Indonesian Performing Arts across Borders

This issue presents a panoply of historicised writings on theatre, dance, and music from Indonesia, ranging from the early 20th century to the present. Common to all the articles is the view that the last century has been a period of great change for both modern and traditional performing arts, which was co-articulated with advances in communication and transportation and the opening up of Indonesia to multinational capitalism.

Indonesia is a maritime nation deeply etched by lines of traffic in goods, ideas and people, yet its performing arts have been primarily thought about in static terms. Performance is usually considered to be grounded in particular regions or centres of production, inscribed within the non-permeable bounds of genre and traditional patronage arrangements and constrained by ritual prohibitions and ancestral reverence. Such traditionalism is at least in part a legacy of Dutch scholarship which tended to reify Indonesian performance by assuming fixedness and strict adherence to immutable rules. Writers such as Jaap Kunst, Jacob Kats, and Th. B. van Lelyveld interpreted the music, dance, and theatre of Java and Bali as continuous with western Indonesia's ancient Indic past. They were quick to dismiss hybrids and modern performance as corruptions and bastardisations. Such a prejudice was also embraced and promoted by indigenous colonial elites, instituting a discourse of heritage preservation which continues to generate anxiety and strategies aimed at containing any possible cultural loss.

Modern performers such as dancer Raden Mas Jodjana (1895-1972) were thus dismissed as inauthentic due to their overly ‘individualistic’ interpretations of tradition (Lelyveld 1931: 38) which would compromise its purity, and hybrid arts such as keroncong or kethoprak merited little consideration. Only recently have scholars begun to unearth histories of itinerant performers and travelling art forms in order to describe and analyse processes of innovation, hybridisation and cross-fertilisation.

This issue considers traditions of Javanese and Balinese performance as being in constant flux and movement, subject to appropriation and expropriation and radical reinterpretation by both Indonesian and non-Indonesian artists and intellectuals. Authors in this volume offer insights into performers, agents, institutions, writers, and ensembles whose work has generated new insight into how Java and Bali are conceived both in Indonesia and abroad. Rather than staging received notions from the past, it is suggested that the performance of Indonesia and its regions is a process situated between the local, the supralocal and the global – which must be negotiated among performers, cultural agents, critics, audiences, and other participants in the cultural field.

Scholarly models and approaches to Indonesian performance

The dominant approach to the study of Indonesian expressive culture was, until very recently, the symbolic anthropology of the late Clifford Geertz. The deficiencies of this model are well known, but Geertz's high standing as a public intellectual and the wide currency his writings have enjoyed in both the social sciences and humanities has served as academic capital to authorise a large raft of studies in Indonesian expressive culture. According to Geertzians, performing arts and other forms of cultural performance (including the notorious Balinese cockfight) are to be viewed as privileged windows into the worldview and ethos of particular ethnic groups with distinct values and understandings, customs and norms. The anthropologist-observer is encouraged ‘to read [performance texts] over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong’ (Geertz 1973: 452). This approach emphasises boundaries between the observer and object of observation and has the effect of capitulating to Indonesian nationalist proprietary claims over Indonesian culture, dismissing variants across performance as insignificant ‘noise’ in an essential text that can be ‘read’ in all performances by the properly situated observer.

A second widely accepted approach to Indonesian performance is grounded in ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood's ideal of bi-musicality. Under the tutelage of Jaap Kunst in Amsterdam, composer Mantle Hood was encouraged to undertake practical instruction in classical gamelan music to understand the production of music from an insider's point of view. In a classic essay, Hood likens the process of learning how to understand and produce a new music as akin to learning a new language, the goal being the acquisition of bi-musicality in analogy to bilingualism (Hood 1960). The insider's understanding of musical performance allows for a more accurate description of musical processes, principles of improvisation and ensemble playing, and provides new-found respect for the technical skills and artistry of master performers.

However, the metaphor of bi-musicality has come up for much discussion and critique. Hood and his students believed that foreign music should be taught through ‘performance study groups’ that aimed to faithfully replicate the traditional repertoire of world music ensembles; but more recent ethnomusicologists have encouraged improvisation and the creation of new music for traditional ensembles.

A related perspective is the Asian theatre studies model most closely associated with the Asian theatre programme at the University of Hawai'i. This approach aims to legitimate ‘theatre forms of Asia by approaching them on the same level that theatre in the West’ has been studied (Brandon 1989: 26). Students of this approach have likewise been encouraged to undertake direct tutelage in traditional theatre, and Hawai'i and other institutions espousing this approach regularly import ‘master artists’ to train student performers. The characteristic Hawaiian mode of study has been the genre study in which a traditional theatre form is studied as a system of production with attention to repertoire of plays; division of performance roles; and voice, music, movement, costumes, and sets. Some attention is also typically given to criticism, reception and audience roles, as well as the biographies of outstanding performers. This model has been instrumental in efforts to seek out and describe overlooked performance genres that otherwise would leave few physical traces. It has not been subject to systematic critique, though some have noted the tendency of its proponents to idealise genre as the mode of production. This approach to performance has been particularly important in Indonesia through its implementation at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, in the Performing and Visual Art Studies (Pengkajian Seni Pertunjukan dan Seni Rupa) programme.

