Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance

Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives

Edited by

Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen

Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives, Edited by Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen This book first published 2010 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2010 by Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2575-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2575-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: The Transnational Dynamic in Southeast Asian Performance................................................................................................. 1 Matthew Isaac Cohen and Laura Noszlopy Creativity and Cross-Cultural Collaboration: The Case of Didik Nini Thowok’s Bedhaya Hagoromo ........................... 25 Felicia Hughes-Freeland Transnational Aesthetics and Balinese Music ........................................... 47 Andrew Clay McGraw Cambodia’s Trials: Theatre, Justice and History Unfinished .................... 79 Eric Prenowitz and Ashley Thompson ‘My Dog Girl’: Cok Sawitri’s Agrammaticality, Affect and Balinese Feminist Performance.............................................................................. 107 Hypatia Vourloumis ‘I am Cultures’: Ea Sola’s Transnational, Transcultural Arts and Answerability.................................................................................... 133 Rivka Syd Eisner Nameless, Sexless, Rootless, Homeless: Performance in a Transnation State ......................................................... 163 Paul Rae and Alvin Lim Dedication to Mari Nabeshima (1972-2010) ........................................... 191 Additional Transnational Perspectives on Southeast Asian Performance............................................................................................. 195 Contributors............................................................................................. 201 Index........................................................................................................ 205

INTRODUCTION: THE TRANSNATIONAL DYNAMIC IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN PERFORMANCE MATTHEW ISAAC COHEN AND LAURA NOSZLOPY

Written accounts of performing arts are commonly framed, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of nations. A typical reading list for a World Theatre course might include book titles such as The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, Traditional Chinese Plays, Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre, South African People’s Plays, The Metacultural Theater of Oh T’ae Sŏk: Five Plays from the Korean AvantGarde, or Dance, Drama and Theatre in Thailand. Some of these books concern plays, productions and theatrical genres that predate the nationstate. Others are about practitioners with transnational careers, people who are more likely to be encountered when they are working on stages abroad than in their countries of origin. The performance practices discussed within might exist in a number of countries (sometimes under different labels), their vitality owing much to their capacity to move across cultures and societies. Notably, books of this sort, to some extent at least, were compiled or written with the aim of communicating something about the performing arts to what is necessarily a transnational audience. National culture has particular meaning and power in post-colonial contexts as an authoritative discourse informing representations of creative practice as well as practice itself. National frameworks shape strategic inclusions, exclusions, juxtapositions and integrations, and there are sound academic and political reasons why nationally-framed books about the arts (and institutions, festivals, professional positions, educational courses, websites, etc.) continue to be produced. But it is clear that the analytical frame of the nation is increasingly redundant in explaining much arts practice and reception in today’s globalized and hyper-networked world. The sources of inspiration for contemporary performance makers are not bounded by their nations of origin. Their social networks are not limited to

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their fellow citizens. Many aspire to be recognised far beyond the national boundaries of the countries they were born into. In this global context, the national identity of an art form or artist cannot be taken for granted. The nation, to be meaningful, must be actively imagined and performed into existence in specific staging grounds and socio-political contexts. Older accounts of performing arts have often figured movement across geographical borders as epiphenomenal. The travel of a play abroad was taken, for example, as a sign of its prestige. A dancer’s training in a foreign country was often viewed simply as a pragmatic necessity in the development of a career. More recent studies of transnational performance (e.g., Gebesmair and Smudits 2001; Haiping 2005; Um 2005; Elam and Jackson 2005; Gilbert and Lo 2007; Rebellato 2009; Savarese 2010), following trends in cultural geography, have viewed flows of artists and artistic ideas as being constitutive of artistic forms and essential texts or sub-texts for artistic events. In a ‘labor-intensive human performance’ staged in a transnational site, ‘the dialectic between the performer and the spectator is brought forth as a focus for imagining a complex shifting of the socially given positionality of all those present and involved’ (Haiping 2005: 242). Mutual borrowing, fluid transactions and transformations of performances and performers have a long and enduring history in Southeast Asia. The contemporary explosion of global communications and travel serve only to widen the scope and flavour the depth of mixed up performance forms and their expression. The fluidity of performance forms and the porosity of their boundaries are related to Southeast Asia’s political geography. The division of Southeast Asia into its current constellation of eleven countries (Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) involved a high degree of what Anthony Reid (2010) has dubbed ‘imperial alchemy.’ Each of these countries has immense internal diversity and fuzzy cultural borders. Southeast Asia’s nations are not monocultural monads but geopolitical products of modern histories of colonialism and nationalism. These countries were once called ‘new states,’ but are made up of culturally overlapping old societies. From pre-colonial times, polities were complexly linked through movements of people, trade in goods and exchange of ideas travelling across seas and up and down river systems (Reid 1988, 1993). There were strong polities that united vast swathes of ancient Southeast Asia—Majapahit, Srivijaya, Champa, the Khmer kingdom of Angkor, Malaka—but basically Southeast Asia before the seventeenth-century expansion of European imperialism

