Sekar Sari
PhD
Screen and Cultural Studies (Dance Film and Performance Studies)
Sekar Sari is an artist-researcher, dancer, actor, and PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne. Her work explores the intersections of performance, embodiment, and intercultural cinema -particularly how the concept of rasa (aesthetic-affective resonance) operates within dance film. Sekar is also an award-winning actor whose practice-based research integrates artistic, ethnographic, and cinematic methodologies. She received international recognition, including Best Actress awards at the Singapore International Film Festival and Indonesia's Young Iconic Actress Awards Top 10 Asia. Her recent works engage with Indonesian cultural memory, voice, ritual, and embodied forms of remembering, including performances presented at Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) and Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Through her research and creative practice, she continues to bridge the domains of performance, screen media, and cultural diplomacy, contributing to the cross-cultural understanding of movement-based cinema.
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Thesis
Indigenous Intercultural Bodies: Rasa in Indonesian Dance Film
Bodies shaped within specific cultural worlds can nevertheless resonate with audiences far beyond them. This thesis examines how Indonesian dance films make such encounters possible through rasa, an embodied mode of feeling, perception, intuition, and sensory attunement. Focusing on dance films directed by Garin Nugroho, it analyses how bodily movement and its cinematic environment function as narration, knowledge, and cultural memory. Combining close film analysis, autoethnography, and interviews with creative practitioners, the study explores how rasa supports affective resonance across cultural difference while sustaining cultural specificity, without requiring audiences to fully decode every cultural reference embedded within the films they encounter.
Research interests
- Dance film
- Performance and embodiment
- Rasa and Indonesian aesthetics
- Intercultural and transnational screen cultures
- Cultural diplomacy