Pencelupan - Immersion

What does it mean to sustain a slow art form in an age of impatience? How does it feel to be truly immersed to lose oneself in creative practice?

Pencelupan celebrates the rare art of Rifa’iyah batik and the women who sustain it as a humble yet powerful act of resistance to global cultural homogenisation.

Choreographed and performed by Australian-Indonesian dancer Alfira O’Sullivan, with original live music by Javanese composer Cahwati Sugiarto, Pencelupan invites audiences to step away from the rhythms of everyday life and into an enchanting botanical world. The performance also features Darwin-based Sahul & Sunda community dancers, Sydney’s Suara Dance, and batik artists from Batang, Indonesia.

From a semi-rural, semi-industrial community on Java’s north coast, Rifa’iyah batik is rich with Sufi-inspired spirituality, botanical knowledge, and layered symbolism across generations. It is a meeting place of diverse cultural influences and metaphor, with astracted creatures that emerge and recede within intricate motifs.

Despite the challenges of sustaining a livelihood and the distractions of the digital era, Rifa’iyah women artists continue to create, often spending up to a year completing a single work, maintaining a tradition that is cultural, spiritual, and deeply personal.

Pencelupan reflects on artistic practice as a means of building community, collective healing and developing spiritual discipline. It examines the plurality of art-making: as a form of spiritual devotion: an offering of patience, persistence, and care, as a way to maintain radically local identity as well as a way for women to earn a living.

Presented in George Brown Darwin Botanic Gardens, the performance unfolds among tropical plants that have long inspired many Rifa’iyah artworks. In this shared landscape – intimately connected to the cultures of Darwin’s Southeast Asian neighbours – the work reveals the quiet beauty, resilience and enduring relevance of a tradition shaped by nature, spirit and community.

See the live performance and explore the exhibition Batik Rifa’iyah.