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was ‘an expanding cloud of localized, fragile, loosely interrelated petty principalities’ (Geertz 1980: 4). In this pre-modern intersocietal system and, to a degree, up to the present, cultural performance has functioned as a form of currency across principalities and regions, a social lubricant to entertain guests from near and far, instil camaraderie, gauge the status of an event’s hosts, express the aspirations and ideals of a class of people, in addition to entertaining, instructing, venerating ancestors and warding off evil influences from village to state levels. The region’s chieftains and kings recruited and trained courtesan-dancers, musicians and other artists and artisans to deck out their palaces in imitation of the gods and heroes of Indic myth. A large-scale royal celebration typically assembled an array of contrasting performances. For example, an annual Thai New Year Buddhist celebration described in the Memoirs of Nang Nophamat, attributed to a consort of a fourteenth-century Sukothai king, though certainly inscribed some centuries later, involved the worship of Buddhist icons, sermons, almsgiving, firing of guns and cannons, a procession of soldiers and monks, music, singing, dancing and merry-making (Rutnin 1993: 37f). Agrarian and fishing communities sponsored smaller-scale performance events to enliven rural celebrations and relieve the grind of village life. An astounding variety of such rural performances are collated in encyclopaedic fashion in the Javanese poetic text, the Serat Centhini, best known through an 1814 redaction from the royal court of Surakarta, but based on texts written in the seventeenth century if not earlier (see i.a. Sumarsam 1995: 24-45). Myriad forms of traditional expressive culture, including participatory social dances accompanied by booming gongs, masquerades, processions, trance dances, shadow plays, storytelling, poetic duelling, pageants, ballad singing, court ceremonialism and praise singing, have historically not simply been stories that people told themselves about themselves, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz (1973), but were enacted in awareness that they were cultural performances to be witnessed by geographically diverse audiences. Traditional literary texts from around the region depict performances as sites of social transformation involving the adoption or revelation of disguise, the shaping of identities and the manifestation of bonds of kinship across social groupings. The cockfight in south Sulawesi’s epic poem I La Galigo (believed to have been composed between the 13th and 15th centuries) habitually operates as a narrative device by which sundered families are reunited and romances are hatched (Koolhof and Tol 1995). A tale about the Javanese Islamic saint Sunan Kalijaga inscribed in early

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nineteenth-century Java but perhaps originating centuries earlier, tells how the wali magically transported his disciples from Cirebon to the rival kingdom of Demak to attend an all-night wayang kulit performance. One of the disciples opts to stay until the play’s end and is discovered with the light of dawn by locals and brought before Demak’s sultan. Curious about Kalijaga’s magical powers and mystical insights, the sultan sends his son to Cirebon, yielding diplomatic relations between the two sultanates (Pusposaputro 1976; Cohen 2005). In pre-modern Southeast Asia, as in many other times and regions, cultural performance was, as often as not, a means to induce awe and compel others to recognise the accomplishment and prowess of patrons. This is mined for comic effect in Lao literature. Scenes depicting the awed reaction of Lao villagers upon ‘hearing a spectacular musical performance by the Bodhisattva’ simultaneously demonstrate the limitations of the ‘common range of experience’ of rural life, and the sophistication of the elite musical tradition (Koret 2000: 217). The use of performance to impress has particular saliency in crosscultural contexts. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that the performance of dance, music and theatre features as a universal constituent of encounters across cultures. ‘If allowed, people will let us get to know them by performing (parts of) their culture. Such knowledge—let us call it performative—demands participation (at least as an audience) and therefore some degree of mutual recognition’ (Fabian 1999). We can cull much performative knowledge from the Serat Centhini, for on entering rural communities, the vagabond santri (students of religion) of this epic poem are routinely involved in cultural performances ranging from religious discourse to trance dance, and post-performance dialogues that follow. Performative knowledge is also evident in a travelogue by Chinkak, a merchant of Chinese descent from Thailand who visited Bali in the early nineteenth century. During his visit, Chinkak was treated by a local potentate to performances of wayang kulit shadow puppetry and arja dance drama. This occasioned a detailed discussion with the ruler about Thai equivalents (nang and lakon). The merchant and the ruler discussed numbers of performers, costumes, size and number of puppets, accompanying musical instruments and the like. The splendour of Thai royal drama, puppetry and dance-drama caused the Balinese ruler to reflect that the Thai court must be ‘very rich because it could afford’ performance on such a massive scale (Kasetsiri 1969: 100). Mutual recognition should not be glibly equated with solidarity and communitas; in the terms of Charles Taylor (1992) there is a ‘politics of recognition’ informing the strategic choices made in the distillation of

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collective identities in public performance. A probing example of this politics of recognition in the pre-modern cultural-political arena comes from the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Chronicles), believed to have been written in early seventeenth-century Johor. The episode recounts the visit of the sultan of Malaka to the god-king of Majapahit to request the hand of the Majapahit king’s daughter. Impressed by the sultan’s cleverness and good looks, Majapahit agrees to the union. The upcoming wedding is celebrated with forty days and nights of feasting, with performances of music, song, poetic recitation, dance and masked dance by Majapahit’s courtiers. Majapahit bids his future son-in-law to ‘order the men of Malaka to play for him’ in exchange. The sultan’s advisor informs the sultan that he should tell Majapahit’s king that ‘the only game we Malays know is sapu-sapu ringin.’ This children’s game involves hitching the sarong to knee height to reveal the legs, an indecently over-familiar posture for adults. Majapahit’s king, not knowing the nature of the game, agrees to see it acted out. The Javanese courtiers become incensed at this act of exposure and threaten to kill the players, but the sultan’s advisor pleads they are only playing as they were bid to do so by the king, and the king orders the game to be played to its completion. Majapahit reciprocates by giving the players robes of honour, thereby expressing gratitude and simultaneously covering their nakedness. The king observes that ‘these men of Malaka are far sharper than those of any other country! No one would stand a chance with them at any game!’ The playful antagonism between the two parties culminates in marriage, a diplomatic alliance between Majapahit and Malaka and Majapahit’s gifting of lands in Sumatra to Malaka (Brown 1952: 80-1; see also Robson 1992: 38-40). The episode invokes a deep sense of cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 1997), revealing the Malays’ own feelings of artistic inadequacy in relation to Javanese accomplishments while expressing the pride Malays take in cleverness in social interactions. In a stroke, Malaka reverses the hierarchical relation formed by taking a wife from Majapahit by revealing the lower bodily stratum in carnivalesque revelry, ultimately establishing a sort of joking relationship (Radcliffe-Brown 1940) between the two parties that recognizes social disjunction while allowing for mutual aid and respect. Performance in this scheme becomes figured thereby as a contact zone, ‘the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Geertz 2000: 115). The contact zone of performance here emphasizes how the Islamic and Hindu polities of Malaka and Majapahit are ‘subjects…constituted in their relations to each other’ via ‘copresence,

