Laura Noszlopy and Matthew Isaac Cohen, Laura Noszlopy (Editor), Matthew Isaac Cohen (Editor) - Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance_ Transnational Perspectives-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2010

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 Sǂk: Five Plays from the Korean Avant-
Garde, or Dance, Drama and Theatre in Thailand. Some of these books
concern plays, productions and theatrical genres that predate the nation-
state. 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
2 Introduction
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

Matthew Isaac Cohen and Laura Noszlopy 3
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, alms-
giving, 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

4 Introduction
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 cross-
cultural 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

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,

6 Introduction
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

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.

8 Introduction
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, American-
trained Mexican dancer Xenia Zarina (a.k.a. Jane Zimmerman), Texas-
born 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

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 ex-
circus 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).

10 Introduction
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

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.

12 Introduction
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

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

14 Introduction
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.

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 pan-
Indonesian 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 cross-
cultural experiments over the years, as well as offering a forum for non-
traditional or kontemporer performance (McGraw).
Region and nation are not absent from even the most singular of
productions. Thus despite the playful anti-essentialism of Yogyakarta-
based Didik Nini Thowok’s cross-gendered masquerades, the dancer-

16 Introduction
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’ (Hughes-
Freeland; 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).

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 ‘post-
modern.’ 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

18 Introduction
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).

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

20 Introduction
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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CREATIVITY AND CROSS-CULTURAL
COLLABORATION:
THE CASE OF DIDIK NINI THOWOK’S
BEDHAYA HAGOROMO
FELICIA HUGHES-FREELAND
Didik Nini Thowok is a high-profile Indonesian choreographer and

performer. This chapter discusses his work as a cross-gendered, cross-
cultural cosmopolitan in relation to a broader analysis of cross-cultural
collaboration. I focus on a dance project from the early 2000s, which
originated in Didik’s transnational engagement with Japanese performance
culture, sponsored by the Japan Foundation. The Bedhaya Hagoromo
dance project (2001) combined a classical Javanese court dance form with
performance elements from Japanese noh drama. A discussion of this
project generates insights into the process of inter-Asian and east-to-west
cultural flows (Kuan-Hsing and Chua 2007), and elaborates broader
cultural issues about innovation, the location of culture in performance,
and the role of collaborations: how they are mediated and brokered, and
the complex issues of ownership and branding which arise from them.1
Introducing Didik Nini Thowok

Didik Nini Thowok, the performing name and dance brand of Didik
Hadiprayitno, is arguably the most popular and successful professional
performing artist-cum-entertainer in Indonesia. His success and popularity
as an idiosyncratic innovator rest on his skills as an entertainer and
comedian, particularly as a female impersonator in the popular kethoprak
plays, which dramatise historical events and legends, and in his humorous
choreographic creations. He performs in wide range of venues: at civic
events, on the streets, on Indonesian television and on stages around the
world. He is versatile and has a constantly developing creative dynamism.

1
This chapter is based on the first part of the Asia Research Institute Working
Paper Series No. 108 (Hughes-Freeland 2008b).
26 Creativity and Cross-Cultural Collaboration
He is always looking out for new ideas and new opportunities to develop
them, through his own network in Java, or with artists from other societies.
I met Didik during my PhD research in 1982. Since then I have seen
him perform as a dancer and as a comedian in many contexts and
countries. I have also had many conversations with him about his own
work and about Indonesian performance cultures. I first saw him perform
in 1983 in ‘One Night in Tokyo,’ a revue produced in the city of
Yogyakarta by the troupe Glass and Dolls, directed by the dance
enthusiast and entrepreneur, Hamzah. The dances were performed on a set
consisting of a long flight of white steps inspired by Japanese cabaret,
which was itself inspired by 1930s Hollywood Deco. Didik’s clown dance
opened with his red-nosed face peering from behind a Japanese kimono
stretched across the top of the steps.
This entrance was a small example of complex cultural references: an
Indonesian dancer wearing a western clown signifier (red nose) and using
the kimono as a Balinese dancer uses a curtain in topeng, arja and drama
gong: dancing behind it before making an entrance on to the stage. So in
the early 1980s, Didik was already combining a Javanese love of comedy
with a western clown persona in a Japanese-inspired version of modern
theatrical spectacle.
Clowning has been central to his performance work, in many different
ways. For instance, in July 1989 I saw his ‘Sandal Dance’ (Tari Teklek)
during the opening carnival for the Yogyakarta Arts Festival, when a
cavalcade of pupils, wearing wigs and sunglasses, clattered hilariously
along the street in the wooden sandals traditionally worn in Java at bath
time. Later that year, as part of a concert for tourists in his home, I saw
him perform his famous Dwimuka dance in which the masked dancer turns
round to reveal a grimacing Didik.2 In 1999 at Yogyakarta Town Hall after
the local elections, he performed Walang Kekek (‘Grasshopper,’ named
after the melody), first unmasked as a beautiful woman, and then masked,
as a gauche young woman and an elderly woman.
In addition to his high-profile professional work, Didik also raises
money for ongoing causes and specific disasters. He uses a range of
strategies, from the long-established practice of ngamen (performing on
the streets for money), to employing formal institutions such as charitable
trusts. I last saw him perform in the Special Region of Yogyakarta in July
2006, a month after a major earthquake had caused devastation in the
Province. Didik was one of many local performers who participated in a

2
The inspiration for Tari Dwimuka was a detective film where the killer hides
behind models. The first version was called Tari Salome; the final version was
choreographed in 1987 (Janarto 2005: 112-3).

Felicia Hughes-Freeland 27

free gamelan and kethoprak concert to raise the morale of homeless and
hungry people in the district of Bantul. He also accepted my offer to
provide a free concert to entertain the hamlet of Bulu which had been
almost completely destroyed by the earthquake. It turned into a long night,
as volunteers in the hamlet had organised performances by different
groups of local children. Didik had also brought along his friends from the
well-known TV comedy troupe, Lawak Angkringan, including the singer
Kristina. Lawak Angkringan performed comical sketches with audience
participation by children. A sketch about a jaipongan dance class with
Didik as a child, wearing hilarious gigantic green spectacles, provided the
link for Didik’s own performance in Walang Kekek. 3 On this occasion he
refreshed the dance by dropping short bursts of techno music into the
soundtrack and responding accordingly in his dance, the jerky movements
triggering new and unexpected laughs for the audience.4 Didik often
refreshes his established dances in this way; I have rarely seen him
perform the same dance in an identical manner, and he also generates new
dances from previous ideas. For instance, he developed the ‘Two Face’
dance concept into the ‘Jepindo’ dance and later the ‘Five Face’ dance
(Panca Muka) which was developed collaboratively using masks from
China, India, Java and Japan.5
It is still rare for a performer to live by his or her art in Indonesia, but
Didik has succeeded through a combination of strategy and necessity
(Hughes-Freeland 2001). He is socially marginal in a number of ways,
being part Chinese,6 Protestant and performing as a cross-dresser, although
he dresses as a man in everyday life. Astutely professional in his self-
promotion and business, he runs a thriving chain of dance schools and has
taken a leading role in developing stage make-up in Indonesia.
Networking is one of his many professional skills. In Indonesia he has
been the subject of much popular journalism, such as the women’s
magazine Femina’s six-part online series in 2007 (n.a. 2007), as well as an

3
Jaipongan was a new dance form created in the 1980s in west Java which
became extremely popular due to its lively choreographies, virtuoso drumming
and, occasionally, its risqué songs.
4
A short section from Walang Kekek is available on my Indonesian performance
website: http://www.swan.ac.uk/sssid/indonesianperformance/
newtraditions.htm
5
Panca Muka was performed at the Kala Kina Kini concert in which Bedhaya
Hagoromo was premiered in 2001.
6
Didik’s father has some Chinese blood, but this is probably less than has been
claimed. Indeed, Didik maybe only be 1/16th Chinese (Alex Dea, email 14
September 2008).

authorized biography (Janarto 2005). He is one of four Indonesian

‘Artists’ Voices’ in Burridge’s edited collection about dance in Asia and
the Pacific, where he is described as an ‘internationally acclaimed comedic
cross-gender performer and teacher’ (2006: 114).7 His assiduousness in
maintaining relations with overseas scholars has resulted in a number of
academics referring to his work and words (Hughes-Freeland 2001; Mrázek
2005; Ross 2005).
Didik may remind some regional specialists of the distinctive
economic entrepreneurship of the Chinese in Java, but he takes care to
balance his modern professional work by responding to social needs in the
Javanese ‘mutual help’ (gotong royong) manner. His work can be
appreciated and enjoyed because he operates out of a populist central
Javanese cultural framework, but although he has a sense of obligation to
Yogyakarta, the region of Java where he trained and now lives, he also
uses choreographic practices from other regions of Indonesia, and can be
appreciated outside central Java. This is evidence that tradition, in the
sense of established socio-cultural expectations, legitimises innovation in
more than purely staged and performative ways. His work also shows the
problems of a simple contrast between past ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation.’
Performance traditions are rarely static repetitions of established practice.
Didik differs from choreographers of Javanese court dance forms which
now form part of the classical Indonesian dance canon, because these
choreographies aim to conceal signs of newness even though they are
highly innovative (Hughes-Freeland 2007: 212-216). Creativity is not
simply the work of private individuals working from a blank sheet but
occurs contextually and collaboratively, within frameworks or fields of
reference. Creative innovations have to be recognizable for audiences to
be able to accept what is new, otherwise they will fail to establish a niche
through recognition and remain as gimmicky one-offs. The matrix of the
socio-cultural context in which the choreographer works with tradition and
precedent ultimately determines whether a work will be ephemeral, or
whether it will ‘stick’ (Barber 2007) and change the future of traditions.
Didik’s performance practice exemplifies the relationship between
tradition and innovation in the creative process, and he is a popular
mainstream entertainer in Indonesia precisely because his work can be
understood from the local Indonesian Javanese cultural frame of reference,
even though it is constantly innovative and surprising. Didik’s creative
work usually begins in a close collaboration with a master of whatever

7
Surprisingly, Didik’s choreographic skills are not mentioned. The other
Indonesian dancers discussed are Retno Maruti, Sardono and Boi Sakti.


form he is interested in. It is because he innovates by building on
established practice that his work is so popular. As well as playing with
combinations of old and new, he also plays with many different
choreographic and performative practices to produce original and
entertaining choreographic and theatrical performances. Although his
work is playful, it is firmly grounded in a particular cultural framework,
though it pushes at the cultural boundaries and goes beyond them. We can
see this process at work in the creation of Bedhaya Hagoromo, a
transnational collaboration with Japan that combines the classical Javanese
bedhaya dance form with elements from Japanese noh drama. It is
revealing that this dance was premiered at a concert entitled ‘The Time of
Then and Now’ (Kala Kina Kini)—a theme which sums up Didik’s
creative approach in general and this project in particular.
Bedhaya Hagoromo: the dance

Bedhaya Hagoromo is a new and authored dance based on the conventions
of the classical Javanese court bedhaya dance form as it developed in the
court of the Sultan of Yogyakarta (Hughes-Freeland 2008a). The first
performances took place in 2001, at Taman Ismail Marzuki in Jakarta on
28 and 29 October and then at the Purna Budaya Hall in Yogyakarta on 5
November. I heard about the dance when Didik was in London in
February 2003 on tour with ‘In Gesture and Glance: The Female Role
Player in Asian Dance and Theatre,’ which showcased four male cross-
dressed dancers from India, Japan, China and Indonesia (Hughes-Freeland
2008b). Didik’s innovations in this dance are two-fold. He incorporates
aspects of Japanese performance, and he alters the gendered conventions
of bedhaya. Didik explained that he had received a grant from the Japan
Foundation to study nihon buyǀ with a female impersonator, the master
Gojo Masanosuke, from October to December 2000. We subsequently
discussed Bedhaya Hagoromo both by email and in person when I was in
Indonesia. He later sent me a DVD recording of the performance on 12
October 2004 in the prestigious Jakarta Arts Hall (Gedung Kesenian
Jakarta) to help me develop the account that follows.8 I will first discuss
the cross-cultural aspects of the dance, and then consider its gendering in
relation to Didik’s second cross-cultural project.
Bedhaya and noh are high art forms which require their audiences to be
connoisseurs to a certain degree. Bedhaya used to be exclusive to the royal
courts of Java. A dance school was opened by two Yogyakartan princes in

8
The Bedhaya Hagoromo project is also discussed by Janarto (2005: 179-185).

1918 and since then the dance has been taught in state and private venues,
including the Indonesian Academy of Arts (ISI), which provided eight of
the dancers for Bedhaya Hagoromo. Following Indonesian independence,
bedhaya conventions as practised in the Yogya sultanate style can be
generalised as follows. Nine female dancers perform a dance which
normally lasts from sixty to ninety minutes. It is normally divided into two
distinct sections, flanked by entrance and exit marches. In the first part, the
lajuran, the dancers’ movements are synchronized in patterns which are
subtly differentiated and extremely slow when performed on the spot, and
relatively swift when changing floor patterns. In the second part, there is a
duet which refers to a ‘story’ which may include a fight.
Didik introduced the dance to me as follows: ‘In Bedhaya (Hagoromo)
there are three parts. First there is ladrang (a musical form) used for the
opening dancing in bedhaya “format” [used in the original Indonesian].’9
The choreography and music retain the structural elements of court
bedhaya: entrance march, dance accompanied by a ladrang; pause for a
song; dance with ketawang, and exit march.10 But these are compressed,
temporally, so the entire dance lasts about thirty-six minutes, instead of
sixty to ninety minutes,11 and the musical ensemble is much smaller than
is usual for bedhaya dances. The costumes are the usual velvet jerkins,
wrapped bathik skirts, elaborate hair ornaments and ostrich feathers, used
since the 1920s in Yogya, but the dancers wear fans at their waists instead
of dance daggers and the two lead dancers wear kimonos and extra hair
ornaments. The dance movement in the opening section is like classical
feminine dance, except for a gesture in which the outstretched right arm at
shoulder height with the hand holding a fan flat, closed or open. There is
less dance sash work than usual with the left hand, which instead is held in
ngruji, palm facing forward with the thumb across it and the other fingers
straight and close together. This movement still conforms to the square
shape of the arms which is a feature of bedhaya movement in Yogya
dance, except that the square is normally defined by the position of the
lowered elbows, not by outstretched arms. Didik’s explanation continues:
‘… then, before the story begins, in part two, i.e. with ketawang music, all
the dancers use masks to indicate (menunjukkan) the collaboration
between noh drama and bedhaya. So as well as masks the dancers also

