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Vier personen in een lege hoekige ruimte, één ondersteboven tegen de muur, één liggend op de vloer, één zittend op een kruk en één rechtop staand. Michel Schnater

dance

ISH Dance Collective

DJANGAN!

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Thursday 8 April 2027

Tijd20:30 LocationStudio Prijs €18.00
Prices
regular €18.00
up to 26 years €13.50
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Djangan: don’t do it. Show no anger, no fear, no guilt, no sense of loss. Don’t break down. Don’t reveal what a body sometimes needs to feel most of all.

The decorations have been preserved. The silence surrounding them has too. Three dancers wear the KNIL uniform: one Javanese, one Moluccan, the third from Manado. Men with different backgrounds, deliberately brought together by the colonial army so that no single group could ever unite against the system. When Indonesia gained independence, it became clear that everything they had given was suddenly worth nothing.

Behind the decorations is a person, not a soldier: someone who could feel anger but was never allowed to show it, someone who felt fear and learned that fear had no place. Not every story is the same. Some carried what had been done to them out into the world, becoming hard where softness was needed. Victim and perpetrator can exist within the same body.

What the uniform teaches, standing tall, staying silent, showing no weakness, eventually becomes part of the body itself. The danger has long passed, yet the body remains on alert. That discipline does not end with the uniform: standing tall becomes raising children to stand tall. Strictness becomes the language through which a father passes on both control and love to the next generation; children who learn what they are not allowed to show long before they understand why.

Three men stand motionless, exactly as they were taught. Then, almost imperceptibly, their posture begins to soften. What rises to the surface, anger, fear, guilt, longing, is finally allowed to exist. Not a collapse, but a release: the courage to be vulnerable at last.

DJANGAN! is a dance performance by Cheroney Pelupessy that asks what it means to be a man within the KNIL, and what ideas of masculinity we unconsciously pass on, without offering a definitive answer.

Cheroney Pelupessy is a dancer, choreographer and theatre maker with Indonesian, Moluccan and Dutch roots. She weaves together traditional and contemporary dance to tell stories about cultural identity, heritage, community and memory. In 2026, Cheroney won the Golden Calf Audience Award for her documentary Mama'ku. She also received the Dutch Dance Days Innovation Award 2026 and the Gieskes-Strijbis Stage Award.

DJANGAN! is developed under the banner of ISH Talent, in which ISH supports talented emerging makers in their professional development.

“By sharing experiences from my own life and from the people around me, I strive to create connection and offer my audience a new perspective.”
— Cheroney Pelupessy
 

  • direction Cheroney Pelupessy dance Ryan Berg, Jefta Tanate & Madhan Ramadhan music Rik Ronner lighting design Mike den Ottolander costume design Arnold Puts
  • age 14+
  • content warning This performance addresses sensitive themes, including domestic violence, emotional oppression and intergenerational trauma.

Whether this performance has an interval is not yet known.

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