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interaction, interlocking understandings and practices... within radically asymmetrical relations of power’ (ibid). Just as monarchs around Southeast Asia manifested their worldly glory by decorating their palaces with the trappings of many nations, the ability to mount a geographically-diverse variety of performances as part of a large-scale celebration signalled a principality’s vitality and the monarch’s cosmopolitan awareness. The centripetal movements of performance forms from periphery to centre and across principalities through gifting, abduction and emulation are celebrated in numerous pre-modern texts. The I La Galigo characteristically describes a royal ceremony enlivened by Javanese flutes and gongs, Malay-style music and various Bugis instruments (Koolhof and Tol 1995: 330-3). In the seventeenth-century Hikayat Banjar, a Banjarese prince journeys from Borneo to Java and becomes skilled in a variety of Javanese arts (wayang, topeng, gambus, joget and gandut) before returning to Banjar where he performs ‘in order to brighten the country up’ (cited in Robson 1992: 37). The exchange of performance continued well into the twentieth century. ‘Visits of Thai royalty to Indonesia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in the export of Javanese musical instruments and the creation of gamelan-based Thai music by composers such as Luang Pradit Phairau, who was part of Prince Woradet’s entourage in a 1915 trip to Java’ (Cohen 2006a: 588). There were also Javanese reciprocal artistic gestures, including musical pieces for gamelan based on Thai melodies and compositions for a set of Thai instruments presented by Thailand’s king to the royal court of Surakarta in the early 1930s. The traditional ‘Malay’ dance tradition taught in Malaysia today as joget gamelan developed around this time in the courts of Pahang and Terengganu in imitation of the refined female dances of central Java; instruments and some of the teachers were imported from the islands of the Indonesian archipelago (Sheppard 1969). Nineteenth-century advances in transportation and communication technologies and migrations of Indian and Chinese labourers and European settlers contributed to the internationalization of Southeast Asia’s performing arts. The import of Chinese opera troupes led to the initiation of numerous local troupes and hybrids in Cambodia, Vietnam, Java, Borneo and other parts of the region. Parsi theatre companies from the Indian subcontinent, which toured Southeast Asia extensively in the second half of the nineteenth century, greatly impressed local audiences with their massala mix of lively songs and dances, elaborate costumes, declamatory acting, romantic love interests, adventure, supernatural apparitions and stage spectacle. Southeast Asians made this formula their

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own in popular theatre genres such as bangsawan, komedi stambul and likay (Cohen 2006b). The growth of cities and print capitalism shaped new audiences interested in novel entertainments. Newspapers from 1890s urban Java contain advertisements and notices for circuses, magic shows, European social dancing, organ grinders, string orchestras, phonographic demonstrations, magic lantern shows, variety shows, marionette companies, English operetta companies, French and Italian opera, ring toss games and tombola stands, Japanese and Chinese acrobats, firework displays, panoramas, waxworks, cinematic projections, dog-and-monkey shows, ventriloquists, balloon shows, freak shows, fire juggling, magnetism, comic speeches, mimics and many other international expressive forms (Cohen 2006b). Classical Western music began to be studied by Southeast Asian elites, and subalterns indigenized Western musical instruments and forms to create hybrid musical genres such as keroncong and kundiman in urban centres in colonial Indonesia and the Philippines. Filipino musicians established their pre-eminence in the pan-Southeast Asian urban musical arena by the late nineteenth century. There are accounts of an orchestra of Filipino musicians playing daily in the esplanade of the colonial town of Medan in the 1890s. Musicians from the Philippines are still playing pop and country-western standards in bars, clubs and hotels in Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and cites around Asia and the world today (Ng 1995; Watkins 2009). Southeast Asian performers also found their way into international touring circuits starting at the same time. Exotic animals like orangutans from Borneo; ‘freaks’ such as Krao Farini, ‘the missing link’ from Laos; and Burmese jugglers such as Moung Toon and Javanese acrobats like the Sandi Brothers entertained audiences in Europe, the United States and around the world. These attractions excited the popular imagination about distant places, and also buttressed colonial ideologies. One observes a combination of romanticism and imperialism in the 1905 British musical drama The Blue Moon, written by Harold Ellis and A.M. Thompson, with music by Howard Talbot and Paul A. Rubens (cf. Platt 2004: 74-7). In this colonial drama, the Burmese dancing girl Chandra Nila is courted by a Burmese prince and falls for a dashing British army officer, Captain Jack Ormsby. It turns out that the dancer is actually English, having been kidnapped by the evil Burmese juggler Moolraj as a youth. The performing arts and artists in the play, such as the acting-bandmaster of the Royal Muzzerfernugger Native Band, are ephemeral figures of fun and satire, not earnest attempts at portraying another culture.