9
Email from Didik Nini Thowok, 22 May 2007, translated by the author.
10
The music is more complex than this; for instance, the ladrang is preceded by
gendhing kethuk 2 and minggah kethuk 4 (Alex Dea email 14 September 2008), but
in this discussion, I follow the choreographer’s perspective, rather than that of the
composer.
11
The first section lasts for 15 minutes, the second for about 13 minutes.


carry fans. Then in the dance movement I mix (memadukan) the two
movements as well.’
So the innovation on classical bedhaya intensifies at the end of the
ladrang section, when the dancers turn to face backstage and put on their
masks for the remainder of the performance. These masks are deliberately
designed not to look like noh masks; Didik’s mask references the noh
Hagoromo maiden mask but in this performance has brightly painted
features, in keeping with the style of Central Javanese masks.12 After a
short women’s song, male vocalists make Japanese hayashi calls. These
resemble male alok calls which are used in bedhaya dances in Surakarta
but not in Yogya, where they are associated with women’s dances outside
the court, which are considered to be the opposite of bedhaya’s refined
elegance. There is drumming on a noh shoulder drum (tsutsumi) which
evokes the sound of the Javanese keprak, a tapping on a wooden box, used
to signal to the dancers that it is time to stand up, or that the rhythm will
change.
The original inspiration for the composition, which makes the cultural
encounter more convincing and motivated, is the resemblance of the old
noh story, Hagoromo (‘The Heavenly Mantle’) to the Javanese folk story
of Jaka Tarub. Both tales centre on an earthly man who steals a heavenly
nymph’s wings to keep her on earth, but who finally returns them to her so
she can fly back to heaven.13 Jaka Tarub would not normally be used for
high-art Javanese court bedhaya because culturally it belongs to the
domain of folklore, but the high status of the Japanese version makes it
appropriate for its representation as a bedhaya dance. Didik writes:
In this ketawang part we enter the story, which is when Jaka Tarub gives
the wings [back to Nawang Wulang, the nymph from whom he has stolen
them out of love for her]; in Japanese this is known as Hagoromo, then the
nymphs dance as they fly back to the sky. In this part the collaboration and
‘blending’ [sic] is really lovely (apik) the music and the dance I take from

12
There has been some debate about the whether these masks should be altered to
be more in keeping with the Japanese aesthetic (see Coldiron 2004). When I raised
this with Didik, he explained that the original Noh masks are too expensive – for
his farewell solo performance in Japan, he had to pay 100,000 yen – around £550:
‘a special rate for students,’ to hire a costume for a performance of the Japanese
Hagoromo dance. The masks for Bedhaya Hagoromo were designed to represent a
synthesis between Java and Japan, not a Noh aesthetic.
13
There are many regional versions of Hagoromo, which is one of the oldest Noh
stories. A translation by Pound and Fennollosa is available online at the University
of Virginia’s ‘Japanese text initiative’ website. The Jaka Tarub story also has
many versions (Brakel-Papenhijzen 2006).

the noh style Hagoromo dance when the nymphs dance as they fly back to
the sky. After that we go into the third part and return to ladrang until the
end.
In the ketawangan section there is a very short duet using the flat fan
movement by the dancers who perform the leading roles of Batak and
Endhel (danced by Hardiono and Didik), who always represent the main
characters in bedhaya stories. Here Batak portrays Jaka Tarub and Endhel
the nymph Nawangwulan. After the duet, Batak fetches the mantle and
returns it to Endhel who puts it on. The lighting then changes to pink and
Javanese kemanak instruments accompany a song sung by Didik, based on
the noh Hagoromo text. This segues into a Japanese-style chorus which
accompanies Didik’s solo ‘Angel dance’ (tari Hagoromo). This dance has
been described as an ‘ethereal solo section in noh style… [which] really
went to the heart of noh, and showed how well it worked with Yogyanese
dance.’14 Didik’s dance movements here become more ‘Japanese’ looking,
chiefly due to the shallow angle of the elbows, which are held lower than
is usual in the feminine Javanese dance mode,the raised arm holding the
fan, and the upright stance instead of the usual low centre of gravity.
Court bedhaya choreographies normally emphasise collectivity and the
dancers are dressed identically, including Batak and Endhel who dance a
duet in the second section. Bedhaya Hagoromo emphasises individual
virtuosity more than classical bedhaya and this section showcases Didik’s
solo dance instead of the usual duet. The disruption of collective
uniformity also occurs near the close of the dance when the dancers return
to the ‘three by three formation’ (rakit tiga) and perform the usual
bedhaya dance movements, in this case kicat nyangkol, stepping first to
the left and then to the right, with one side of the dance scarf wrapped
round the elbow and the other held out to the side. Didik alone remains
motionless in the centre of the front row except for a slight movement of
his fan, just keeping in formation, with little steps (Figure 1).
When Didik kneels, the other dancers follow and perform the
conventional ‘nglayang’ or gliding movement that signals the end of the
dance. When the other dancers perform the sembah salutation of palms
joined and raised to the nose, used conventionally in the court as a sign of
respect to the sultan, Didik just tucks his fan into his waist band and
organises his kimono sleeves. The dancers then all perform the courtly
‘sitting walk’ (mlampah dodok) and regroup into the body formation used
for the original entrance in order to make their exit.

14
Garrett Kam, email to Didik Nini Thowok, copied to me 5 September 2007.


Figure 1: The three-by-three formation (rakit tiga)
Didik is clearly identified as the author of this dance, in contrast to

normal court bedhaya conventions which deny authorship. Each new court
bedhaya choreography is a ‘new creation’ while not being identified as
such and, crucially, each dance is anonymous and attributed to the
reigning sultan, not its actual creator(s) (Hughes-Freeland 2007). Although
creativity is commonly associated with personal effort, other forms of
creative innovation involve the loss of the person in a greater collective
tradition, a process which can be thought of as collaboration with the
agency of the dead (Archer 1995). The collective theory of creativity goes
against the status associated with personal authorship and ownership
which is central to the game of the individual capitalist artistic status
system: games which people in new capitalist societies, in Asia and
elsewhere, are now playing in a new style. Didik has been at pains to
choreograph Bedhaya Hagoromo and to contextualise it within bedhaya
traditions in other ways. He had offerings made before the performance in
keeping with ritual practices before performances of special hereditary
court bedhaya dances such as Bedhaya Ketawang and Bedhaya Semang.
He also spoke about Bedhaya Hagoromo in terms of the discourses
normally used about the oldest court bedhaya dances: ‘It felt sakral
(sacred): a white bird flew with the dance [the building is open sided], and
a student from Sulawesi saw a white girl wearing a long white dance scarf’
(pers. comm. 21 February 2003).
In the context of Bedhaya Hagoromo, these statements and practices
show a deliberate intention to identify this new bedhaya dance as high and

noble (adiluhung) Javanese court performance, which has now become

Indonesian classicism or art (Hughes-Freeland 1997). Despite the novelty
of the Japanese elements, Didik made a dance that was recognizable to
other Indonesians in those terms: as a historically grounded genre.
Didik’s interest in the spiritual aspect of embodied performance also
extends to gender representations on stage. As already noted, he emphasizes
the connection between his innovative work and different performance
traditions. This is important for understanding the significance of gendering
in Bedhaya Hagoromo, its second level of innovation. Instead of women
dancers, the dance is performed by nine male dancers who wear women’s
clothes and perform feminine court dance movement (beksa putri). The
dance references cross-gendering as a feature of the noh tradition, but it is
not new to Javanese court performance culture either.
This innovation in gendering is innovative only in relation to what has
become established practice in the classical bedhaya tradition. In Yogya,
bedhaya became ‘women’s dance’ after Indonesian independence. Before
Indonesian independence was ratified in 1949, bedhaya was performed by
boys or girls inside the court; court dance theatre was performed solely by
men, who also played the female roles. The gender representation in
colonial bedhaya dances and Bedhaya Hagoromo is complex. What we
see are men dancing women, one of whom, in the case of contemporary
bedhaya, represents a male character. In Bedhaya Hagoromo, this character
was Jaka Tarub, the man who had stolen the nymph’s heavenly mantel,
danced by Batak. This means that Didik’s innovation is actually a return
to a tradition which has been a source of considerable embarrassment for
‘modern’ Indonesians, despite the well-known Indonesian and Asian
conventions of males performing in female dress (Hughes-Freeland
2008b). So what appears to be innovation is actually a revival of lapsed
performance conventions.
Didik places Bedhaya Hagoromo within a tradition, but will it stick as
a composition? At the time of writing, Bedhaya Hagoromo has been
performed three times in Indonesia and was sufficiently recognisable for
Indonesians to appreciate its foundation and the skill in marrying elements
of bedhaya structure, movements, formations and music with elements
from noh. It is however less accessible than Didik’s other works, including
his own popular solo performances and the choreographies taught in his
school, which do stick beyond the performance event. Bedhaya dances, by
contrast, remain in the high art category and often depend on court
patronage. They are expensive to produce because of the need for nine
very skilled dancers, a live orchestra and chorus. Some court bedhaya
choreographies, such as Bedhaya Ketawang, are repeated annually as


political ritual; others are performed regularly but lapse due to a new
sultan commissioning new dances or other reasons until they are later
‘revived’ by the courts or dance associations. Since the 1950s named
choreographers outside the court choreographed new bedhayas on different
scales and themes, including revolution, the Virgin Mary, and state
philosophy; since the 1970s, very short versions have also been created.
Court-style bedhaya dances have also been created by choreographers in
state academies for performance in and outside the Javanese courts, and
some of these newer dances are still performed. With its need for nine
accomplished dancers, a prima donna to perform the solo ‘Angel dance,’
and further specialist expertise discussed below, it is uncertain whether
Bedhaya Hagoromo will be repeatable without Didik’s management and
participation. Its use of cultural borrowing to make the traditional new is,
however, likely to influence other choreographers and performance culture
in Indonesia. Whether the innovations in Bedhaya Hagoromo as high art
form dance will make more impact in the field of art dance than other
cross-cultural collaborations using contemporary dance or folk-based
styles is a question which will be interesting to examine in the longer term.
‘Bedhaya Hagoromo: a Japan-Indonesia collaboration’?15

Apart from the contradictions between the consciousness and intentions of
the individual performer in relation to the collective theory of creativity in
general and Javanese collectivism in particular, the process of making
Bedhaya Hagoromo turns out to be more complex than its ascription as a
Japan-Indonesian collaboration suggests.
When he explained the dance to me, Didik always emphasized the
choreography, costumes and story. In particular he identified the fans and
masks as the visible signs of noh, and his ‘Angel dance’ solo as the
epitome of his synthesis of noh and bedhaya dance movement, and he
referred in passing to a ‘Japanese song’ during the three-by-three
formation. In our first conversation about this dance project in 2003, he
said that his Japanese grant had been to study nihon buyǀ; he just
mentioned noh in passing. The collaboration he emphasised was with Bu
Yudanegara, the leading female bedhaya choreographer in the Yogya
court until her death in 2004, and he mentioned that he worked with her to
draw on the choreography of Bedhaya Sinom as a foundation for Bedhaya
Hagoromo. This gave me the impression that Didik had been the gate-
keeper and choreographer of Bedhaya Hagoromo, which was created as a

ϭϱ
This is the title of the DVD of the dance.

result of his personal skill and reputation, which had earned him the
funding to study in Japan, and his ability to learn from teachers from
outside his place of origin, which allowed him to collaborate to make
something new.
The collaboration turned out to have been much more collective and
culturally complex than it had first appeared. Further email conversations,
initially with Didik and Garrett Kam, the art historian and Javanese
dancer, clarified the role of a crucial figure in the dance’s creation:
I studied with Prof Richard Emmert who I met through my friend Alex
Dea [of whom more anon]. He’s lived in Japan for over 30 years, and has a
deep understanding of noh drama in the KITA school or clan. I studied
with him with a Fellowship from the Japan Foundation, Jakarta from
October to December 2000. The dances I learn were Yuya, Momijigari and
Hagoromo… Emmert has translated many noh manuscripts into English.16
Richard Emmert is one of the few certified non-Japanese performers of

noh. He has translated noh plays and also written about noh for theatre
practitioners. An important figure in the KITA school, he is also
developing a new form called nohgaku.17 As the newest and most open of
the noh schools, the KITA school is more likely to admit foreigners to
learn the form, be they American or Indonesian.18 Even so, it would have
been difficult for Didik to be able to study in this particular noh school
without an intermediary because of the overall conservatism associated
with the form.
Apart from acting as a gate-keeper for Didik’s access to noh training,
the relationship between Didik and Rick Emmert is clearly important for
harmonizing bedhaya and noh movement conventions. Emmert also
participated as a dancer in the 2004 performance recorded on DVD.
Wearing a bathik kimono tucked into a Japanese style sarong, a Javanese
headdress (blangkon), and carrying a fan while dancing in noh style,
Emmert leads the dancers in for the entrance march (kapang-kapang
majeng).19 When the dancers sit down, he chants the introduction and
story (maca kandha) in Javanese but in a Japanese vocal style, so that it is

