with musical improvisation. The musicians later played with Prapto and presented their own ‘gig’ as part of the ‘Amerta Movement in Performance’ events in July 2018 and 2019 in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK.1 After the Stroud workshop in 2019, Prapto asked researcher Emma Meehan to write to the musicians to discuss their exploration of ‘somatic music’. The following set of e-mail exchanges over the past year share excerpts of this ongoing dialogue instigated by Prapto. Following Prapto’s death in December 2019, we gathered our conversations here to pay tribute to his work and celebrate his inspiration to artists experimenting in Amerta Movement in performance. Alongside these conversations, we invite readers to listen to audio recordings of somatic music with Tim Jones, Adrian Lee and Prapto. Rather than presenting a definition of what somatic music is, we want to share perspectives on somatic music as an ongoing dialogue that will continue as part of Prapto’s legacy in years to come. A title for these exchanges suggested itself from Prapto’s comment (2018, 151–152) ‘the idea for receiving the idea, that is the seed’, to acknowledge his seeding of this conversation into existence.