The Aesthetic Expression of Ronggeng Culture in Sang Penari

Abstract

Sang Penari presents Ronggeng culture not simply as a traditional performance inherited from village life, but as an artistic form closely connected with the body, memory, social identity, and local cultural experience. Through the character of Srintil, the film turns Ronggeng dance into a central visual and emotional language. The movement of the dancer, traditional costume, music, ritual scenes, rural landscape, and the rhythm of cinematography work together to create an aesthetic image of Ronggeng culture that is both attractive and emotionally complex. This paper examines the aesthetic expression of Ronggeng culture in Sang Penari from several related aspects, with particular attention to dance and bodily performance, visual composition, costume and color, music and ritual, and the construction of female identity. Rather than treating Ronggeng only as a cultural symbol, the discussion focuses on how the film transforms traditional performance into cinematic experience. Srintil’s body is especially important in this process. It is at once the medium through which Ronggeng is performed and a site where cultural expectation, personal feeling, and social pressure meet. The film therefore gives traditional beauty a complicated emotional dimension. Its representation of Ronggeng is not a neutral reproduction of local tradition, but a selective and aesthetic reconstruction shaped by cinematic language. Through this reconstruction, Sang Penari preserves recognizable elements of local culture while also giving them new visual, emotional, and narrative meanings. The film shows how traditional performance can continue to function as cultural memory within contemporary Indonesian cinema.