16
Didik Hadiprayitno, email 27 July 2007.
17
Garrett Kam, email 5 September 2007.
18
Margaret Coldiron, pers. comm. 21 July 2008.
19
This appears to be the end of the Hagoromo dance or a shamai ‘demonstration’
dance (Margaret Coldiron pers. comm. 21 July 2008). Emmert’s role evokes the
largely lapsed practice of female court attendants (in Yogyakarta) or two male
‘clowns’ (canthung balung) (in Surakarta) escorting the bedhaya dancers in and
out of the dance hall.


hard to hear which language it is in. Emmert accompanies the duet and
Didik’s solo dance with a noh shoulder drum (tsutsumi), plays the noh
flute, and sings with the chorus, including the hayashi calls which are
performed at the point where normally there would be a Javanese male
vocal chorus. When the second section ends, he sits next to Didik (Figure
2). He then follows the dancers’ exit (kapang-kapang mundur, so the last
dance we see is the same noh movements that we saw at the beginning. It
is evident that Emmert’s role in the performance itself as a carrier of
Japanese elements, dancer, singer and musician, is very important. It also
places limitations on the dance’s performance, which requires specialist
Japanese performance skills, although Emmert did not dance in the first
performances.
Figure 2: Rick Emmert with Didik
This makes it clear that Bedhaya Hagoromo was not a straightforward

Javanese-Japanese collaboration. It was an encounter between two
cultures, mediated by an American expatriot who is a noh expert. But the
story becomes even more complex. Didik was originally introduced to
Rick Emmert by Alex Dea, a Chinese-American gamelan musician partly
based in Yogya. Alex has been involved with bedhaya performance since
1976 in Surakarta, and has worked closely with the leading Yogyakartan
musician, the late Pak Cokro Wasitodiningrat (KPH Notoprojo). He is a
highly skilled performer and is admitted to the most exclusive Javanese
musical circles. For instance, he participates in the playing of the ancient
court gamelans in the mosque courtyard during the month of Mulud. He

also sings in the male chorus during the annual performance of the
Bedhaya Ketawang in the Kasunanan court in Surakarta. In performances
of Bedhaya Hagoromo, he played in the gamelan, sang the songs, and
performed the hayashi calls with Emmert.20 Although his name comes
after that of Didik and Emmert in the film credits, Dea was centrally
involved in the creation of the dance and the musical composition.
The structural and musical composition was created by Dea and
Didik.21 After returning from Tokyo, Didik approached Dea, who had also
studied noh with Emmert the previous year, explained his idea and asked
him to help with the music and production. While Didik consulted with Bu
Yuda on the choreography and looked for a text, Dea consulted with Pak
Cokro on the musical structure. Dea chose Gendhing Widasari as befitting
the story and not being too flirtatious or seductive (genit, kemayu) but with
Pak Cokro’s approval he changed the ‘key’ (pathet) from slendro manyura
to pelog barang, the key often used for Yogya bedhaya. Pak Cokro
selected Ladrang Tebusauyun for the middle section, a piece from
Yogyakarta’s junior Pakualaman court, while Dea chose the Ketawang
Larasmaya from the repertoire of the Kasunanan court in Surakarta. For
the second section, he also decided to use kemanaks instead of the full
ensemble. Kemanaks give Bedhaya Ketawang and other ‘archaic’ (kuna)
bedhaya compositions an unearthly quality due to their clear, ringing
repetitive phrases. They also created what Dea referred to as the ‘acoustic
space’ for the transition to noh tuning in the Hagoromo song. Dea also
trained Emmert in the opening kandha chant, and Emmert taught Didik in
how to sing the Hagoromo song.
Dea’s expertise in both Yogyakartan and Surakartan music and
bedhaya styles means that what looks like a Yogyakartan bedhaya dance
with noh elements is accompanied by music from the court traditions of
both Yogyakarta and Surakarta. This occasionally produced differences of
opinion. For example, for the opening and exit marches, Yogyakartan
bedhaya use militaristic Gati melodies. Dea was keen to use the
Surakartan style exit march with the noh flute but Didik insisted on using
the Yogyakartan conventions, so the flute part was moved up into the end
of the final Ketawang section. Dea also discovered that there were certain
elements of Surakartan music which Yogya singers refused to perform,

20
Emmert and Dea are co-founders of Teater Cahaya which produced the
multicultural Siddharta in 2003
(http://www.kakiseni.com/articles/reviews/MDQwMg.html#top).
21
Alex Dea helpfully clarified the creative process in emails on 14 and 24
September 2008. He also advised against using sequins and shiny gold paint and
gold fringes on the costumes.


which also affected the final composition. This is an important reminder of
cultural variations at the heartland of Javanese culture. Despite Java’s
history of assimilating outside influences into its literary and musical arts
(Dea refers to this as its ‘assimilative ease’), the persistence of these
culturally-bounded variations always means that the successful completion
of a transnational collaboration always requires complex creative
negotiations.
Bedhaya Hagoromo and Interculturalism

The nature of this collaboration raises further questions about intercultural
collaboration, and how we should conceptualise inter-/cross-cultural and
transnational performance productions, including the power relations
within these processes of creative interaction. Does Bedhaya Hagoromo fit
the intercultural category? If not, how can we characterise this collaboration?
Interculturalism is a contested concept, and has a complex and
controversial range of applications (see Brandon 1996; Pavis 1996,
Schechner 2002: 226-272). For example, Pavis (1996) has classed the
work of Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret and inventor of ‘Theatre
Anthropology,’ which looks for universals based on European and Asian
theatrical traditions, as interculturalism.22 This is controversial because of
the exclusion of African or Latin American traditions, and also in its take
on the relationship between cultural traditions. For example, Odin
Teatret’s production The Million (1978-1984) borrowed performative
features from Bali, including steps from the martial baris dance and
elements from the well-known demonic character Rangda, to create the
terrifying Anabasis, who borrowed Rangda’s distinctive vocalizations,
mask and hand gestures, enhanced by gloves with long fingernails. For
Turner (1995) these borrowings reflect Odin’s cultural encounters and
misunderstandings of Balinese performance practices. For Schechner such
borrowings are imitations, not the encounter of what he describes as the
‘deep structural level’ (audience relations, performance duration,
extraneous elements and acting styles) (1996: 43-44). In contrast to Pavis,
Schechner regards interculturalism as the encounter of the modern with the
modern (ibid: 47). These arguments suggest that Bedhaya Hagoromo is
not an example of interculturalism.

22
Pavis distinguishes between intracultural, transcultural, ultracultural, precultural,
postcultural, and metacultural (1996: 5-8), and identifies three kinds of theatre
which are Euro-American in motivation (intercultural, multicultural, and cultural
collage), and another three forms which are not (1996: 8-9).

We could instead ask if Bedhaya Hagoromo is an example of what

Kirsten Hastrup has termed ‘creolisation,’ where costume, motifs,
gestures, musical phrases or instruments are chosen to enhance local ideas
of dramatic effectiveness and aesthetics (Hastrup cited in Turner 1995:
342). This kind of ‘creolised’ cross-cultural encounter is partial and
selective: steps are borrowed, but not choreographies, in a manner that
appeals and is absorbed by the eye, not the body. This characterisation
appears to be appropriate for the first sections of the dance, where bedhaya
is modified by the use of Japanese elements, such as costume, movement
styles and props, which are added on to the Javanese foundation. But in
the case of the ‘Angel dance,’ there appears to have been a genuine
synthesis of sources, resulting in the creation of something new, which
goes beyond the borrowing of steps to create a new choreography which
does achieve a synthesis. Synthesis is also achieved in certain parts of the
musical and vocal accompaniments. So creolisation does not encompass
the work of Bedhaya Hagoromo as a whole.
Alternatively, is Bedhaya Hagoromo a form of multiculturalism? And
how is this to be distinguished from ‘interculturalism’ or from cultural
collage? The distinction between interculturalism and multiculturalism
appears to rest largely on the extent to which hybridization loses the
original elements and creates a new synthesis. Multiculturalism includes a
diversity of languages in performance and among the audience; cultural
collage by contrast is a non-humanistic collection of postmodern
fragments or ‘pastiche’ (Jameson 1991). But the arguments above suggest
that interculturalism is less than total hybridization, which make it less
different from multiculturalism and cultural collage.
Brandon advocates the use of the term ‘multiculturalism’ rather than
‘intercultural’ work (1996: 8) to characterise performances that result from
these processes. Hybrid forms are an effective way of reaching out to the
audience, either inter-culturally or intra-culturally, but Brandon (2000)
rightfully reminds us that cultures are not homogenous. Interculturalism
refers to practices which reproduce and represent relations of cultural
domination, rather than balanced dialogues between cultural performance
practices. Cultural complexity tends to be lost in the implied homogeneity
of phrases like ‘interculturalism,’ in the same way as ‘transnationalism’
assumes nation to be a coherent whole, rather than a political construct.
Internal variation, and the possibility of strangeness and diversity within,
and not just between political entities, should never be forgotten;
variations within the Javanese heartland are a case in point. Bedhaya
Hagoromo may well represent multicultural rather than intercultural
processes. Yet the term ‘multiculturalism’ has become associated with


cultural pluralism within a political whole, so this also might not be a
satisfactory concept for characterizing exciting creative encounters of
artists from different backgrounds. The case of this particular collaboration
highlights our need for caution in reifying the identity of performance
elements that are combined as inherently the property of a particular
culture.
The cultural complexity of the process by which Bedhaya Hagoromo
came to be created and performed, grounded in two cultural referents with
temporal weight, is ill-served by concepts like ‘interculturalism.’ The
concept seems to have been left behind by cross-cultural experimental
performance practices. ‘Multiculturalism’ too carries within it the notion
of culture as a bounded entity which becomes plural. Even in cases where
classical forms are freighted with elaborate culturally-branded codes of
skill and standard, we need to break down where those cultural elements
converge and diverge, in the way that I have above, and to establish where
tradition is replicated and where it is ruptured to make something new.
The issue of control and ownership of the resulting production is
relevant here. The example of Bedhaya Hagoromo as a Japanese-
Indonesian encounter and an east-east flow initially might appear to refute
the argument that ‘interculturalism … is western imperialism in another
guise’ (Jeyifo 1996; Barker 1996). Apart from anecdotal evidence from
Indonesian artists about Japanese cultural appropriation of Indonesian
performing arts, putting paid to the illusion that east-east flows are free of
cultural imperialism, we now know that this was not just a Japanese-
Javanese creative encounter but a cross-cultural collaboration doubly
mediated by American and American-Chinese performers who work in
Japanese and Javanese idioms.
The double mediation by expert expats in both Japan and Java also
endorses Brandon’s argument that particular arts cannot be considered the
property of a particular culture position. Drawing on his performance
experience in Hawai’i, Brandon has made the important point about the
role of the ‘dance scholar’ in ‘replicating’ dance forms, especially ‘high art
Eastern forms’ such as kabuki, which has been practiced in Hawai’i for
over a century (Brandon 1996: 51 ff.). In fact, mediation by expat experts
in cross-cultural and transnational work is very common in performance
innovations which involve changes within a form and its performance

context.23 The creation of Bedhaya Hagoromo and its performance

demonstrates a more complex collaborative engagement than Didik’s
account first suggested. Yet Didik’s manifest control over the dance and
its dissemination makes me hesitate to class it as an example of cultural
imperialism in itself. The account of the creative collaborative process
demonstrates that what appear to be east-east flows are more complex than
this, and involve other interests, be they creative (as in this case) or
political. Theory is hard-pressed to keep up with practice.24 How
individuals within such collaborations claim ownership and carry risk is an
under-researched topic which needs to be examined more when exploring
the dynamics of performance, in the formation of national classical
traditions, in experimental work and in international collaborations.
Conclusion
Dancing has always been a challenge to social scientists because it is a
moving unity which can accommodate, play with, and transcend the
rigidities of binary oppositions: traditional and modernity, self and other,
east and west. My example challenges the simplicity of the category of
cross-culturalism in a particular example which suggests that the power of
dance undercuts the limits of cultural classifications, while at the same
time gaining momentum from them. Bedhaya Hagoromo demonstrates the
importance of process, particularly in the interweaving of established prior
practice (‘tradition’) and invention or innovation. In the field of cultural
politics, the classification of genres—as ‘traditional,’ ‘high,’ ‘popular,’
folk etc.—could well be replaced with a different continuum, the local to

23
In the 1950s French dancers were instrumental in setting up the dance school in
Vientiane, Laos after independence, and developing the Thai inflected style of
central Laos (author’s field notes 2003). Balinese dance gained a wider
international reputation and extended its repertoire following John Coast’s tours in
the early 1950s (Coast 1954). A more recent example is the Swiss-French musician
Julien Jâlal Eddine Weiss, who founded the Al-Kindi ensemble in 1983, which has
accompanied the Damascus Dervishes on European tours, recently in 2007.
24
This is clear from Dea’s response to my comment about cultural imperialism:
‘Didik liked what he learned in noh, saw a similarity in the Jaka Tarub story, and
wanted to make a new piece. I, as composer, have always been interested in using
elements and techniques from different cultures (starting with my experiments in
California in 1972 when I had Balinese kecak with African text, and Indian drone
by a chorus supporting an operatic soprano in quartet with two saxophones and a
trumpet). We just wanted to play. There was no particular consideration that the
Java or Japan parts were superior, more (or less) adi luhung, or had more value’
(email to the author, 24 September 2008).


