WHEN choreographer Jecko Siompo discovered hip hop at 16, the style felt deeply familiar. He had taken a trip from his village in West Papua to see how the city folk danced in Jakarta.
"I saw people break dancing - like they do in the United States - and I saw the dancing looked similar to our tribe," Siompo says.
Back home he flexed some moves for his family.
"My grandmother said: 'Why do people in the city follow us in the jungle?' "
She asked him to perform both styles. "I found the similarity when I moved," he says.
Siompo, now 36, believes hip hop originates from the traditional dances of West Papua.
"You don't have to believe me, but my grandmother told me," he says, and he says it more than once during the interview.
He argues the point in his dance work We Came From the East, which will have its Australian premiere at the Malthouse Theatre as part of the Melbourne Festival tonight.
Siompo rejects any notion that hip hop sprang from the streets of New York in the 1960s and 70s.
"Around the world I think there is a similar thing of the hip hop," he says. "The embryo is from Papua, or Indonesia."
When he visited New York in the 90s he did "some jamming with the hip hop dancing".
He says the style is clearer in the US, but is still convinced it comes from Papua. He argues hip hop was in Jakarta in the 1960s before springing up in the US in the following decade.
Siompo studied dance at Jakarta Institute for the Arts, and studied and performed in the US and Germany.
We Came From the East had its premiere in Jakarta as part of the Goethe Institut's Tanzconnexions program, an initiative that encourages dance projects between Europe and Asia.
It showed at the Da:ns festival in Singapore this year, which also featured works by Britain's acclaimed Hofesh Shechter Company and the Ballet Nacional de Espana.
Using 10 dancers - eight from Indonesia and two from Germany - Siompo aims to show the evolution of hip hop from the earliest times, incorporating his traditional dance and signature "animal pop" style.
"My expressions come from the animals: birds, crocodiles, birds, reptiles, kangaroos and wildcats," he says. "In Papua, dancing is like daily life."
Siompo's grandmother, he says, also danced. "She danced like a chicken, very slowly."
When he visited Papua in 1995, after studying in Jakarta, his grandmother had died.
"I wanted to tell her more about dance," Siompo says. "But now she is in paradise."
Source; www.theaustralian.com.au
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