All three of the above approaches emphasise synchronic over diachronic analysis, and tend to idealise certain performances as more ‘authentic’ to tradition than others.

Other, more dynamic approaches and models have however emerged. A newer approach to Indonesian performance is derived from the academic discipline – some would say anti-discipline – of performance studies and the loosely allied field of theatre anthropology founded by Eugenio Barba, which focused on an exploration of intercultural performance through practice. Performance studies developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the interstices between theatre and anthropology. A number of performance studies' early theorists, including Richard Schechner, Phillip Zarrilli, and John Emigh, went to Asia initially to study Asian performance to enrich their own theatre-making vocabularies, and later realised that Asian performance in situ holds its own inherent attractions and points of interest worthy of exploration. Performance studies has served to de-exoticise Indonesian performance by pointing out commonalities with cultural practices from other parts of the world. It has celebrated the diversity and variety of performance, paying homage to both cultural and individual styles and through its connection with theatre anthropology it has stimulated a practice-based exploration of Indonesian theatrical idioms. However, performance studies since the 1990s has been less attentive to Indonesian (and other non-Euro-American) performance, further removing itself from anthropology proper and from the theoretical uncertainty of theatre anthropology, and converging with queer studies in its reformulation of performativity.

The performance studies of Schechner and Emigh is not necessarily the only desirable model for a study of Indonesian performance. The pioneeering work of linguist A.L. Becker (1979) on Javanese wayang kulit has inspired a small but influential cohort of scholars to consider Indonesian traditions of verbal art as oral philology, by which the elements of the past are unearthed and made to speak to the present. Village performers have been thus figured as hermeneuts who endeavour to make sense of the confusions and ambiguity of contemporary society by way of tried-and-true artistic strategies inherited from the ancestors. Interpretation is thus not the sole prerogative of the scholar-observer, but is a shared concern with the artist-subject.

In more recent years there has been a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the lack of consistent engagement with the epistemologies of the body, among those engaged in the study of Indonesian performance – and more specifically dance performance making – and the lack of a scholarship grounded in the physicality of the body, able to recognise the dancing body as a cultural-political producer. Dance studies is the disciplinary field which took off in the 1990s from Susan Leigh Foster's articulation of the notions of corporeality and embodied knowledge and their relationship to the act of writing. Foster ushered in a scholarship that views dance making as ‘a form of theorizing, one that informs and is informed by instantiations of bodily significance’ (Leigh Foster 1995: 16). It is only a matter of time before such approaches are turned towards and reworked to investigate Indonesian performance making.

Historicity reconsidered

The writings presented in this volume are not homogeneous but they all share, in lesser or greater degree, a view of performance as a terrain in which ambiguities are rife and meaning and significance are always open to contestation.

Matthew Isaac Cohen argues that the first half of the 20th century represented a high point in the Orientalist expropriation of images of Java and Bali on international stages. The staging of Java differed from pre-20th-century expropriations in that a Javanese persona was embodied and assumed onstage and off. Indonesians, Eurasian, Europeans, and non-Indonesian Asians (including Japanese and Indian artists) were complicit in this movement. This era ended with Indonesian independence, when the Indonesian state assumed a proprietary right to monitor representations of its ethnic constituents abroad through cultural missions and diplomacy. Neil Sorrell questions the appropriateness, on the part of Euro-American composers, of invoking Javanese models when creating work for gamelan, as this often leads to serious misunderstandings over fundamentally different musical concepts, such as intonation. Better to allow local accents to emerge without seeking ‘to replicate the identity of elsewhere’, and he instantiates this localisation by discussing the Missa Gongso, composed by him for the York based Gamelan Sekar and performed at York Minster in 2005.

Alessandra Lopez y Royo focuses on two ballets, The Prince of the Pagodas by Cranko created in 1957 and restaged by MacMillan in 1989 and Gong by Morris, premiered in 2002. Through a discussion of these dance works and their musical score, by Benjamin Britten and Colin McPhee respectively, she revisits the highly contested meanings of influence and cultural appropriation, and of transformation and translation. In so doing she foregrounds the negotiation of sexual identity through the use of the gamelan as a gay marker among 20th-century North American composers, in a line that goes from McPhee to Lou Harrison and later composers, and to which British composer Britten seems to belong in view of his close association with McPhee.

Michael Bodden applies a sociological perspective to the postcolonial history of Indonesian national art theatre. He analyses the modern use of tradition as a ‘scarce resource’ (cf. Appadurai 1981) that is negotiated in contestations between cultural bureaucrats and government officials of aristocratic origins and artists with populist leanings. While agents of the state reified tradition as static and orderly, artists celebrated the unruly and multivocal qualities of folk art.

Barbara Hatley offers a case study of contemporary Indonesian theatre group, Teater Garasi, which is explicitly grappling with issues of contested identity – what it means to be essentially Javanese in a time when the notion of ‘Javanese-ness’ is contested.