translocal. But we should not forget that just as globalisation has been
qualified by glocalisation, however much dance is diffused across space in
its broadcast and reception, it always begins in a space which is within a
locality, with at least one foot on the ground.
This analysis has been driven by the work of a particular performer. As
a performance practitioner, Didik buys into the individualist model of the
artist, as demonstrated in his marketing and entrepreneurial skills as a
choreographer, as a performer and entrepreneur in high profile venues in
Indonesia and overseas, and in his initial silence about Emmert’s and
Dea’s roles in creating and performing Bedhaya Hagoromo. However, he
works within cultural convention while engaging with other conventions,
and is able to experiment and innovate, precisely because he offsets
newness and surprise by meeting local socio-cultural expectations of a
dancer and a comedian. In this process, he uses a multicultural approach,
borrowing aspects of Japanese performance to enhance his own practice
and as well as expanding the sphere of performance repertoire in Indonesia
for other dancers. Didik is thus part of an Asia-wide conversation within
long-established traditions of conventional performance skills, where
Asian scholars themselves are now asking questions about the way in
which these conventions have been misrepresented so as to conceal
complexity. At the same time, Didik retains his grounding in Javanese
cultural values, which gives his work appeal to a wide audience of
different ages, rather than only a radical avant-garde.
More generally, the interface between life and art is elusive precisely
because of the cultural categorisation of behaviours in particular contexts.
Cross-cultural performance resists analytical reductiveness, but is
susceptible to manipulations through the politics of representations.
Instead of being seen as a hybridisation of elements, it is more helpful to
think of it as an ongoing process of transformation and exchange.
Bibliography
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Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Barber, Karin. 2007. ‘Improvisation and the Art of Making Things Stick’
in Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, eds. Creativity and Cultural
Improvisation. Oxford: Berg. pp. 25-41
Barker, Clive. 1996. ‘The Possibilities and Politics of Intercultural
Penetration and Exchange’ in Patrice Pavis, ed. The Intercultural
Performance Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 247-256

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Indonesia and the Malay World 34(98): 75-90
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—. 2000a. ‘The Performance Triangle: Whole or Unholy?’ Key note
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—. 2000b. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge:
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Burridge, Stephanie, ed. 2006. Shifting Sands: Dance in Asia and the
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and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg. pp. 207-222
—. 2008a. Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in
Java. New York: Oxford: Berghahn Books
—. 2008b. ‘Cross-Dressing across Cultures: Genre and Gender in the
Dances of Didik Nini Thowok,’ in Working Paper Series 108.
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[Dance till you are reborn]. Malang: Save Media
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Cultural Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge


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Filmography
Didik Nini Thowok. 2004. Bedhaya Hagoromo: A Japan-Indonesia
Collaboration. DVD, 29 mins. Yogyakarta

TRANSNATIONAL AESTHETICS
AND BALINESE MUSIC
ANDREW CLAY MCGRAW
Foreign observers and Indonesian composers often refer to Indonesian

musik kontemporer (lit. contemporary music) as avant-garde (garde depan)
or experimental (eksperimental).1 The Euro-American etymology of these
terms suggests a direct historical-cultural link between Balinese and
Western new music traditions, one of top-down, West-to-East cultural
influence. The reality is significantly more complex; cultural connections
have been indirect, temporary and discontinuous. Western connections
exist alongside powerful Javanese, Japanese and Indian (and other) links.
In Euro-America, the term ‘avant-garde’ represents a complex history of
innovation involving multiple movements and schools distributed across a
wide swathe of time and place. Burdened by the weight of a haywire of
meanings, ‘avant-garde’ appears defunct as a meaningful descriptor.
‘Experimentalism,’ primarily referring to the conceptual innovations
pioneered by John Cage, today seems hopelessly vague. Nevertheless,
these terms persist and are used to describe increasingly particularized
forms of new musics around the globe, some with no direct historical or
cultural connections to Euro-American new music traditions.
This chapter revolves around several questions concerning the
intersection of Balinese culture and aesthetic transnationalism: How has
Bali been figured within transnational aesthetic movements, specifically
the Euro-American avant-garde and vice versa? What is Bali’s relationship
to the global spread of Western musical modernism? How might Balinese
new music2 function to decentre and problematise notions of a global

1
See for instance Sutton 2006; Harnish 2000; Kartomi 1995; McDermott 1986.
See also Seebass (1996: 85) for a comparison of earlier forms of Balinese musical
innovation with expressionism and the Italian avant-garde. See McGraw (2005) for
more on the use of the term avant-garde in Indonesia.
2
Since Colin McPhee’s opus on Balinese music was published in 1966 until the
present, ‘Balinese music’ has generally been synonymous with traditional gamelan
percussion orchestra music. Today the ecology of the Balinese musical landscape
is considerably richer than during McPhee’s era; Balinese rock, punk, jazz,
48 Transnational Aesthetics and Balinese Music
avant-garde? What alternative visions do Balinese artists imagine for their

music and its potential for effecting cultural change? How do intersections
with international aesthetic networks shape Balinese composers’ global
imaginations? What does it mean to describe Balinese new music as avant-
garde or experimental?
I argue that while Euro-American music has impacted the development
of Balinese new music, this has occurred in a fractured and indirect way.
As a result, the interpretation of musical innovation in Indonesia from the
perspective of the Euro-American avant-garde distorts any meaningful
understanding of Balinese contemporary expression. In this chapter I first
contextualize the avant-garde’s historical development and its tendency
towards expansionism and aesthetic universality. The traditional Balinese
performing arts, a fetish of the Euro-American avant-garde, have played a
central role within this drama. I then describe the global diffusion of
Western musical modernism, a form that has come to represent a
hegemonic, ‘official’ field of global composition dominated by circuits of
power and patronage that align along old colonial routes and I describe
how Indonesian composers have remained largely independent of these
structures. I suggest that Balinese composers contribute to a broader
decentering of the notion of a global avant-garde through the composition
of both neotraditional and radically experimental works that owe more to
local and global aesthetic referents than they do to Euro-American
modernism. Within this context, Balinese composers celebrate their
transnationalisms as an aesthetic achievement while they simultaneously
manipulate their rhetoric to demonstrate concern for a Balinese cultural
heritage perceived locally to be under constant threats from Westernization.
Finally, through an anecdotal example from my recent fieldwork, I
problematize the notion of influence as it has been deployed in the
analysis of non-Western, postcolonial musical innovation.
Bali and the Avant-Garde

Historically, Balinese artists have had only limited exposure to the Euro-
American avant-garde. This is gradually changing through intensified and
sustained intercultural connections between artists, a local conservatory
curriculum that increasingly focuses upon globalization, and unprecedented
access to electronically mediated information. While in the West the
avant-garde manifests as a long and winding historical discourse, it is

experimental and pop bands exist alongside and combine with gamelan. In this
article ‘Balinese music’ generally refers to gamelan-based repertoires.

Andrew Clay McGraw 49
often understood in Bali as a single entity as its presence became felt all at
once, as it were, beginning in the 1970s and coinciding with the
postmodern turn in the Western arts. As it was adapted in Indonesia, some
of the term’s original connotations were replaced with local meanings by
Indonesian composers and artists who reworked elements of the avant–
garde to serve their own aesthetic needs. Only recently, as information
networks have become more robust, have Indonesian artists begun to
reconcile their own localized notions of the avant-garde with the
documented history of the Euro-American avant-garde. Indonesian radical
aesthetics have developed along a distinct but related history.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a profusion of local
avant-gardes emerged in Euro-America. In his attempt to contain the
rambling history of Euro-American avant-gardes Poggioli (1968)
suggested that they were minimally bound by the strategies of ‘Activism,’
‘Antagonism,’ ‘Nihilism’ and ‘Agonism’; Cameron (1990) characterized
the avant-garde as an almost inevitable, universal cultural development—
an ‘ideological template.’ Despite a rather chaotic complex of schools,
styles and aesthetics, a focus on the sociological rather than aesthetic
avant-garde reveals a tendency towards a turning away from history and
tradition. Here we can identify the first of many discontinuities between
Balinese radical expression and the Euro-American avant-garde; Balinese
temporal imaginations, that is, attitudes about the relationship between
innovation and the past, present and future, often differs radically from
Euro-American conceptualizations. Whereas Balinese musik kontemporer
composers strive to demonstrate cultural continuity, Euro-American avant-
gardes often give birth to themselves through parent killing manifesti.
Nevertheless, both display a high level of what Anthony Braxton has
termed ‘restructural potency,’ by which he means the potential of a new
expressive form to radically reconfigure the social understanding of art
and so act as a conduit for broader change (Lock 1988: 162).
In the 1920s, Surrealism and Dadaism functioned as a form of cultural
critique, looking to the emerging field of anthropology and to non-Western
cultures to expose the constructedness of Western, indeed all, cultural
institutions. A tendency towards referencing cultural others and of
drawing upon apparent irrationality to critique local social institutions has
remained a cornerstone of many Euro-American avant-gardes. A similar
impulse is displayed by Balinese musik kontemporer composers who
borrow, transform and willfully misunderstand the expressions of the
Euro-American avant-garde (and other expressions) to catalyze local
critical experiments.

The ‘pre-lapsarian nostalgic primitivism’ (Harding 2006: 22) of the

early European avant-gardes was always, however, mediated by the
colonial encounter, which limited the depth of Euro-American avant-garde
artists’ understanding of non-Western forms. Like their fin-de-siècle
predecessors, the Surrealists were fascinated with the non-Western
cultures they encountered in colonial expositions, an obsession that would
manifest itself in, for instance, Picasso’s interest in African arts and
Antonin Artaud’s fascination with Balinese dance.3 Between the turn of
century and the postwar era a cadre of American and European dancers
with little or no direct training performed imagined versions of Javanese
and Balinese dance for receptive audiences willing to accept dubious
claims of authenticity. Cléo de Merode and Mata Hari (Margaretha
Geertruida Zelle) would be followed by Ruth St Denis,4 Takka-Takka,
Raden Mas Jodjana, Ram Gopal, Mary Wigman, La Meri and Xenia
Zarina, each performing faux Javanese and Balinese works, or modernist
works loosely inspired by these traditions (Cohen 2007a: 14 and 2010).
Many of these dancers collaborated with modernist composers and
performers inspired by gamelan (traditional Indonesian orchestral music)
traditions including: Henry Eicheim, Jaap Kool, Colin McPhee, Leopold
Godowsky, Alexander Tasman, Josef Holbrooke, Paul Seelig, Constant
van de Wall and Eva Gauthier.5 While some of these composers imagined
a fictitious Javanese or Balinese musical other, composers including

3
The Surrealists’ interest in primitivism and orientalism was prefigured by what
Raymond Schwab has called the Oriental Renaissance beginning in nineteenth
century in which Asian, especially Indian, philosophy deeply influenced the
development of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s Transcendental Idealism, the
philosophies of Heidegger, Bergson and the twentieth-century Existentialists
(Mitter 2007: 10).
4
Ruth St. Dennis and her husband Ted Shawn studied in Java in 1926. Their
Denishawn dance company in Los Angeles became a major institution in the
development of American modern dance. Before moving to New York, Martha
Graham studied under Dennis from whom she developed her lifelong interest in
Indonesian dance forms (Cohen 2007a and 2010). In the 1960s and 1970s
Graham’s school would be an important conduit through which the concepts of the
Euro-American avant-garde would be transferred to the several Indonesian
choreographers she would host. Gendhon Humardani, the administrator of the
Central Javanese Conservatory of the Arts in the late 1970s and the grandfather of
musik kontemporer, studied under Graham in New York.
5
According to Cohen (2007a: 15) Gauthier, a Canadian who collected Malay
songs and had reputedly studied singing in the Solonese court in Java, was
accompanied by Colin McPhee on piano for her North American tours in the late
1920s. Gauthier likely sparked McPhee’s interest in studying in Bali.

McPhee and Godowsky creatively interpreted their direct experiences of

gamelan.6
Modernity, Modernism
While pre-war Euro-American avant-gardists were adopting the signs of
their cultural others to catalyze innovation and wage new battles against
Western traditions, an amorphous but profoundly influential complex of
social, political, cultural and economic changes—modernity—was sweeping
through Asia. In Bali, modernity intensified with the beginning of formal
and complete colonial administration in the first decade of the twentieth
century. However, Bali had for centuries served as a crucial node in the
maritime pasisir (coastal) culture of Southeast Asia, a world linked
through trade and overlapping cultural histories, languages and religions.
Typified in the Balinese malat, the widely dispersed tales of the
adventurer-prince Panji, the pre-colonial Balinese global imagination was
intensely outward looking, marked at extremes by Turkey to the West and
Japan to the East (Vickers 1996: 7). This literary tradition already included
elements that would later be characterized as ‘modern,’ including concepts
of individual autonomy, a preoccupation with cultural contact and cultural
and technological change (ibid). The image of Bali as somehow cut off
from the wider archipelago—a time capsule of pre-Islamic Java—was a
colonial and anthropological invention (Schulte Nordholt 1986).
Modernity is not necessarily westernization, and apparent manifestations
of westernization in the Balinese arts are often the result of a more
complex cultural lineage. While Holt (1967) and Fischer (1990) attribute
the emergence of modern Balinese painting (associated with portraiture,
realism and secularization) to the direct influence of Western painters
residing on the island in the 1930s, Vickers identifies key elements of the
‘modernistic’ style in Balinese painting emerging at least 100 years earlier
through a much more complex, negotiated processes (Vickers 1996: 14).
Slowly colonizing the island beginning in 1849, the Dutch did not achieve

6
By the late 1920s Java and Bali had also established a permanent presence in
American popular culture. Greta Garbo pranced in faux Javanese ethno-drag in the
films Wild Orchids (1929) and Mata Hari (1931). Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
were lured in by the tableaux of non-Balinese cultural hokum in The Road to Bali
(1952) and Eva Gabor played a Balinese maiden seduced by a marooned American
pilot in Love Island (1952). In 1952 the English promoter John Coast arranged the
American tour of a gamelan ensemble from the village of Peliatan introducing a
wide audience to actual, rather than imagined, Balinese performing arts (Coast
2004).