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European tours of Southeast Asian dance troupes representing Southeast Asians royal courts are recalled in Western performance histories for inspiring European artists. The Javanese troupe combining musicians from a plantation in West Java with dancers from the Mangkunegaran court which played the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 encouraged French composer Claude Debussy’s explorations of gamelan effects and pentatonic tunings in pieces such as Pagodes (1903). Performances of the ‘Ballet Troupe of the Royal Siamese Court’ in St. Petersburg in 1900 inspired Michel Fokine’s Orientalist choreography for the Ballet Russes. The Cambodian dance troupe under King Sisowath which performed in Paris and Marseille in 1906 is linked to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin; the Balinese troupe led by Cokorda Gede Raka Sukawati of Puri Ubud which played Paris in 1931 is viewed through Antonin Artaud’s phantasmagoric descriptions. English theatre visionary Edward Gordon Craig, while likely never witnessing a live performance of wayang kulit, intensely studied Javanese puppetry through available scholarly literature and his practical explorations of puppets’ forms. Craig lived with his collection of Javanese shadow puppets, decorating his walls with them and taking ‘them with him wherever he set up house’ (Savarese 2010: 466). These puppets were pivotal to Craig’s writing, teaching and theatrical practice after 1913 (Cohen 2010a: 38-41). International enthusiasm for Southeast Asian performance provided openings for the international careers of a number of Southeast Asian performing artists during the first decades of the twentieth century, including the Yogyakarta-born movement artist Raden Mas Jodjana. There were also foreign dancers and musicians such as Russian-born, Americantrained Mexican dancer Xenia Zarina (a.k.a. Jane Zimmerman), Texasborn dancer La Meri (a.k.a. Russell Meriwether Hughes), Indian dancer Nataraj Vashi, and Canadian composer Colin McPhee, who journeyed to Southeast Asia and returned to their places of origin to perform their musical interpretations and re-enacted choreographies. Numerous other performers who had never been to Southeast Asia nonetheless made work based on their exotic impressions of these distant and enticing cultures (Cohen 2010a). The positive reception of Southeast Asian courtly and classical arts by Europe’s leading intellectuals and artists encouraged cultural nationalism in the early twentieth-century and raised the esteem accorded performance in the inter-Asian cultural context. Artists such as Balinese dancer I Mario and Burmese actor-manager Po Sein acquired lasting reputations that extended far beyond their countries of origin. Conversely, this valuation could also be used by colonialists against native elites, as in 1927 when

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control of the royal court dance troupe of Cambodia was taken away from the palace for its purported neglect of the great tradition of Angkor and placed under the management of the scholar-administrator George Groslier and the Service des Arts Cambodgiens (Sasagawa 2005: 427f). Popular variety shows, theatrical troupes and carnivals circulated around the region in the first decades of the twentieth century, introducing the arts of the region and beyond to mass audiences. Ethnically-mixed companies were assembled by cultural entrepreneurs, many of whom were of foreign birth or extraction. Indra Zanibar, also known as Wayang Kasim after its owner, the Bombay-born composer and musician Bai Kasim, was a bangsawan troupe that originated in Singapore in the 1890s and captured huge audiences during its tours of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand through the 1910s. The manager was a man of ability who developed certain features of his show till they placed it far ahead of all others in popularity. […] He attracted excellent comedians, encouraged them to jest on the topics of the day, improved the scenery and accessories, and chose his actresses with a keen eye for beauty (Wilkinson 1925: 56).

Actors and musicians were drawn from both Indonesian and Malaysia, while specialty numbers inserted between the acts of plays were often performed by Europeans (Cohen 2006: 219-34; Tan 1993), thus subverting the usual turn of exoticism in keeping with the local audience. Another popular Malay-language theatre troupe, Dardanella, was founded in east Java in 1926 by A. Piëdro (a.k.a. Willy Klimanoff), an excircus artist of Russian descent born in Penang in 1903 when his parents were en route with a travelling circus from Colombo to Java. Dardanella compiled dance and music of Asia and the Pacific in its extra numbers. The troupe’s travels around Asia in the 1930s also provided material for plays such as Maha Rani: The Lotus Flower of Burma, Devil Worshippers of Papua, Fattima: The Balinese Temple Dancer and The Return of Fatimma (a.k.a. ‘the Pearl of Cambodia’). Company members likewise had diverse geographical origins—including many islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Guam. Dardanella’s plays’ dramaturgy followed the romantic clichés of Hollywood, and songs and dances were jazzed up to accommodate the rhythms of modern urban life. Nonetheless the company promoted its work as an opportunity for audiences to ‘see the Orient from an Oriental angle.’ Part of Dardanella’s popularity was due to the soccer team made up of its performers and technicians, which played local teams wherever the company toured as a form of outreach (Cohen 2010a: 180-7; Tan 1993: 52-6).

