Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo who is known for her endurance art finally did a live performance to mark the closing of her solo exhibition titled “Why Let the Chicken Run?” at Museum MACAN that has been held since February 2020. It is also an event to celebrate Museum MACAN’s fourth anniversary. 

At the end of the whole series of her live performance on 13 November, Melati performed the “Exergie - Butter Dance” (2020) which is recognised as her most iconic and best-known work. The “Butter Dance” debuted at the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin back in 2000, and Melati performed the dance across Europe, Singapore and Canada. However, in Indonesia, the first performance of the dance was held in 2006 at the Goethe Institute. 

The “Butter Dance” is 20 minutes long, but it requires physical endurance as Melati has to dance on top of a pile of butter, where she repeatedly slips and stumbles. In this performance Melati explores the specific bodily sensation experienced in the single “delicate moment” where the body loses control before falling over. The dance highlights the subjective nature of pain as part of a universal human experience and the importance of will and determination. 
Melati also performed her other works, such as “Eins und Eins” (2017) where she sips black ink from a basin and spits it out, representing how the human body holds onto aggression and unease before eventually purging these emotions physically in the form of nausea or vomit. She also performed “Alé Lino” (2003), “I Love You” (2007), “Behind The Light” (2017) and “Transaction of Hollow” (2016) to end her solo exhibition at the museum.