complete control of Bali until 1908.7 Bali’s experience of direct, colonial

modernity was tempered by the Dutch interest in maintaining the island as
a kind of cultural museum through safeguarding, but in fact transforming,
its distinct Balinese Hindu religion as a stopgap between the Islamic
nationalism of Western and Eastern East Indies. Balinese colonial
modernity lacked the most conspicuous manifestations of modernization
such as intense industrialization, proselytizing and railroads.
In Euro-America modernism, as a cultural expression, emerged to
critically engage the predicament of modernity in the West.8 In the colonies
‘adaptive modernities’ (Gaonkar 2001: 17) emerged, manifesting in new
expressive forms. Modernity unfolded differently in each civilizational
context leading to unique outcomes and plural, alternative modernities.
Modernity has almost always been imposed, but local cultures have
employed ‘creative adaptations’ (ibid), to manage its impact. Alternative
modernities exist alongside a normalized, Western-centered supercultural
modernity. In Bali, a complex of cultural changes connected to Western
modernity, modernism and postmodernism is captured by the term moderen
(Vickers 1996). This is an indigenization and conflation, rather than
translation of, ‘modern,’ ‘modernity,’ and ‘modernism.’ Posmoderen is
employed in various contexts but rarely in ways that meaningfully
distinguish it from the moderen.9 Moderen refers to a distinctly Balinese
modernity, one that encapsulates the changes brought about by pre-
colonial trade, colonization, national development and mass tourism and
describes wide-ranging artistic changes that are only sometimes
tangentially connected to the internationalization of Western modernism
and postmodernism.
In Bali gong kebyar, the now-ubiquitous form of twentieth century
gamelan, developed partly as a reaction to the social changes brought
about through modernity (Seebass 1996: 85). Emerging in the milieu of
Northern Bali, close to the pasisir and colonial port of Singaraja, kebyar

7
While their cultural impact seems to have been limited, small groups of
Europeans had been living on the island since the late 1500s.
8
The philosophical and aesthetic attitudes of the German Frankfurt school
embodied cultural modernism, but its philosophical thrust was not fully felt in
America for some decades due to the delayed translations of key works such as
Hoerkhiemer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1945), not translated into
English until 1972.
9
However, posmoderen is increasingly employed to distinguish New Order (1965-
1998) innovation from work of the subsequent reformasi (reformation) era,
indicating a search for freedom from the rigid historicity of bureaucratized New
Order innovation (see Morrell 2000, Heryanto 1995, Hatley 2004).

grew up around new copra and coffee plantations, Bali’s new Dutch
schools, and the influence of non-Western modernities including Indian
theosophy. Kebyar developed in tandem with the modern Balinese novel,
the Surya Kanta movement (which advocated modern law marriage rights
and the standardized Malay language) and hybrid Western-Asian forms of
theatre entertainment such as stambul. Despite being completely modern
and experimental by any measure, kebyar did not display any overt signs
of Western influence, such as European instruments, and could appear to
outsiders as completely indigenous and traditional, even if it abstracted
foreign musical materials and aesthetic concepts. Seebass (1996) identifies
in kebyar a fundamental shift in temporality within Balinese music.
Through linking the form to European expressionism and characterizing it
as temporally condensed and linear he suggests that kebyar developed
partially as a reaction to Western tastes, emerging concurrently with the
advent of tourism on the island.
In their global search for ostensibly pure traditions, many Western
modernist artists residing in Bali during the colonial era saw in new forms
such as stambul and kebyar the degradation of oriental classicism.
The kebiar [sic] is, first of all, the negation of all that is classic, all that
controlled Balinese music, and gave it its clear outline. . . kebiar may
represent the collapse of tradition, it is indeed a spectacular form of
expression for the individual, who gives himself up to the music with
feverish intensity (McPhee 1938).10
Nevertheless, the expressions of adaptive modernities such as kebyar

would sometimes be understood by Euro-American avant-gardists as
elements of pure ‘tradition,’ and would inspire Euro-American modernist
innovation. When they were first premiered in the 1940s and 1950s, the
modernist works of composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee were
often understood as incorporating elements of a classic, timeless Oriental
culture (Oja 2004). But McPhee’s musical snapshots in fact captured a
fluctuating cultural landscape deeply impacted by the changes wrought by
a long process of modernization.
Modernity shuffled the Euro-American temporal imagination as well.
For Walter Benjamin, modernity represented an ‘intensified experience of
historicity’ (Williams 2004: 206) that manifested as an attitude of
questioning the present and an intense, if not suffocating, awareness of the
constant and relentless flow of time and change. Transformations in the
temporal imagination are shared between Euro-American and Balinese

10
For similar critiques of stambul see Spies and deZoete 2002 [1938]: 214.

modernities, although their concomitant socio-cultural reactions are hardly

similar. Whereas Euro-American temporal imaginations focused almost
obsessively on the future, Balinese imaginations eventually began to
fetishize the past. Later, Balinese musik kontemporer composers including
I Komang Astita, I Nyoman Windha, I Wayan Rai and I Ketut Gede
Asnawa, would seek inspiration primarily within traditional ritual and
custom for their early musik kontemporer works of the late 1970s and
early 1980s.
Modernist Music
Postwar Euro-American musical modernism embodied an aesthetic of
stringent order and discipline. The dissolution of Western tonal harmony
and the development of dodecaphonic (twelve-tone), atonal and serial
languages by composers including Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Messier
and Babbitt came to embody musical high modernism, propped up by the
institutional acumen of the Western conservatory, university and
symphony hall. By the 1980s the language of Western musical modernism
linked composers from Singapore, Accra and Istanbul (etc.) to those in
Paris and New York. However, for reasons described below, Indonesia,
and especially Bali, has never served as a primary node within the world
of such Eurological (Lewis 1996) musical modernism.
Developments in American musical modernism steadily fractured as
the twentieth century wore on. The irrationality pioneered by the Dadaists
and Surrealists would later be adapted in the pulverizing aesthetics of the
concept art of the international Fluxus movement led by John Cage. Cage,
influenced by his ‘conceptual Orientalisms’ (Corbett 2000), would liberate
sounds themselves in his use of chance. Ironically, although Orientalism
seems to have furthered the Western interest in indeterminacy, chance is
rarely found in traditional East or Southeast Asian composition. Balinese
composers, working in Java, would not begin to incorporate elements of
chance until the 1980s and it would not be until the mid 1990s that chance
occasionally appears in Balinese musik kontemporer. Below I describe the
composition of the first truly ‘Cageian’ Balinese musik kontemporer work
in 2008.11

11
The Balinese composer I Wayan Sadra has included chance and random or
uncontrolled events in his experimental works created in Central Java since the
early 1980s. The Balinese composer I Komang Astita used experimental symbolic
notation for his work Waton composed in 1988 while pursuing his masters in
composition at UCLA. In 1993 I Wayan Yudané composed a work that involved
throwing pebbles at a gong suspended at an angle and above a pile of gamelan

In the 1960s a group of Euro-American composers and visual artists

interested in perception and Gestalt psychology explored the use of
minimal materials to encourage perception from multiple perspectives.
Steve Reich, the paradigmatic minimalist composer, began studying
Balinese music in 1973 at the University of Washington in Seattle with I
Madé Samadhi as part of the American Society for Eastern Arts (ASEA).12
McPhee’s transcriptions of Balinese music, published in 1966, provided
grist for the minimalist mill, just as A.M. Jones’ 1959 publication of
transcriptions of West African music had directly influenced Reich.
Transcriptions, rather than direct, extended experience of the dense and
complex music of Balinese gamelan seems a more likely source of
inspiration for the minimalists. In Western notations such as McPhee’s,
complex paired tuning systems are flattened into tempered pentatonicism
and dynamic, flowing gong forms are imprisoned within the Western
repeat sign to become the literally recurring ‘cycle.’ Indeed, transcriptions
of Balinese music are minimalist in that typically they erase layers of
locally significant information about tempo, dynamics and improvisation
to focus on repetitive melodic structure. While certain examples of
Balinese and Javanese musik kontemporer share sonic similarities with
Western minimalism, explicit knowledge of the concept as a Western
musical category would not be present in Bali until the mid 1990s. The
composers I Wayan Yudané, I Wayan Sadra, Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya
and Ida Bagus Widnyana have referred to certain of their works as
minimal or minimalis, self-consciously referencing the Western technique.
However, whereas Western minimalism is centrally concerned with the
manipulation of perception, Balinese composers tend to use the term in
reference to restricted textures or instrumentation.13

keys removed from their cases. While the element of chance can be identified in
traditional ceremonies such as the karya gede in which several gamelan are
performed simultaneously but independently within a temple courtyard, and in the
many Balinese forms of traditional noisemakers and aeloian harps, these are not
considered locally as forms of composition.
12
ASEA conducted annual summer classes in Asian performance beginning in
1963 with support from Samuel Scripps. Beginning in the late 1960s the
foundation increasingly focused upon Indonesian performing arts. ASEA was
renamed the Center for World Music in 1974 and was moved to San Francisco by
its first director, Bob Brown. In 2006 the center was renamed yet again and moved
to the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana.
13
Several young composers and choreographers presenting works at a 2008
festival of contemporary music and dance in Singapadu claimed their works were
minimalis. In his post-concert critique, the composer I Wayan Sadra suggested

Modernism as a Transnational Aesthetic Movement

Here I am concerned with how the overarching flow of Western-derived
aesthetic movements, from the primitivism of the early avant-gardes, the
rational languages of musical modernism and the celebrations of
difference in postmodern intercultural collaborations, sought to reproduce
themselves around the world through an implicit universality and a
relentless drive to appropriate local musical signs. Because of modernity’s
basis in science and technology, it was prophesized that all cultures would
inevitably undergo the same transformations: secularization, dissipation of
religious belief and atomistic self-identification, leading all cultures to
eventually converge upon the same, rational outcome (Taylor 2004).
While this view has long been critiqued in cultural studies and anthropology,
it is recurrent and persistent, albeit camouflaged, in the arts. The notion of
a global, simultaneous avant-garde first emerged in the universal literature
postulated by Goethe (Korfmann 2004: 126). A later tendency within the
‘Eurological’ (Lewis 1996) avant-garde to eschew tradition and
convention was connected to an oftentimes implicit conceit of bypassing
the culturally specific towards the universal: Varèse and Xenakis sought a
higher form of universality through imitating natural processes (Tenzer
2003: 114); Schoenberg moved beyond tonality; Cage freed sounds
themselves; Bailey attempted to free himself of all idioms in his
improvisations. In an article written in 1967, Boulez urged composers to
avoid the passing fad of orientalism and to instead seek the ‘universality’
and ‘transcendence’ of an ostensibly unitary music (Boulez 1967).
Postmodernism, in contrast, tended towards the deconstruction of ‘the
monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and
heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the
concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and
pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative,
shifting and changing’ (Cornel West, quoted in Harney 2004: 230).
However, postmodernism has ironically furthered a new kind of
universalism through its fetishization of difference and particularism and
in the persistence of a utopian one-world vision furthered by artists, such
as Eugenio Barba, who seek the pre-cultural, biological foundations of art
in intercultural collaborations in which Balinese artists have often played a
central role.14

these composers were inaccurately using the term to refer to any work that receives
a minimal amount of rehearsal time or funding.
14
The contemporary interculturalist theatre director Eugenio Barba (who
frequently works with Balinese musicians and actors), has sought a kind of

Western appeals to global cultural consensus recur cyclically, from

Kant’s and Habermas’ work on global law and justice to more recent
celebrations of cosmopolitanism (MacCarthy 2001). There seems to be
only a vague, if any, dividing line between calls for global human rights,
intellectual property law, universal economic mechanisms and American-
styled democracy, and what would be their functional equivalents in the
cultural realm. The Western historical avant-garde emerged as the rise in
capitalism in modern Europe necessitated the delocalizing of law and
politics, leading to the formation of the modern nation state. Similarly, the
globalization of capital, intensifying after world war two, has led to a
denationalizing or supranationalizing of global managerial systems,
bringing with it the postmodern avant-garde that appeals to a universal
status. While the Euro-American art world has come to allow more artists
from the periphery into the centre, it remains the West that acts as
gatekeeper, admitting participants based upon its ideas of the avant-garde
and standards of idiosyncrasy. In fundamental ways Balinese contemporary
composers are similar to their counterparts in West Africa or Latin
America, placed within a universe of artistic vassalage to the West.
The condition of multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory
modernities has been termed postmodernity. Postmodernity as a cultural
phenomenon overlaps, rather than supersedes modernity, especially in
areas such as Bali where Western modernism and postmodernism entered
nearly simultaneously. Postmodernism ushered in a complex postcolonial
critique of modernity and modernism in which the oppositional practices
of the Euro-American avant-garde have been interpreted as serving the
Western bourgeoisie (Araeen 2003). Mosquera has suggested that all
cultural globalisms in the avant-garde were pioneered beginning in the
early 20th century by a hegemonic framework of Euro-American modernism
that strove to create a mirage of shared contemporary sensibility
universalizing conceptualist modes of innovation (Mosquera 2003). The
Brazilian artist Ferreira Gullar has suggested that postmodernism and the
avant-garde have ‘no universal validity,’ but that they represents a ‘non-
movement’ of atomized groups of artists only occasionally interacting in
meaningful ways. When it has acted as a global movement, it has
functioned to further underdevelopment (in Korfmann 2004: 127). While
Euro-American avant-gardes have sought to destroy icons of tradition,
local artists often seek to bear witness and to testify to their particular
histories as a response to the threat of Westernization. In his 1928

universalism in the biologism of what he calls ‘pre-expressivity,’ a stripping down
of performance to its supposed pre-cultural foundations (Watson 2002).

