Indonesian dancers in Fremantle

Penny and I went into Fremantle for a couple of hours today, to eat chocolate lunch at San Churro and browse a bead shop, but found ourselves diverted by a school performance in a small market under the giant fig trees.

The school in question, I learnt from a bookmark one of its members (older student or teacher) handed out, is Prince’s Cre@tive School, an Indonesian school, and a group of their young students was performing traditional dances.

We watched nine girls in bright skirts, trousers and tops – apparently Indonesia has hundreds of ethnic groups, each with their own dress, so I don’t think I can find the proper words in a quick google search before bed – and headwear comprising a band that circled the head with a semicircular bit on one side. They sang, punctuated occasionally with birdcry-like sounds, and clapped. Dances included: kneeling in a line, tapping parts of their bodies and the ground, bowing and turning their heads; splitting into threes for similar motions; back in a line, three groups linking hands and rotating in front and behind each other, unlinking hands to pass the others and re-linking very quickly.

Then the whole group got onto the stage, including some girls in different dresses and their hair falling down to one side, a single white and pink flower pinned to it, instead of the other girls’ topknots, and boys in trousers and white tops with red waist-sashes and headbands. They played the angklung, a bamboo instrument that each produces a single note; many together form the music. It has two bamboo tubes in a frame and, when shaken, produces the note. Here’s the wiki page. They played a traditional Australian song first (“Waltzing Matilda”), then a traditional Indonesian piece.

Overall, very interesting to watch!

The bookmark, scanned, with small pictures: here. We saw the centre dance, but missed the naga.