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Amusement parks were common features of urban centres throughout Southeast Asia by the 1930s, and were important sites of consumption of the latest transnational ‘shows and specs.’ Singapore, for example, had three permanent amusement parks running in 1940: Happy World, Great World and New World. The region’s tropical climate meant that ‘funspots’ could operate year-long, attracting thousands nightly (n.a. 1942). ‘Manila Show’ was a generic name in the region for itinerant carnivals that combined rides, game of skill and chance, side shows, boxing, wrestling and a variety of other modern entertainments. The largest and most successful of these outfits was Tait’s Manila Show, owned by the American showman Edwin Tait, a former nickelodeon operator based in Manila from 1909. Tait’s carnival was reputed to have ‘played Calcutta, Shanghai, Yokohama, Kobe, Hong Kong, Macao, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Surabaya, Batavia and many other spots’ (Abbott 1944: 42). Tait’s other business interests included the promotion of boxers, the Santa Ana race track and the Olympic Stadium in the Philippines. Until the outbreak of World War Two, Tait was said to have ‘had his finger in nearly every amusement pie in the area’ (ibid). His shows featured American motordrome riders and high divers working alongside Hawaiian dancers, Filipino musicians and Southeast Asian ‘freak’ and animal acts. There were also smaller vaudeville and variety companies which played night fairs, amusement parks, movie theatres and other entertainment centres, and featured both European and Southeast Asian performers. Taman Setia, advertised as an English and Manila ‘combination’ troupe, toured Java in 1931. It offered popular Malay-language plays and operas in the komedi stambul style such as The Rose of Manila and The Woman from Hell as well as gymnastics by The Cotrells (a family act from England), a Manila jazz band, a Filipino comic who mimicked Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, and a variety of other cabaret acts. The constitution of such companies varied over time, responding to local trends in popular entertainment. When Taman Setia played Singapore two year before the Java tour, for example, it boasted a chorus line of ‘10 Manila girls’ supplementing a company of 45 actors and actresses of unspecified origin. These international flows of performance culture, official and unofficial, offered audiences ‘a protean world of hypothetical, utopian identities without limit or possibility of attainment’ (Day 2003: 26). Such protean imaginings were smashed with the outbreak of World War Two in the Asia-Pacific region in 1941. The Japanese government viewed theatre and performance as a vital organ for promoting the war effort, instilling

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military discipline into the populace and naturalizing the ideology of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. And so the transnational took a new direction. Japan imposed its own performance culture in occupied Southeast Asia, creating national cultural organizations, launching training courses, translating and adapting propaganda plays into Southeast Asian languages, drafting censorship regulations and forming Takarazuka-style revues to entertain the Japanese occupiers. Many of these innovations proved ephemeral, but the value of the arts for mobilizing the masses in the struggles for independence that followed Japan’s defeat was a lasting lesson. Independence came piecemeal to the nations of Southeast Asia in the decades after World War Two (with the exception of Thailand, which was never colonized), and with autonomy came new geographic horizons for the region’s performing arts, and a political emphasis on the nation-state as the essential unit of production and the central means of institutional regulation. National cultural policies were formulated that recognised to different extents the internal diversity of ethnicities, colonial legacies, forces of conservative traditionalism and awakening possibilities of internationalism. Cultural missions represented the nation in official exchanges with neighbouring countries and the world, and at international arts festivals such as the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod, founded in North Wales in 1947. National arts companies, such as the Bayanihan Philippine National Folk Dance Company (established 1957) were formed. Embassies fielded dance and music troupes to entertain guests at diplomatic functions. Europeans and Americans had brokered much of the cultural traffic between Southeast Asia and the rest of the world during the first half of the twentieth century. This continued to a limited degree after World War Two. For example, Englishman John Coast (who had first encountered Southeast Asians and Indonesian performing arts while interned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Thailand), dedicated years to adapting and promoting an ‘authentic,’ if stylised and abbreviated, revue of traditional Balinese music and dance. His project, supported by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, culminated in a tour of Britain, the USA and several European cities in 1952 by a 44-strong troupe from the small Balinese village of Peliatan (Coast 2004 [1953]; Noszlopy 2007b). Increasingly, however, Southeast Asian states claimed degrees of ownership of ‘authentic’ and ‘indigenous’ cultural forms, effectively nationalizing culture.

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The decolonization and nationalization of performing arts is particularly clear in the case of Malaysia. British colonial scholar-administrator R.J. Wilkinson, writing in 1925, points out that a casual glance at the dances and dramas of the Malays might lead us to infer that they all came from abroad. The wayang is Chinese; the bangsawan is a copy of our own comic opera; the ronggeng, gamboh and joget come from Java; the boria was brought from Hindustan; the hathrah and main dabus are traceable to Arabia; the ma’yong and mendorah are relics of the old kingdom of Ligor (22).

Wilkinson attributes a predisposition to professional foreign entertainments over bucolic local performances as a symptom of Malay cosmopolitanism. After the formulation of Malaysia’s National Cultural Policy in 1971, performing arts were reformed and revitalized to express authentic Malay values. Exogenous elements in bangsawan, for example, were systematically excised, and the drama took on a folkloric appearance, which failed to excite Malaysian audiences (Tan 1993). Drawing on Henri Lefebvre (1991: 53), we might say that bangsawan in the 1970s and 1980s fell ‘to the level of folklore… immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of reality.’ Southeast Asian performance in the decolonized world is still available to be exoticised for the titillation of sophisticates, as with the Siamese dance troupe featured in a nightclub scene of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). But after World War Two such representations were no longer left uncontested. Southeast Asian nations came to monitor how they were represented on international stages and in film. Famously, the stage and film versions of The King and I, with their offensive portrayal of King Rama IV, ‘one of the most beloved kings in Thai nationalist discourse, as a capricious, sometimes cruel, and often foolish tyrant,’ resulted in bans in Thailand and international protests (Jory 2001: 203). The wars in Indochina with France and the United States brought special attention to the region. The United States considered Southeast Asia as a linchpin in the containment of Communism. Dancers, musicians and theatre makers were offered residencies and grants by both the United States and Eastern Bloc countries to try and win them over ideologically. The US government and American private foundations invested in research and education in the arts and cultural programming to educate the American public about this little-known but strategically vital part of the world. This included the acquisition of ‘ethnic’ musical ensembles, prominently gamelan, which were used starting in the 1950s in the