Manifesto Antropo’fago, the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade

confronted what he perceived to be the distortion of the ‘exotic’ by
Picasso and other European artists. Andrade hoped that through using the
methods of cultural cannibalism a unique Brazilian avant-garde could be
developed that engaged meaningfully with local culture rather than
negating it. Similarly, in the early 1940s the Indonesian cultural critic Ki
Hadjar Dewantara articulated a vision of a new Indonesian form of high
art based upon the ‘puncak-puncak’ or various ‘peaks’ of local cultures
(Sumarsam 1995: 9). Both examples illustrate the strategies adaptive
modernities develop to respond to modernity’s, modernism’s and
postmodernism’s threats and claims of universality.
Despite occasional local resistances, modernism, rooted in the
particular aesthetics and history of the Euro-American avant-garde,
remains hegemonic around the globe. It has established itself in multiple
global outposts through colonization, cold-war cultural diplomacy and the
continued socio-cultural dominance of Western funding and educational
structures. To a certain extent the avant-garde was always a transnational
phenomenon (Oliva 1982). Born in Western Europe, the coexistence and
intermingling of multiple languages, traditions and aesthetics have always
been at its core. But the spread of modernity brought modernism to
peoples with radically different histories and aesthetics from those of the
Western Europeans. A cosmopolitan elite of visual artists, architects and
later composers and choreographers emerged after the Second World War
to contribute to a global, but steadfastly Western-centered modernist
avant-garde. A musical language combining late romanticism, atonality,
dodecaphonic composition and serialism spread throughout the major
cosmopolitan centers of the globe, creating an imagined community linked
through performances and scores. The spread of musical modernism in
Asia was aided by the earlier domestication of Western music in Japan
beginning during the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912) when the Japanese
government mandated the use of Western music within educational and
government institutions ‘as an ideological construct to support the nation’s
social integration into the New World Order’ (Everett and Lau 2004: xvi).
Japan’s later occupation of China, Korea and Indonesia would further the
domestication of Western musical languages throughout the region.
Eventually, Western art music would become an important symbol of
modernity for the growing Asian middle class.
Western modernism spread ‘asexually’ (Mitter 2007: 13) around the
globe, reproducing artists in its image without intimately engaging local
histories. The illusion of a wholly voluntaristic, equitable global modernism
was furthered by the subtle nature of postwar American imperialism, one

founded ‘less on direct territorial domination than on interlocking forms of

indirect economic, political and cultural control’ (McQuire and
Papastergiadis 2005: 3). The newly global economy, while not solely
controlled by the West, functioned to extend western economical and
political domination through an agenda of deregulation, privatization and
submission to Western market imperatives (ibid). Within this context, non-
Western modernists became caught in the minefield of authenticity, on the
one hand encouraged to take part in an increasingly globalized style, while
on the other often being accused of colonial mimicry if their contributions
did not fulfill Western primitivist fantasies. Double consciousness became
the poisoned gift for all non-Western artists who would be modern
(Gaonkar 2001: 3).
While the performance of non-Western arts in America and Europe
began to shift in the 1930s from the imaginative (re)interpretations of
partially or untrained Euro-Americans to more accurate performances by
native practitioners and Euro-Americans who had studied seriously,
sometimes in situ,15 the presentation and critique of music by non-Western
modernist composers often mirrored the racist logics of the ‘Oriental
Weeks’ frequently sponsored in European and American galleries in
which postcolonial artists’ works were reduced to expressions of their
race. The ironies of these aesthetic regimes has been documented by
Everett and Lau (2004) who illustrate that for many Asian composers,
modernist Euro-American music has been so thoroughly domesticated that
it is often understood simply as ‘music.’16
The last quarter of the twentieth century saw an increase in cross-
cultural musical interactions in Asia and the invitation of a large number
of Asian artists to study in American ethnomusicology and composition
programs.17 Many of these artists would return home to found outposts of

15
In terms of Indonesian arts, educational, ethnological dance programs were
founded in 1939 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and
seminars beginning in 1942 in New York directed by Franziska Boas (Cohen
2007a: 23). The American composer Henry Cowell studied Indonesian music in
Berlin in 1931-32, later offering courses in world music at the New School in New
York (Nicholls 1998: 522).
16
See Ryker (1991) for more on the domestication of Western art music in East
Asia.
17
This included a number of artists who would either influence the development of
musik kontemporer or compose musik kontemporer themselves: Suka Hardjana,
A.L. Suwardi, Ben Pasaribu, Franki Raden, Gendhon Humardani, I Madé Bandem,
Sudarsono, I Wayan Dibia, I Madé Sumandhi, I Nyoman Windha, I Nyoman
Sedana, I Komang Astita, I Ketut Gede Asnawa, I Nyoman Catra, I Wayan Rai,
among others.

modernism. For some Asian artists modernism’s edgier avant-garde and

its legacy of rebellion and revolt fit well within the context of post-
colonialism (Araeen 2006: 2). Indonesian artists would return to lay the
groundwork for a series of composition contests, curricular changes and
seminars that fostered the development of musik kontemporer. The
residencies of a number of Western, primarily American, theatre students
including Julie Taymor, John Emigh, Kathy Foley and Larry Reed, among
others (see Snow 1986, Cohen 2007b), coincided with the establishment of
local experimental theatre projects such as I Kadek Suardana’s Sanggar
Putih in Bali in 1976 (Nabeshima and Noszlopy 2006) and the Javanese
choreographer Suprapto Suryodarmo’s Wayang Buddha experiments
beginning in 1974. Each of these new projects demanded new, experimental
forms of music. The American gamelan Sekar Jaya, founded in California
in 1979 by I Wayan Suweca, Michael Tenzer and Rachel Cooper, has
provided a forum for the creation of new and hybrid works for a
generation of Balinese and American composers. The proliferation of
gamelan ensembles outside of Bali in the 1990s, primarily in America and
Japan, has formed a musical subculture standing in between, and
somewhat outside of, the Western and non-Western avant-garde.
Contemporary Balinese experimentalism is indebted to and feeds off of
the catalysts provided through these intercultural collaborations.
The Asian Composers League, founded in 1973 with the mission of
‘promoting art music activities in Asian countries,’18 has functioned to
further the modernist avant-garde throughout East and Southeast Asia. Its
founding members and chairpersons have been trained primarily in the
West, and while its purpose is ostensibly to forge a unique form of Asian
modernism it has also served to highlight the cultural barriers created
through colonization and economic globalization. Membership is
dominated by composers from Asia’s wealthier nations with growing
middle classes, primarily Japan, Korea, Singapore and China. Indonesian
composers have rarely made appearances at the group’s annual meetings
and Balinese composers only occasionally intersect with the world of
Western high modernism.19 When they do, they appear primarily as

18
http://www.acl.org, accessed 16 January, 2009.
19
Intersections with the modernist avant-garde are seen, albeit in a limited extent,
in the recent score-based work for Western instruments and gamelan by the
Balinese composers I Wayan Yudané, I Wayan Sudirana and, earlier, by I Wayan
Sadra and I Komang Astita. I Wayan Sudirana’s performance of Michael Tenzer’s
Resolution/Tabuh Gari in 2008 with the American Composers’ Orchestra and
Yudané’s collaborations with Jack Body provide rare, but spectacular examples.

representations of Balinese tradition, rather than as unique composers.

Bali’s place in global musical modernism has primarily been as a catalyst
for the inspirations of Euro-American composers or as a foil for the
timeless Orient. Indonesian innovators have long worked within an
aesthetic universe on the boundaries of modernism, even if certain of their
concepts might be traceable to contact with Western avant-gardists. 20
Balinese musik kontemporer, in particular, intersects with the circuits of
modernist avant-garde, but because Balinese composers continue to
compose almost exclusively for gamelan orchestras, their global presence
as distinct composers (rather than as disembodied representations of
Balinese tradition) is immediately felt only within the international
gamelan musical subculture. As such, Indonesian musik kontemporer
represents a counterweight to the expansionist tendencies of the
Eurological avant-garde.
Experimental World Musics

Balinese musik kontemporer is one of many emerging forms of
contemporary musics from around the world not dependent upon Western
art music as its primary aesthetic referent. Rather than broaden the
boundaries of the avant-garde to invite previously ignored musicians into
the club, I will refer to these as experimental world musics. Often, these
musicians and composers display an ambivalent relationship to the
modernist avant-garde, and typically only employ the term when it suits
their strategic interests. Experimental world musics represents a
decentering of the modernist avant-garde. By ‘decentering’ I mean not
only to reconceive the classic geographic boundaries of experimentalism
but to question the assumption that oppositional politics represents
experimentalism’s most basic, and salient feature. Is it possible to imagine
aesthetic radicalism that is not oppositional?
Experimental world musics are often produced by small pockets of
composers and performers who are chimerical in their styles and whose
bands quickly dissolve much like the little magazines of the early
European avant-gardes. They are often condemned by traditionalists for
being too experimental and critiqued by Western-trained ‘real’ composers

The overwhelming percentage of these composers’ output has been for Balinese
gamelan orchestras.
20
However, certain early musik kontemporer composers could be placed squarely
within the field of Western modernism, among them Slamet Abdul Sjukur, Suka
Hardjana, Franki Raden and later Tony Prabowo. All of who, however, are
urbanized Javanese with extensive training in the West.

for being too popular. But their experimentalisms, while stop and go and
frequently small-scale, often represent what Bateson called the ‘difference
that makes a difference’ (2000: 459), offering alternatives that often
influence the course of larger scenes. If we imagine the avant-garde to be a
cutting edge, then the scene of experimental world musics is a hacksaw of
rough edges, multiple borrowings and plural contestations.
Experimental world musics are to be found today in Indonesia,
Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Finland, Kazakhstan, Egypt and
Brazil, among other locales, and as a group represent new and challenging
ground for ethnomusicologists. 21 These are the expressions of often tiny
subcultures— communities smaller than those ethnomusicologists have
traditionally dealt with. Balinese musik kontemporer, for instance, is the
expression of only about twenty active composers; performances are
almost never repeated and no canon has ever coalesced. The explosion in
new forms of media and the Internet have led not necessarily to cultural
homogenization but the vertiginous growth of small groups which form
around increasingly particularistic interests and tastes. Home recording
equipment, online forums and other modes of communication have helped
people find, communicate with and perform for others with equally
idiosyncratic tastes.
Like local Newly Composed Folk Musics (NCFMs, see Slobin 1992:
18), experimental world musics are sometimes evoked as ‘authentic’
national expressions. But they reside in the slippery space between the
local, often valorized as inherently authentic, and the global often
portrayed, in an inverse figuration, as ‘always already artificial and
inauthentic’ (Biddle and Knights 2007: 3). They are valorized by the
superculture when they can play the role of an ultramodern national art
music for international elite, academic and bourgeoisie clientele, but
decried as corruptions when they transgress or resist the superculture’s
hegemony. Non-Western experimental composers increasingly engage
with Western musics through the media-scape of downloads, internet
networks and cassette and CD sales, but they do not neatly epitomize
Appadurai’s (1996) model of the localization of globalized media as a way
of bypassing identities imposed by the nation-state. Experimental world
musics do often embody national identities, albeit while offering alternative
aesthetic perspectives. These musics have a kind of authenticity, but one

21
See also discussions of experimental music in West Africa (Euba 1975), Finland
(Austerlitz 2000) and Brazil (Neto 2000). Of course there are many instances in
which individual composers’ output stride the divide between local
experimentalism and Western modernism. Tenzer’s (2003) work on Jose Maceda’s
corpus is especially relevant here.

that might be described using Graham’s concept of ‘ironic authenticity’

(1999). That is, to local audiences they can represent national identity as
something other than a given essence or unchanging character; they model
hybrid identities in motion while to outside audiences they display what
Taylor (2007) terms a ‘hybrid authenticity.’ They are up to date but
identifiably local.
Artists in this field work within the fluid, ill-defined junctures between
revivalist, avant-garde, popular and world music forms and are often
involved in cross-cultural collaborative and performance projects
sponsored by academic, festival, and granting institutions centered in the
West. Performers and composers of these musics are typically linked by
several other characteristics: they often share attitudes towards music and
its function in society and self-consciously distinguish their music from
so-called folk musics associated with ritual; their musics are expressions
of absolute music, or what is sometimes called ‘art for art’s sake’; they are
connected by their ambivalence towards (and sometimes ignorance of)
Western forms; they are often trained in local traditions but have since
moved beyond, often through their experiences of higher education; they
are often cosmopolitan, but rarely wealthy. Experimental world musics
provide a voice for individualistic expression in music-cultures that have
historically maintained more anonymizing traditional modes of
composition. Affinity intercultures (Slobin 1992) often play an important
role here; many composers seek out and maintain links beyond their
shores, sometimes with Western composers, but the knowledges
exchanged enter through improvisation or willful misunderstanding, rather
than through structured, continuous study of foreign traditions. These
composers often only seek catalysts for their new creations rather than
specific knowledge. These musics are often a site of reevaluation in which
aesthetic priorities, notions of authenticity and group identity are
refigured; some of these alternate possibilities are sometimes later selected
for use within larger, national, cultural frames.
Experimental
I have provisionally adopted the term ‘experimental world musics’ to
speak about the sprawling field of non-Western radical aesthetics lying
outside of the globalization of the Eurological aesthetics of musical
modernism. But ‘experimental’ has its own lineage of discourse, albeit not
as weighty as that of the ‘avant-garde.’ Nyman (1974,1999) defines
experimental as distinct from the avant-garde expressions of composers
such as ‘Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwhistle, Berio, Stockhousen [and]

