Come dance through deep-time with us! Consider an end-of-year gift, and empower us to craft the next phase of the work in 2026.
Who Are We?
Prehistoric Body Theater creates deep-time animal dance, bringing an embodied celebration of humanity's shared evolutionary ancestry to the stage and screen. Founded in 2017, we are a collective experimental performance company based in Central Java, Indonesia. Our work fuses Indonesian traditional performance and cultural knowledge with cutting-edge stagecraft and collaborative research with an international panel of mentor paleontologists.
Co-artistic directors Dr. Ari Dharminalan Rudenko and Sofyan Joyo Utomo lead an ensemble of 15 Indonesian performing artists who share a passion for nature conservation, education, and experimental performance-making. In 2025, Prehistoric Body Theater completed their U.S. debut tour at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and Asia Society NYC, followed by a month-long residency with paleontologists at Montana's Hell Creek Formation.
66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of a billion atomic bombs. The ensuing global mass extinction event marks the end of the reign of the dinosaurs and the dawn of the age of mammals. Ghosts of Hell Creek tells the story of Acheroraptor, the last feathered raptor dinosaur to prowl the Hell Creek jungles of prehistoric Montana 66 million years ago, before its annihilation in the wake of the apocalyptic asteroid impact. The work then celebrates the miraculous survival of humanity’s ancient primate ancestor Purgatorius, who rose from the ashes and thrived on the first fruit as the world was born anew.
Ghosts of Hell Creek is Prehistoric Body Theater’s first flagship dance-theater production, crafted like a mesmerizing clay-textured diorama, activated by full-body clay costumery, intricate lighting, and an immersive musical score undulating with experimental gamelan motifs.
Prehistoric Body Theater’s second feature work-in-process performance titled A Song for Sangiran 17, is a work in honor of the ancient Homo erectus peoples who lived in Java one million years ago, known from the Sangiran fossil site just 30 minutes north of Prehistoric Body Theater’s “Nest” basecamp house. Sangiran 17 is the most complete skull found at the site, and from this fossil we can reconstruct their face and brain case. The Sangiran people were among the first in the world to use fire and simple stone tools, and mark the dawn of humanity’s consciousness.
A Song for Sangiran 17 was first commissioned by curator by Melato Suryodarmo for Indonesia Bertutur Festival, and was performed on September 8, 2022, on a constructed stage at Borobudur Temple, Central Java, Indonesia. A new tourable version of the performance is currently in development. Keep tuned for updates!
CALENDAR
