a sketch by Merlyna Lim, January 2010.
text by Merlyna Lim, January 2010, rewritten in January 2026.
***
I am not fond of drawing people. I can. But prefer not to.
When I sketch, I sketch the scene, the place, and the vibe. Sometimes I scribble people or crowds. But they appear only as part of the atmosphere, absorbed into space.
But this is Kecak.
A dance made of bodies in rhythm: fifty bare-chested men moving together and apart, chanting back and forth, sync and unsync, pulse answering pulse. Bodies are the rhythm.
I wonder, must I sketch people now?
Hmm. No, I tell myself. I don’t have to draw people. I only have to trace movement.
I sit at the edge of the circle, pen in hand. No pencil. Never pencil. When I sketch, I ramble with the pen. I do not erase. I never undo. Every mark stays. A witness to the rhythm I follow with my eyes, hands, and heart.
My pen dances over the dance. In rising and falling arcs, catching shoulders as they lift, hands as they slice the air. Gestures repeat, overlap, and dissolve into one another. The chant thickens, folds in on itself, vibrates through the cliffside. My lines chase it. Deliberately, inaccurately, imperfectly, wildly. No-so-quiet echoes of thousands of movements.
Ink scratches paper in short bursts, then long sweeps. I lag behind, then surge ahead. The rhythm does not wait for me, and I do not wait for it. And yet somehow we meet.
The dancers’ arms rise and fall. Voices stack in impossible patterns. I don’t join the chant. I don’t lift my arms. But I enter the flow anyway, translated into ink. Their rhythm fills the air; mine stays on the sketchpad.
The patterns are mesmerizing—imprecise, uneven, and yet absurdly seamless.
Then, I add colour. I reject the edges. I brush. I stroke. I let pigment run where it wants, bleed where it must. I trust the motion. I trust the flow. Light shifts. The paper breathes. Colour follows pulse, not form.
I am outside the circle, seated at its edge.
And yet I am inside it too. Carried by rhythms that are not theirs nor mine. But that my pen, stubborn and faithful, makes its own.
***
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