Bussotti’ whose expressions are ‘conceived and executed along the well-
trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition’ (1999: 2).
Nyman suggests that the early American experimentalists including
Feldman, Tudor, Wolff, Brown and Cage were more interested in
situations, games and processes than in prescribing time objects (ibid).
Cage understood the avant-garde as attempting to communicate conceptions,
while experimental composers were more concerned with perception.
These composers increasingly came to eschew standard western notation,
either modifying the system for their own needs, developing new graphic
systems or doing away with notation altogether.
Nicholls (1998) locates the avant-garde within the forefront of tradition
(but still within it) and experimentalism as lying outside of it, suggesting
that the avant-garde can be partly identified by the sanctioning it has
historically received through institutional support. Experimental composers,
furthermore, may have been more ‘extrospective’ than their more
straightforwardly ‘prospective’ avant-garde colleagues (Nicholls 1998:
531), looking more often and more deeply to non-Western traditions for
inspiration.22 Nicholls suggests that the experimental is more radical than
the avant-garde, pointing out that the problem of teasing them apart is
linked to two paradoxes: ‘First, almost all forms of radicalism will, as a
function of time, progressively degenerate into normality and acceptability:
today’s novelty can easily become tomorrow’s cliché. Second (and more
important) radicalism does not exist per se, but rather is a function of
difference when measured against contemporaneous norms’ (Nicholls
1998: 517). The application of the terms avant-garde and experimental to
non-Western forms based only on an arbitrary measure of radicalism as
gauged against the local status quo (assuming we can come to such an
understanding) and independent of any intellectual or material connections
to the historical experimental or avant-garde movements seems to be of
little or no analytical use.
The materials of American experimentalism have traveled far afield,
carried directly by John Cage, the global Fluxus movement of composers
and artists that grew up around him and by the expansion of electronic
media. Eschewing traditional Western modes of composition, performance,
and transmission (notation), American-styled experimentalism could
easily detach itself from the superculture to float around global

22
Cage’s interest in Eastern philosophy and Glass’, Reich’s, Harrison’s and
Riley’s direct study of Asian musics provide examples within earlier avant-garde
and experimental movements. Zorn’s Arcana edited volumes (2000, 2007), in
which Western composers describe their uses of Balinese, Thai, Japanese, Cuban,
West African (etc.) musics provide more recent examples within experimentalism.

compositional circuits as a kind of free radical, easily adopted and

transformed by local composers. Georgina Born has referred to this as a
‘global Cageian experimental movement’ (2000: 29). But, as Nicholls
points out, whether or not these materials would be felt locally as radical
has everything to do with distinct local histories, rather than anything
inherent in the materials themselves. Interpreting and identifying musical
radicalism around the world in this way resembles Geertz’s attempt to
differentiate meaningful winks from meaningless eye twitches (1973).
Balinese Kreasi Baru

Nicholls (1998) strains creativity into three categories: prospective
(pushing into ‘advanced territory’ in the search for something different),
retrospective (into apparent conservatism) and extraspective (searching for
influences from outside one’s cultural boundaries). But artists can,
although sometimes ironically, deploy each of these strategies
simultaneously. Tawadros describes the work of Ethiopian video artist
Salem Mekuria as exploring the ‘chronological synchronicity’ which
characterizes contemporary Ethiopian life: ‘. . . namely the co-existence of
past, present and future simultaneously in the present’ (Tawadros 2005:
67). Tawadros quotes Mekuria: ‘Time is circular. One is never too far
from encounters with the prehistoric, the pre-modern, the modern and the
post-modern in the course of a few moments’ (ibid).23 Many contemporary
Balinese composers similarly look forwards, backwards and out (or in
Nicholls’ terms, prospectively, retrospectively and extraspectively) in their
creative process. Play in a multidimensional spatial/temporal imaginary
lies at the heart of many Balinese composers’ practice. Their works are
often marked by fluid, and thus liberating, boundaries between the radical
and the traditional. Most Balinese composers term this mode of creation
kreasi baru, (lit. new creations) a term that in many ways is the functional
equivalent of the English ‘neotraditional.’
Agus Teja’s Bara Dwaja represents a typical example of contemporary
Balinese kreasi baru. The compostion won top honors as the instrumental
work performed by the gong kebyar ensemble from Karangasem regency
in the 2007 island-wide gamelan competitions. While the gamelan
competitions, and the instrumental compositions in particular, are celebrated
locally as icons of purely Balinese cultural identity, many composers
include radically innovative elements and extensive quotes from non-

23
Hatley has analyzed similarly non-teleological temporal imaginations in the
experimental works of the Indonesian Garasi theatre company (Hatley 2007: 99).

Balinese traditions within these works. Prolific composers including I

Madé Subandi, I Gedé Arsana, I Dewa Ketut Alit and I Nyoman Windha,
among others, regularly incorporate camouflaged references to various
foreign musical forms within the ancient Balinese musical structures that
form the basis of kreasi baru. Composed for the now ubiquitous gong
kebyar orchestra—the experimental ensemble and repertoire that emerged
in the hotbed of social and aesthetic upheaval that was Bali’s North Coast
in the 1910s and 20s—Teja’s Bara Dwaja included references to Irish
traditional music, North Indian classical music and Thai folk musics.
Complex flute arrangements suggested Western wind ensembles and
extensive sections in additive meters (in this case 7/8, non-existent in
traditional Balinese music), evoked the complex tala rhythmic cycles of
Indian music.
During my fieldwork, Teja consistently described Bara Dwaja as
kreasi baru and resisted my suggestion that, for all of its foreign
‘influence’ and radical innovation, the work should properly be termed
musik kontemporer. According to Teja, composing musik kontemporer
closes off the possibility of serious engagement with tradition. Teja instead
uses kreasi baru to describe a compositional continuum ranging from new-
traditional to radical: a strategy of composition that can accommodate a
variety of performance contexts. Within this context, neotraditionalism
suggests the possibility of new networks of global cultural connections
that break free of center-periphery models, forging alternate cartographies
of cultural borrowings, interaction and internationalisms independent of
those traveled by the Euro-American avant-garde. Neither is negation a
part of the vocabulary of Balinese neotraditional kreasi baru. If the avant-
garde imagines itself as being in the forefront of time and space, the
neotraditional imagines itself in the middle, a position from which
everytime and everyplace is readily accessible. From this perspective the
neotraditional artist may imagine that his creative palette is infinitely
wider and less discriminatory than that of the most radical avant-gardist.
Furthermore, neotraditional artists may interpret the labels experimental,
avant-garde and contemporary as avatars of assimilation (Harney 2004:
xxv) within a structure of cultural imperialism (see Smier 2003). As such,
they may resist their ‘worlding’ (Harney 2004: 3) in ways that conform to
the Western politics of representation and interpretation in which the
radically new is valued and conflated with an authorial image of genius,
lunatic and otherness.
The ahistorical tendencies of Western experimentalism are rarely
adopted by non-Western experimentalists, especially within Indonesia
where cultural memory and specificity are essential in the effort to

maintain local cultural identity within the context of nationalization,

globalization and cultural tourism. The choice to turn one’s back on
tradition is a privilege given to those whose traditions are not otherwise
endangered. This recalls Lewis’ discussion of the role of memory in
Afrological improvisation versus the celebration of pure spontaneity and
the exclusion of history or memory in Eurological improvisation. While
the Euro-American ideal of the avant-garde embodies myths of the frontier
in which ‘that which lies before us must take precedence over the ‘past’’
(Lewis 1996: 109), for post-colonial artists living in the era of global
capital ‘an insistence on being free from memory might be regarded with
some suspicion’ (ibid). Non-Western composers who feel marginalized by
the Western avant-garde have worked to develop their own, often
independent, notions of what counts as radical cultural practice and how it
should be named, ‘neotraditional’ being but one example.
Balinese Musik Kontemporer

Teja bears witness to Bali’s distinct aesthetic history within a global field
of music production by maintaining overt connections to local traditions
within his innovations. But the duty of bearing cultural memory can be a
burden in itself. While global modernism has facilitated the circulation of
artistic expression from the non-Western world, it often continues to
circumscribe it as exotic, authentic and timeless. Identity-driven
expositions in art biennials are mirrored in world music festivals and
cultural tourism events in which musicians are expected to embody their
ethnicity in slideshows of folklorico. Tourism is now Bali’s primary
industry and the leading employer of performing artists. In this context
signs of the radical Western avant-garde can serve as a mode through
which to occasionally step out of demands to play the other.
For his 2006 final recital at the national conservatory in Bali (Institut
Seni Indonesia, ISI), the young composer Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya
(hereafter: Sauman) created a radically experimental work entitled
Geräusch (noise in German) for a small ensemble of five musicians
performing four sets of cut but untuned telephone poles, a set of detuned
gamelan keys amplified and distorted using guitar pedals (performed by
hacking at them with small handsaws), various bits of rebar and a gong.
The cacophony culminates in Sauman’s playing the gong with a hammer
in one hand and an electric grinder in the other, producing a torch-like
shower of sparks (Figure 1). Several members of the ISI jury arrived at the
performance wearing earplugs, a section of the audience walked out, and
the piece generated a lengthy discussion among ISI faculty on the structure

of departmental curriculum and advising, and led to subsequent graduating

students being limited in their final recital options.
Figure 1: I Nyoman Arsawijaya performing Geräusch. (Photograph by the author.)
In Balinese traditional contexts the gong is a revered symbol of one’s

ancestors, elders or teachers; it is an abode of spirits and is given special
offerings and prayers. Sauman’s intention was not only to explore new
sound qualities and shock audiences, but also to make a provocative
statement of protest against the ISI faculty who, according to him, did not
fulfill their roles as thoughtful, open-minded composers, mentors or
teachers.
In written descriptions of his work Sauman refers explicitly to Western
culture; references to musique concrete, noise music, performance art, and
John Cage abound in his thesis. However, much of the work can be
understood in terms of local traditions and discourses. In interviews
Sauman related his unusual aesthetic of ketidakindahan (un-beautiful-ness
or ugliness) in Geräusch to Balinese painting styles: ‘traditional paintings,
like those at Kertha Ghosa24 and modern paintings of things considered
low or ugly in real life, such as dogs, can become art in painting. Why not
in music? ISI composers have for too long equated good composition with

24
Kertha Ghosa, a seventeenth century painted pavilion in the Eastern Balinese
town of Klungkung, is often referred to as the Balinese Inferno because it depicts
the horrific torture of souls in hell in traditional wayang painting style.

pretty melodies.’25
Theorizing Influence
The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre claimed that Surrealism had been
stolen from Europe by a ‘black [the poet Aimé Césaire] who used it
brilliantly as a tool of the Universal revolution’ (quoted in Mitter 2007: 7).
In his analysis of the Indian avant-garde Mitter interprets Sartre’s
comment as encapsulating the knotted discourses of power, hierarchy and
authority in the complex relationship between non-Western artists and the
Euro-American avant-garde. Within this discourse non-Western
contemporary art is interpreted from an Occidental perspective and is often
described as derivative. Mitter terms this the ‘Picasso manqué syndrome’
based upon British critiques of Indian cubism as colonial mimicry.
According to Mitter: ‘Stylisitic influence . . . has been the cornerstone of
art historical discourse since the Renaissance. . . Indeed influence has been
the key epistimic tool in studying the reception of Western art in the non-
Western world: if the expression is too close to Western styles, it reflects
slavish mentality; if on the other hand, the imitation is imperfect, it
represents a failure’ (ibid: 7). In this model Euro-American artists may be
celebrated for their informed ‘borrowings’ of or ‘affinity’ with a given
non-Western form, whereas colonial and postcolonial artists ‘imitate’ and
thus sacrifice their integrity. Similar kinds of analyses have long bedeviled
non-Western composers engaged with the Western avant-garde.
Diamond’s discussion of the Balinese composer I Wayan Sadra’s
musik kontemporer work prompted an audience member at the 1990
Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting to comment: ‘This sounds
just like a performance piece from New York! Isn't this just Western
influence?’ (Diamond 1990: 14). Sadra’s work often involves radical
experimentation and, in Diamond’s discussion, the breaking of rotten eggs
on the stage. Diamond notes her reaction:
At first, I wanted to say that there is no Western influence. But of course

European-American culture has influence in the world today, not just in art
but in everything. And it would be difficult to argue its absence in
Indonesia: the Dutch ruled there for 200 years, and ties with the U.S. are
now very strong (Diamond 1990: 14-15 and Miller 2006: 2).
Becker (1980), Sutton (1996) and Sumarsam (1995) have each pointed to
examples of Western ‘influence’ in gamelan music. Although their

25
Interview with I Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya, July 2007.

examples are specific and presented within the context of a nuanced

historical analysis, simplistic notions of influence, flowing unproblematically
from West to East, persist in the study of cultural innovation in Indonesia.
Although Central Javanese composers had little or no exposure to
Western avant-garde music when they began their radical musik
kontemporer experiments in the late 1970s, McDermott (1986) comments
on their work’s ‘remarkable similarity to Western experimental music,’
tacitly assuming a form of Western influence (Miller 2006: 5).26 While it
is possible to trace certain aspects of musik kontemporer back to the West,
these connections take the form of indistinct traces of abstract concepts
rather than the direct adoption of specific materials. The valorization of
innovation in and of itself and the conceptualizing of composition as a
specialized and bounded aesthetic realm has a lineage that links back both
to colonization and the authority of Indonesian cultural administrators who
studied in the West between the 1960s and 1980s (Sumarsam 1995: 104).
In his study of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry Bloom (1997)
proposes his concept of the ‘anxiety of influence,’ by which he means the
ways in which authors distinguish themselves in relation to their
precursors and the canon. Within this context originality is valued at
almost all costs even if the artist might die misunderstood. This notion of
influence has long been a guide to shaping and understanding artistic
identity within the Western world and has guided prior Western analyses
of Indonesian experimental music.
Balinese composers’ attitudes concerning influence are highly variable
depending on context. A short anecdote illustrates this point. In June 2008
I accepted an invitation by the Balinese composer Ida Bagus Madé
Widnyana to take part in his musik kontemporer performance for the Bali
Arts Festival. In the single rehearsal, Widnyana arranged five musicians in
a circle, giving each a kajar (time-keeping gong-chime) and cueing them
in a seemingly randomly fashion in order to create a constantly changing
and unpredictable texture. In rehearsal I noted that the work resembled
Balinese gambling games. Prior to the performance the following day
Widnyana distributed five comically oversized dice to the musicians. Re-
arranging our performance only minutes before we were to play,
Widnyana instructed the musicians to take turns rolling their die to initiate
one of six pre-arranged musical options.