Mark Hobart raises a series of crucial questions relating to how Balinese dance performance has been misunderstood so far, as a wholly ahistorical entity, absorbed in the imaginary pre-colonial past. Should we not attempt to contextualise it and historicise it by putting it alongside Indian, Chinese and Japanese performance, engaging in a critical study of cross-cultural performance, modernity and post-coloniality? His incisive comments on how Balinese performance heritage has been constructed by outsiders with the connivance of Balinese themselves are relevant not just to Bali but to Asian performance as a whole, suggesting the need for rebooting research in the 21st century.

Margaret Coldiron reports on a recent performance where classical Greek and Indonesian theatrical elements are combined and juxtaposed. She presents the case for a more dynamic model of intercultural theatrical production in which source and target cultures co-exist in dynamic equilibrium.

Laura Noszlopy explores changes in the ways in which the agency of Balinese performing artists can be viewed, as their field becomes more professionalised. She argues that while there is a history of impressarios on the sidelines of Balinese performance, ‘freelancing’ has become the new modus operandi for many contemporary artists.

Articles in this issue were originally presented as papers at conferences in London and Exeter in April 2005. One was a panel on performing Indonesian dance and music in transnational contexts convened by Alessandra Lopez y Royo and Matthew Cohen at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the AHRB Research Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance's conference ‘Music and Dance Performance: Cross Cultural Approaches’. The other was a panel on tradition-based Southeast Asian performance convened by Matthew Cohen and Laura Noszlopy at the 22nd ASEASUK conference. Many of the participants and much of the thinking behind these two panels overlapped, generating dialogue and discussion. The British location slanted conference presentations towards Java and Bali, though there were also important contributions on performance work in Hawai'i and Australia derived from the West Sumatran folk theatre of randai by Kirstin Pauka and Indija Mahjoeddin.

The apparent continued interest in Java and Bali over the rest of the archipelago that transpires from the articles in this journal issue merits comment here. The reason for it is partly a contingent one, as not all the presenters could contribute. Had this been possible, it would have ensured greater variety and a more balanced approach. But there is also undeniably a historical imbalance, rooted in the fact that scholarship on Java and Bali has traditionally been far better established in the universities, tied as it was, with colonial and neo-colonial interests, when the relevant departments were created. Moving on from this, university performance study groups and their crossover into related community arts projects such as practicing gamelan and Indonesian dance ensembles in the west have ensured that Javanese and Balinese genres are more widely accessible, and have thus attracted greater funding in terms of scholarships, exchanges and supporting institutions. The performing arts of Java and Bali, due to their historical prominence, are also more marketable for undergraduate teaching and public workshops.

As for the articles, many of them raise tough ethical questions. Who can rightly claim to represent Javanese or Balinese tradition? Is it wrong to interpret the dance or music or myths of a group other than your own? Is it wrong to infuse new meanings into appropriated material? Are Indonesian performances inseparably predicated on traditional sponsorship arrangements, or does social change open up new possibilities?

One of the issues not specifically raised in the papers in this volume, but of the utmost importance and immediate concern, is the economic exploitation of Indonesian and other Asian performing artists invited to take part in large scale performances in Europe and America. Disguised as an attempt to be diverse, global and transnational, such artistic productions – often reinterpreting enduring and well-loved classics in the European operatic and dramatic canon – rely on the skills and expertise of ancillary Indonesian dancers and musicians for their success with bored, primarily middle-class audiences, constantly hungry for novelty. Such scintillating performances, often lasting no longer than a few days, and never to be staged again, mask a sordid reality of underpaid labour, with per diem passed off as full salary payments and cramped accommodation for the artists. This treatment of those from outside stands in stark contrast to that offered to union-protected resident performers. Quite apart from the sense of outrage one might feel in realising that this scenario belongs to 21st-century Europe or America, and not to some Dickensian past, one needs to acknowledge more explicitly the link that exists between performance, politics and economics. The performing arts are one of the cultural industries of our time and in considering issues of transnationalism it is inadmissible to concentrate solely, in a modernist fashion, on those of an aesthetic content, divorced from the politics of the everyday.

The thoroughly historical nature of all the studies in this volume demonstrates that a comprehensive history of Indonesian performance is overdue. There are complex, and as yet unarticulated, links between the European dance odysseys of Javanese dancer Raden Mas Jodjana and Balinese dancer Ni Madé Pujawati. The ability of Kadek Suardana to make a living as a freelancer has something to do with both current transnational performance networks as well as colonial-era cultural tourism in Bali and the pre-independence representation of Bali on international stages and screens. This volume suggests that any meaningful history of Indonesian performance must take into account contributions by all Indonesians (including Chinese and Eurasians) as well as Europeans, Indians, Arabs, and others. The boundaries of Indonesia as a geopolitical entity were formed as a result of colonial politics, but its cultural field has always been somewhat wider (and also somewhat smaller) than these boundaries imply.

The pleasure of performance lies in its ability to evoke thought, generate discussion and facilitate social relations. The presentation of these essays at conferences and their reworking into articles did all of this, and it is to be hoped that this publication will enable them to continue to perform such functions.