Hailing from the 400-year-old Mangkunegaran Kraton, the artists from the palace in Solo are arguably the paragon of Javanese court dance today.
Halus (refined) in both spirit and gesture, their martial grace, physical distinction and subtlest detail were nothing short of remarkable at their premiere performance on Tuesday.
With bent knees and arched toes, they raised their elbows in angular poses, wrung their wrists fluently, and swished the tails of their sarong costumes.
They shot downcast eyes into fiery stares and turned wide leaps into lilting steps - an alternate language of minutiae and impulsion.
In what was an emporium of Javanese dance traditions, the masters flaunted virtuosity in diverse styles that spanned serimpi, wayang wong, wayang kulit, panji and masked dance.
Most intriguing was how Korean choreographer Sen Hea Ha - known in America for her solo works – tried to wed the ancient Indonesian dance canon with modernist music by Romanian composer, Gyorgy Ligeti.
This juxtaposition was uneasy, not simply because the dancers were moving to Ligeti’s diatonic music as opposed to the usual pentatonic scales of traditional gamelan music.
There was an insistent suggestion of a battle narrative between the Dutch colonialists and the Indonesians, but its contours were slippery.
Multiple signs were dispatched: wine-glasses, roses, spears, daggers, hats, masks and joss-sticks.
Presented with unnamed rituals and meanings that hovered between the authentic and the invented, the audience needed subtitled translations to the dancers’ speech and songs, and also an outline of the elusive plot and cultural references.
Built in three parts - Strife, Exodus and Elysium - Labyrinth applied a schematic binary approach to choreography in terms of music, movement and theme.
The colonisers were often paired with aggressive moves and feverish music while the colonised were marked as soft-limbed and submissive.
Tradition was cast as slow and meditative while the birth of modernity was predictably violent.
Issues of power relations were clear in sections where masks and shadow puppets were brought into play for statements on the duplicitous roles of the ruler and the ruled.
And some sequences were wonderful to watch, such as the hypnotic masked dance and when the dancers broke out into casual banter and parodic action.
It was heartening that the purist preservers of court heritage were gung-ho in augmenting new forms and expressions.
But lacking a lucid line in dramaturgy, Sen Hea Ha could not direct them into riskier terrain in this rare collaboration.
The process for a deeper communication has nevertheless begun.