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instruction of ethnomusicology in American universities, and later as compositional resources and in community arts contexts worldwide. The Cold War impacted heavily on the arts and culture of the region. Prominent dance companies from the Eastern Bloc, Europe and the United States toured Southeast Asia to increase international good will, forge artistic alliances and counteract propaganda and negative impressions formed through popular media, such as film (Prevots 1998). The British Council (founded 1934), the United States Information Service (founded 1953) and other agencies devoted to public diplomacy served as conduits for cultural information and the dissemination of ideologies packaged in art. The entertainments needs of American servicemen stationed in Southeast Asia were serviced by local ‘exotic dancers’ of various stripes. (This industry that finds its legacy in the Thai ‘show girls’ of the Ladyboys of Bangkok, which is in the middle of a five-month tour of Britain at the time of writing.) American theatre scholar James Brandon conducted a year’s research on theatre around Southeast Asia in 1963-4 with Ford Foundation support. He describes a region with remarkable cultural continuities, but strong political fissions. In Cambodia a play may not show either Vietnam or Thailand in a favourable light, for Cambodia’s government is at sword’s point with both countries. Pan-Malayan sentiments used to be encouraged several years ago when Maphilindo [a proposed confederacy of Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia] was official government policy, but today Malaysia is an enemy and a troupe would not think of producing the same play it did a few years back’ (Brandon 1967: 232).

President Sukarno of Indonesia railed against Western pop music (denigrated as ngak-ngik-ngok) as a form of cultural imperialism, while the Communist-affiliated arts organisation LEKRA pulled much weight at both the local and national levels in Indonesia, until the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party following a 1965-6 military coup d’état clandestinely backed by the CIA. The establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 went some way towards suturing international breaches. ASEAN festivals of performing arts generated new transnational synergies. The ‘Malay gamelan’ was reinvented for a 1969 festival of Southeast Asian music and drama in Kuala Lumpur as a Malay assertion of cultural distinction. Wayang Buddha, an experimental shadow puppet theatre from the Javanese arts conservatoire Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia Surakarta, was inspired by the large, unarticulated shadow puppets used in

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Cambodia’s lakhon sbaek, encountered by Javanese theatre artists in festival contexts. These festivals, as well as joint research projects, training initiatives, modernization of ‘traditional media’ and preservation and revival ventures resulted in much contact among Southeast Asia’s arts bureaucrats and elite government-supported scholars and performers from the late 1960s to the present. These networks have enabled the flow of ideas, but also sometimes have served to reify (perceived) differences between national cultures. Movements of performance over the last four decades have flowed in relation to the capitalist imperatives of the global pop music industry, ideological aspirations of the applied theatre movement strongly associated in Southeast Asia with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA, founded 1967), Mekong River cultural projects, transnational networks such as Arts Network Asia, international residency and workshop programmes such as the Asia Pacific Performance Exchange and The Flying Circus Project, and transnational productions commissioned by international festivals. The rise of ‘world music’ festivals and record labels and ‘crossover’ bands using indigenous or ‘ethnic’ instruments and sonorities has brought the promise (and less often delivery) of world fame to a generation of Southeast Asian musicians. Diasporic, student and migrant worker populations of Southeast Asians in Asia, Europe and North America have also played significant roles in the transnational circulation of performance. The relation between today’s global flows of performance and the cross-cultural interactions of the past can be questioned. One observes a certain nostalgia for the European exotes who explored Southeast Asian performance in the pre-War years. Notably, Colin McPhee’s years in Bali were recently re-romanticised in an operatic production by Eric Ziporyn based on McPhee’s memoir, featuring some of Bali’s most prominent and globally-mobile performing artists and composers.1 As in the past, the balance of influence in the ‘collaboration’ is open to debate. Charges of cultural imperialism, exoticism, appropriation, expropriation, exploitation and piracy are levelled not only against Euro-America, but also Asian neighbours. A politically explosive instance of this are the ongoing ‘cultural wars’ between Indonesia and Malaysia over Malaysia’s use of expressive forms including Javanese reyog masquerade and Balinese pendet dance in its own tourist promotion campaigns. Globalization calls up images of well-ordered assembly lines, with parts production rationally distributed by faceless corporations over many 1

See http://www.houseinbali.org/ for details.

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countries. Transnational creative production processes, in contrast, are unruly and unpredictable, with much circular as opposed to linear movement. The ‘deterritorialization’ (Appadurai 1996) of artistic creativity in Southeast Asia is apparent in the genesis of one of the biggest-selling English-language songs in Indonesia, Denpasar Moon. The song was written in 1987 by the London-born composer and rock musician Colin Bass (a.k.a. Sabah Habas Mustapha) while on holiday in Ubud. Bass based his song on the popular musical styles of Sundanese degung and panIndonesian dangdut. Denpasar Moon was made famous in Indonesia, notably, by a cover by the Filipina singer Maribeth recorded in Japan. It was adapted thereafter into the vernacular idioms of many Indonesian regional pop music styles throughout the 1990s. Cultural complexities (Hannerz 1992) proliferate.

Themes and assumptions The six essays collected in this volume engage with contemporary interplays of transnationalism and performance in Southeast Asia from diverse perspectives and disciplinary orientations. The volume makes no attempt to cover each Southeast Asian country systematically, espousing as we do the notion that the nation-state is not the primary framework needed for analysis of culture in today’s global acumen, but rather an ideological construct which must be actively performed into existence. The essays nonetheless discourse upon a number of common themes and are underwritten by shared assumptions which bear outlining. The theme of transnationalism means that the book is concerned by nature with performances and performance makers that are not primarily bounded by geopolitics. We do not deny that nation-states can play powerful mediating roles in shaping performance cultures and enactments, indeed it is very difficult to disaggregate the language and possessiveness of so-called national and regional cultures. The Bali Arts Festival, for example, a distinctly regional event presented annually within the context of ‘national culture,’ is increasingly inclusive of international performances and transnational collaborations (Noszlopy 2002; 2007a). Despite being critiqued for its role in homogenising and ‘dumbing-down’ Balinese culture, its existence has precipitated extraordinary fusions and crosscultural experiments over the years, as well as offering a forum for nontraditional or kontemporer performance (McGraw). Region and nation are not absent from even the most singular of productions. Thus despite the playful anti-essentialism of Yogyakartabased Didik Nini Thowok’s cross-gendered masquerades, the dancer-

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choreographer nonetheless tends to typologize the dance cultures he purviews according to national or regional points of origin, displaying this classification in his ‘Five Face’ dance, which uses masks from China, India, Indonesia and Japan. Didik’s travels around Asia are often underwritten by bi-national agreements; the research and development of his Japanese-Javanese hybrid dance Bedhaya Hagoromo was initially funded by the Japan Foundation, established in 1972 as the cultural arm of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Hughes-Freeland). Similar funding realities finance the work of Vietnamese choreographer Ea Sola (Eisner) and the Khmer-language production of Hélène Cixous’s 1985 play, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (Prenowitz and Thompson). Yet nation is not simply a practical and fiscal context for these performances; it is a co-text, an unfolding narrative that is being actively and purposefully re-written and re-inscribed in performances ‘scaled to the human body and its actions’ (Rae and Lim). It is precisely the ambivalent relationship with nation, home and conflict that informs Ea Sola’s ‘social practice, or politics of performance, [which] stems from her family history of mixed cultural identity, of living through and surviving war, and out of her experience of exile and return to Vietnam’ (Eisner) rather than a hypostasized Vietnamese-ness. Importantly, many of the bodies which enact and apprehend the transnational performances in this book are engendered and constituted in ways that are specifically Southeast Asian. The cultural specificity of body techniques remains true, at least emotively, even for displaced and diasporic artists like Ea Sola, who on her return to Cambodia reports discovering that ‘the country is in the body’ (Eisner). Southeast Asian bodies are porous to the world and animated by external forces beyond the direct control of the self (Laderman 1991). Specifically, gender in many traditional Southeast Asian societies is not strictly biologically determined, but rather femininity and masculinity are considered attributes to be playfully manipulated in performance (Atkinson and Errington 1990). One can enter into and move out of different genders—as in the dances of Didik Nini Thowok—and espouse ‘multiple identifications’ (HughesFreeland; Rae and Lim; Vourloumis). As Hughes-Freeland points out, Didik is exceptional not only as a rare example of a performer who has been able to make a living from his art in Indonesia, but also for his subtly canny management of his marginality (being part Chinese and Protestant, as well as cross-dressing during his performances) through his grounding in Javanese cultural values. Modern states oppose such fluidity of being and strive to seal their subjects into fixed identities (Scott 1999).

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Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral (1995) allegorises this social engineering as the permanent emasculation of the titular character’s offspring, the citizens of Singapore, contrasting their plight under the ‘nanny state’ with the fluid identity of the eunuch admiral, who has the capacity to regain his manhood on death. Balinese performance artist Cok Sawitri likewise invokes an imagined genealogy of powerful women (including an all-female arja performing troupe) not constrained by the gender ideology of the Indonesian state. This discursion to the past allows her to clear a space for her performative subversions of gender identity (Vourloumis). Cok emphatically demonstrates her stepping outside of the accepted gendering of Balinese (and Indonesian) womanhood, railing against the ideological fixing of the body in ‘cultural freeze-frame’ (Massumi 2002). This is not to imply a binary between agency and structure, individual authorship and collective creation. The contemporary performances analysed in this volume are ascribed to particular artists, and are in many ways individual creations. They are simultaneously embedded in structures of collectivity, and respond to inherited aesthetic norms and values, without being strictly bound by them. While uniquely based on his own intercultural training, Didik Nini Thowok goes to great lengths to ensure that his Bedhaya Hagoromo is recognized within the indigenous central Javanese tradition of classical bedhaya dance (Hughes-Freeland). The emotional force behind the young Balinese composer Sauman’s Geräusch, which involves the raucous defacement of a gong, is the shared cultural knowledge that the gong is the revered abode of spirits (McGraw). In this sense, much contemporary performance in Southeast Asia is better described by what British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1994) has called ‘post-traditional,’ rather than the rather more amorphous label of ‘postmodern.’ Traditions are not erased, memories are not submerged. Rather, inherited cultural practices are available to be discovered, recognised, quoted, overturned, confounded and transformed. The citation of tradition increases the marketability of performance work as ‘postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan 2001) products in the international performance circuit. But more importantly it connects performance to particular communities of interest, including members of the transnational ‘affinity intercultures’ (Slobin cited in McGraw) who facilitate the conveyance of work abroad. Past accounts of cross-cultural performance have tended to endorse what Patrice Pavis (1992) famously represented as an hourglass model, by which elements of a ‘source culture’ are filtered into a ‘target culture.’ The essays in this volume, in contrast, assume that contemporary performance involves a high degree of ‘cultural complexity’ (Hannerz 1992) entailing

