Borneo, 1912: The Kancet Lasan | Kenyah Arts
Many of our readers are familiar with the wood carving and beadworking skills of the Kenyah people of Borneo. The Kenyah (and groups related by language) are among the orang ulu peoples living in the remote upper Rejang and the northern interior of the Baram River in Sarawak and across the border into Kalimantan (Indonesia).
Their wide ranging and cultivated artistry, including refined and death-dealing headhunting swords and elaborately decorated shields, represent items that are regularly reproduced and highly esteemed by Western collectors. The latter are often sumptuously painted with a central monstrous face organically surrounded by a gaggle of mythical creatures and various body parts that are connected by scrolling tendrils and curvilinear designs. Dressed in battle regalia, these accoutrements are brandished about by men in the Kenyah war dance, the kancet papatai. In this dance the most adept warriors display their agility and resoluteness while demonstrating their command of flowing martial art moves. In a binary complement, female Kenyah heroism and identity is equally championed in the kancet lasan, a solo virtuoso performance where the dancer hypnotically emulates various movements of the sacred great hornbill (buceros rhinoceros). The hornbill or enggang is a male upperworld symbol that is normally linked with objects that are associated with warfare and head hunting such as swords, spears, shields and human skulls. In this dance, an aristocratic woman wears a man's elaborate war bonnet festooned with long Argus pheasant feathers while using two pom poms composed of bundled hornbill feathers to accent her arm and hand movements. It was said that maidens could not wear such bonnets as "their magic is still not strong enough." (Tillema: 1938:221) Among the Kenyah nobility the ability to dance was synonymous with one's breeding and personal cultivation. In 1928, Tillema observed that dancing provided the Kenyah with the greatest pleasure, and that audiences would watch for hours on end while commending the subtleties of the best dancer's movements, which the Dutch explorer described as "difficult to perform properly."
Click the image below to watch Old Borneo, A Mystical Tribal Dancer with Sape Music
The kancet lasan is usually accompanied by the lulling, but pulsating sounds of the sape, a two-stringed lute. While a humble instrument, when played in tandem with another lute the sounds can be thrilling. Nearly fifty years ago, I once wrote after listening to two oldtimers play that their overlapping musical combinations conjured up images of two exuberant dragons with long tails playfully dancing with one another. Played without the aid of plectrums, one musician would strum his licks and then the other would immediately respond, and like dueling banjos they made remarkable melodies that resonated over the jungle night. This remarkable early film clip catches a Kenyah dancer's cultural command, her status and a sense of purposeful beauty, that like the traditional art that frames this 108 year-old feature has lost none of its potency or luster.
— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors