Reconstructing the Evidentiary Role of the 1957 Tanjung Katung Manuscript: Documentation and Preservation of Malay Dance Heritage

English

Abstract

This study examines the 1957 Tanjung Katung/Lagu Dua manuscript attributed to Guru Sauti (1903–1963), the Serdang Malay choreographer, as a documentary interface between written archival evidence and embodied performance memory. Rather than reading the manuscript merely as a technical dance manual, the article asks how its material condition, internal organization, and post-independence historical setting contribute to the preservation of a performance tradition. A qualitative document-analysis design combined source criticism, descriptive codicology, heritage-oriented thematic analysis, and a qualitative preservation-risk matrix. The evidence base is the manuscript as reproduced in photographs and described in accompanying documentation; the original sheets were not examined physically. The manuscript records movement terminology, floor-path directions, musical notation, and performance rules; its reported condition includes aged lined paper, fading ink, edge damage, and lamination. The findings show that the document performs three simultaneous functions: it stabilizes otherwise embodied knowledge in written form; it reflects a mid-twentieth-century moment of cultural consolidation in which regional Malay dance was reworked for national audiences; and it now operates as a preservation object whose value depends on both physical conservation and contextual interpretation. The article proposes a layered preservation sequence that prioritizes conservation assessment, high-resolution digitization, metadata and provenance documentation, diplomatic and critical transcription, and community-informed audiovisual reconstruction with explicit evidentiary labels. The study contributes to heritage scholarship by demonstrating that the preservation of dance manuscripts requires coordinated care for the physical document and for the performative knowledge to which it points.