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the ‘interweaving’ (Fischer-Lichte 2009) of different cultural traditions in specific contact zones. They problematize simple assumptions of ‘influence’ in postcolonial contexts. The essays do not suggest that encounters between performance cultures inevitably lead to homogenization. As pointed out by American social critic Randolph Bourne in his essay ‘Trans-National America’ (1916), where the word ‘trans-national’ was first invoked, while transnationalism is antithetical to provincialism, it also carries the capacity to highlight and celebrate cultural difference. There is a lurking danger in transnational productions of cultural essentialism and the reification of stereotypes of the timeless Orient, as in Ong Keng Sen’s much-critiqued Lear (1997) (see Bharucha 2001). But the appresentation of alterity on transnational stages also offers the possibility of engendering imaginative sympathies across distinct cultures, which can be harnessed for political action (Eisner; Prenowitz and Thompson). Such an agenda informs, for example, the international theatre network, the Magdalena Project, which has served to give voice to the concerns of Southeast Asian women in solidarity with women in contemporary theatre around the world.2 Randolph Bourne (1916) celebrated hyphenated identities as modelling cosmopolitan inclusivity for the United States. Southeast Asian practitioners with hyphenated identities can make similar claims to importance. Doubly-conscious diasporic artists like Vietnamese-French Ea Sola (Eisner) and Cambodian-American choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro have been pivotal agents in the post-American War reinventing of mainland Southeast Asia’s performance traditions on the world stage. Didik Nini Thowok’s Chinese-Indonesian identity has not only opened entrepreneurial possibilities. His marginality also arguably enables a certain aesthetic distance from the Javanese dance traditions he has studied since childhood. This means that Javanese dance is not unduly privileged above the other traditions in which he has trained since his student days at Yogyakarta’s Academy of Arts. Similarly, McGraw argues that ‘Balinese [contemporary] composers celebrate their transnationalisms as an aesthetic achievement while simultaneously manipulating their rhetoric to demonstrate concern for a Balinese cultural heritage perceived locally to be under constant threats from Westernization.’ Southeast Asian contemporary performing artists such as Didik Nini Thowok, Ea Sola, Cok Sawitri and Ho Tzu Nyen are all in important ways not only the creators of performance texts, but also are at least partially 2 See the project’s website, http://www.themagdalenaproject.org/ (accessed 7 September 2010).

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responsible for authoring the interpretive frameworks that allow these texts to be deciphered in transnational contexts. Southeast Asian national identities weigh heavily in particular international contexts (e.g., Indonesianness in the Netherlands, Vietnameseness in the United States), due to histories of colonization and antagonism. But generally Southeast Asian artists are forced to carry less cultural baggage than, say, Indian or Chinese performers, and are consequently freeer to fashion their own artistic identities. The performers surveyed in this book are often adept in handling the critical languages of performance analysis, and are able to relate their work to significant global trends in performance while inflecting critical concepts such as ‘transgender,’ ‘avant garde’ or, indeed, ‘transnational’ in new ways through performance and discourse. In part because of their common intellectual horizons, these practitioners are not objects of ethnographic curiosity, but interlocutors, collaborators, colleagues and friends to the authors of this volume. Crucially, authors do not stand outside of the theatrical processes they describe, but are co-producers of texts with their originators. The authors are more than what Victor Turner (1979: 92) once dubbed ‘ethnodramaturgs.’ They join the artists and companies they describe in ‘inoperative communities’ (Nancy 1991). The essays in this volume are more testaments to ongoing conversations and social and artistic relations with scholars and practitioners in Southeast Asia than products of discrete, time-bound research projects (cf. Cohen 2010b). Three of the chapters (by Hughes-Freeland, Vourloumis and McGraw) in this book were first presented at a panel on Southeast Asian Arts in Transnational Perspective organised by Matthew Isaac Cohen and Laura Noszlopy for the 24th conference of the Association of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom at Liverpool John Moores University on 21-22 June 2008. This panel also featured Noszlopy’s analysis of the 1952 ‘Dancers of Bali’ tour and the collaboration between English impresario John Coast and Peliatan’s gamelan group; Cohen’s Levinasian approach to early twentieth-century cross-cultural performances of Java and Bali; Margaret Coldiron and Manuel Jimenez’s account of the London gamelan Lila Cita’s collaborations with Balinese artists; Peter Keppy’s discussion of keroncong and jazz in Southeast Asia during the 1920s and 30s; How Ngean Lim’s paper on cultural pluralism in the Malaysian dance-theatre work Bunga Manggar Bunga Raya; Lee Watkins’ investigation on the work conditions and social lives of Filipino musicians in Hong Kong; and David Wong’s examination of the place of classical European music among the Chinese of Sabah, Malaysia. The other three chapters (by Eric Prenowitz and Ashley Thompson, Rivka Eisner and Paul Rae and Alvin

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Lim) were commissioned especially for this volume. We hope that this selection of transnational scholarship captures something of the present vitality and complexity of contemporary Southeast Asian performance, and points the way toward imagining new performance configurations in the future.

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