26
Seebass (1996: 89) identifies similar Western influence in kebyar. See also
Hatley (2004) on Western influence in contemporary Javanese theatre.

Figure 2: Ida Bagus Madé Widnyana’s Dadu (Dice), 2008. Widnyana is seen front
row, third from the left. Note the oversized dice on the stage. (Photograph by the
author.)
After the performance I was thrilled to have witnessed, documented

and taken part in what I understood to be the first true example of
indeterminacy in contemporary Balinese composition. I was further
pleased to find that Widnyana had never heard of John Cage and I mused
at this example of ‘independent genesis.’ I was gratified to have captured
an example of Balinese experimentalism that so clearly sidestepped
accusations of Western influence.
Immediately following the performance an American gamelan student
asked Widnyana how he had developed this new, strange work. I was
thoroughly taken aback when, without pause, Widnyana smiled and
proudly pointed at me: ‘It was all his idea!’ I was mortified, confused and
felt somehow guilty when Widnyana claimed that I had played a central
role in creating the work. I appeared to be tainting my scholarly object,
polluting my informants and exceeding the ethical limits of academic
participant observation. I then felt embarrassed at being embarrassed,
aware that I had fallen into the anthropological romance of Bali, imagining
the island and its inhabitants to be somehow out of the wider world.
I wondered if I had misremembered the rehearsal, if I had played a
more direct role than I recalled. Had I lectured on chance, by chance?

Regardless, Widnyana remembers my sparking a crucial inspiration,

leading to his development of a work based on random events. Moreover,
rather than claiming this development as his own, it made more sense to
him to acknowledge, if not amplify, my role in the process. Widnyana’s
was a celebration, rather than an anxiety of influence. In a cultural field in
which composers have long liberally borrowed from one another,
Widnyana likely would not hesitate to admit borrowings. But his giving
me more credit than was due may have also been a means by which to
establish his intercultural credentials through broadcasting aesthetic
contacts with a Western ethnomusicologist. Furthermore, considering the
radically experimental nature of the work and the generally conservative
audiences that attend the Bali Arts Festival, Widnyana may have also
directed attention towards myself as a diversion should he be accused by
cultural conservatives of exceeding the ‘proper’ limits of Balinese
composition.
As Harding (2006) has pointed out, scholars have often confused
interest with mere imitation via influence rather than ‘recognizing that the
general interest in Western experimental forms by non-European artists. . .
possess numerous dynamic moments of profoundly creative, independent,
and above all, experimental adaptations’ (2006: 34). Harding characterizes
the creative cross-cultural transformations non-Western artists perform as
‘apostate adaptations’ by which he means adaptations that ‘owe no
allegiance to the integrity of their [Western] origins’ and thus become
experimental.
Concluding Thoughts
Bali has historically occupied a more significant space within the global
imaginations of Euro-American avant-gardists than its diminutive size
might suggest. It has long served as a foil for the timeless Orient, a
convenient image to borrow when Western institutions and styles needed
shaking up. A close inspection of modern Balinese expressions counter
Western perceptions of such forms as always already traditional, as
corruptions of Balinese classical forms or as examples of colonial
mimicry. In Indonesia, and especially in Bali, Western music was never as
fully domesticated as it was in other East and Southeast Asian nations.
While many postwar Indonesian artists and cultural administrators studied
in the West, returning to instill abstracted and mediated notions of
experimentalism within national conservatories, Indonesia has never
served as a global outpost for musical modernism, problematizing the
simplistic application of the term avant-garde within the Balinese context.

Through looking at Balinese musik kontemporer we may begin to

theorize deductively, from the particular to the general, to talk about
experimental world musics as a class of music making around the world.
This discussion will inevitably be linked to a wider exploration of
increasingly particular, small, internationalized and electronically-
mediated communities of taste that reside within larger subcultural frames.
Like many composers of non-Western new music, Balinese composers
most often work within neotraditional languages, finding within this form
the flexibility to borrow from the past and present and to incorporate
cultural influences from outside of traditional colonial circuits. Musik
kontemporer allows composers to self-consciously borrow the aesthetics
of the Western avant-garde as a means to upset local aesthetic regimes or
step out of demands to play the other. More often, musik kontemporer
represents a wholly local mode of radical expression that represents shifts
in the global imagination in Bali.
For Erlmann (1999) the global imagination is an articulation of
‘interests, languages, styles and images’ that contribute to subjectivity.
Not simply the shared image of a suspended globe in the minds of all
moderns, it is contingent and in flux; it ‘denotes the means by which
people shift the contexts of their knowledge and endow phenomena with
significance beyond their immediate realm of experience’ (ibid: 4).
Contemporary global imaginations often derive from an ‘epistemological
symbiosis’ of local and Western modernities and are populated not by
direct experiences of the world, but by mediated signs, images and texts
taken for real. Historical evidence suggests that the Balinese have always
imagined their culture to be connected to a larger world: from
Dongsongian migrations to imaginations of a distant Indic holy land to
trade links within a pasisir world itself integrated into a global economy.
Colonial policy and tourist propaganda encouraged the Balinese to enfold
their imaginations within their island while inviting the Western world to
imagine Bali as a geo-cultural extreme, so impossibly distant that it must
be in the past, as if looking towards Bali was the same as gazing into the
night sky.
In the precolonial, proto-modern era of malat, the Balinese global
imagination was mediated through traditional manuscripts and performances
that recounted the tales of adventurer-explorers within the pasisir world.
Today the global imagination of the typical Balinese composer is
differently figured (I am reluctant to describe it as expanded, for
refigurations of the global imagination over time are not simply changes in
order of magnitude), having as its nodes Tokyo, California, Amsterdam,
London and New York, among other locales. Global imaginations are

conditioned by the virtual cartographies of performance; relationships

between the local and the foreign, the self and the other, are played out in
the play of acoustic signs in music. Today, subjects increasingly
experience these acoustic signs within the flattened world of global
networking and downloading sites in which actual distance is eliminated
and virtual distance is a function only of affinity; the global and temporal
imaginations are simulacra.
Western avant-gardists often imagine creativity to lie in the future,
while Balinese artists typically, but not always, seek inspiration in the
past. This is partly because, in Bali, the contemporary often quickly
crystallizes into the traditional in order to better serve the spectatorial lust
of the touristic gaze. Precolonial literary and artistic traditions suggest that
the Balinese previously imagined themselves as living in complete
synchronicity with their cultural others. The contemporary Balinese
temporal imagination attempts to mediate colonial and touristic portrayals
of the island and its inhabitants as tokens of the past with the reality of a
modernity that demands rapid and constant change. The inherent tensions
therein are epitomized by the phrase ‘continuities in change,’ often uttered
by Balinese cultural administrators and performers.27 This mantra suggests
that the future (figured as change) is held at arms’ length while local
adaptive modernities scramble to negotiate impinging Westernization. Many
of my informants exhibited a kind of temporal schizophrenia. They
attempted to live bi-temporally, as it were, charged with remembering all
known traditional musics while displaying an anxiety of belatedness,
fearing that they were somehow living on the backend of a global musical
modernity. Kreasi baru and musik kontemporer represent their dual
reactions to the contradictions of their temporal imaginations, neither
aligning neatly with the avant-garde.
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CAMBODIA’S TRIALS:
THEATRE, JUSTICE AND HISTORY UNFINISHED
ERIC PRENOWITZ AND ASHLEY THOMPSON
This chapter concerns an intercultural work very much in progress, an as-

yet unfinished project for the staging of an ‘unfinished story’: a Khmer-
language production in Cambodia, followed by an international tour, of
Hélène Cixous’s 1985 play, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom
Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (Cixous 1985, 1994).1 Written for the
renowned French theatre company the Théâtre du Soleil by one of the
most celebrated contemporary French authors and public intellectuals, this
is a modern history play dealing in a Shakespearean mode with a recent
tragedy: Cambodia’s descent into genocidal terror, and Sihanouk’s
doomed attempts to change the course of history, in the cold war proxy
battle for Southeast Asia. The play will be performed by a new Cambodian
theatre company, Thngai Neh,2 based in an extraordinary multi-
disciplinary arts school, Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS), in Battambang
province. The company has been established over the course of the
project; members of the French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil have
been actively involved in the work on Cixous’s play and in more general
theatrical training for Thngai Neh members. One of the project’s goals is
to facilitate the long-term viability of this company.
The Théâtre du Soleil was founded and is still directed by Ariane
Mnouchkine, whose work has been deeply influenced by a number of
Asian theatrical traditions. While the Soleil has staged a wide range of
work, from classics of the European canon to improvisation-based
‘collective creations,’ it has always strived to recount the ‘history of our

1
Research and other work on which this article draws has been funded by the
British Academy, the World University Network and the School of Fine Art,
History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.
2
This is the company’s provisional name. Thngai Neh translates the ‘Soleil’
project in more ways than one. It means at once ‘This Sun’ (‘soleil’ meaning ‘sun’
in French) and ‘Today’, announcing the troupe’s ambitions to make active
interventions into ongoing historical processes.
80 Cambodia’s Trials: Theatre, Justice and History Unfinished
times.’ Cixous’s Sihanouk was written for the Soleil company immediately
after it had completed a cycle of Shakespeare histories, and the play clearly
references Shakespearean forms and tropes. Yet while Shakespeare’s plays
are set in a nearby kingdom long ago, Sihanouk revisits a history that was
very close in temporal terms, although geographically and culturally it
unfolded at a great distance from the Parisian stage. Indeed, a certain
tension between proximity and distance (as between the low and the high,
the small and the large, straight-talking prose and poetic transposition,
comedy and tragedy...) could be taken as one of the Soleil’s major artistic
precepts. The play is a political commentary and a call to critical arms,
exposing the nexus of international and interpersonal complicities in the
build-up to the Khmer Rouge genocide, as epic global struggles play out in
the microcosm of a small ‘non-aligned’ country. It is also a highly poetic
literary work in which a particular historical-political situation is brought
into communication with other artistic explorations of tragic human
destinies, as Cambodia is also a metaphor for the world, for the stage, for
the conflicting voices in the tormented conscience of an embattled prince.
By bringing this extraordinary play, originally addressed to a European
audience, ‘back’ to Cambodia; by enabling it to be reappropriated, indeed
‘recreated,’ by a nascent Khmer theatre company in what are difficult and
not particularly hopeful times in Cambodia; by subsequently organising an
international tour of this Khmer-ified European play about Cambodia, we
have aimed to set in motion a process of creative theatrical exchange and
elaboration that we hope will offer new critical and artistic opportunities
both in Cambodia and beyond. The obvious concern, in a situation such as
this, is that even with the best intentions, of exchange and dialogue,
perhaps even of humanitarian or historiographical aid, an unspoken project
of hegemonic neo-colonial imposition will insinuate itself. This risk
cannot be eliminated. Perhaps a shade of something like neo-colonialism
can never be avoided in any interpersonal much less intercultural
interaction. Yet we feel strongly that to minimise this risk, the critique and
the invention must flourish on both sides of the divide. We have chosen
this play, by this playwright, written for this theatre, because it recounts
the recent, tragic history of Cambodia of course, but also because
philosophically, artistically and politically it opens the space of a truly
radical critique of largely unquestioned Western assumptions, biases and
injustices. Likewise, the institutional Cambodian partners in this
endeavour can hardly be taken to be representatives of a normative model
of the cultural, social or political structures of contemporary Cambodian
society. They challenge the norm in several ways even as they have
become established players in the arts sector. In other words, and despite

Eric Prenowitz and Ashley Thompson 81
superficial appearances, this project cannot be reduced to a simple East-

West encounter. Rather than unilaterally imposing a rigid hierarchical
relationship (mission civilisatrice, humanitarian or financial aid, technology
transfer, nation building, history teaching...), the project aspires to foster
intracultural reflection and dialogue as well as intercultural exchange.
The ‘Cambodian’ context within which the project is situated is
transnational on several levels. In the years following the official end of
the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979-89) and the eventual
success of the Hun Sen government in prevailing over any remaining
armed resistance and political opposition, the crippled country became the
recipient of international aid in all domains. Unlike any other nation in the
Southeast Asian region, Cambodia has been literally rebuilt in the past
three decades with significant internationally-orchestrated interventions as
well as more informal and sustained initiatives led by the Cambodian
diaspora in the West and Australia. The contemporary Cambodian arts
sector is itself characterised by extensive transnational exchange largely
driven by individual members of the diaspora and conceptually set within
international frameworks of national reconstruction.
In the performing arts, recent work that has had significant impact on
Cambodian arts professionals and national and international audiences in
Phnom Penh has included a Khmer adaptation of Othello conceived and
staged by a classical Khmer dancer trained in Phnom Penh and resettled in
California,3 and a ‘rock opera’ recounting the culture shock experienced
and produced by a Khmer-American on his return to Cambodia, this
unfamiliar ’home.’4 These productions are exemplary of a range of work
involving the diaspora in one way or another and explicitly attempting to
formulate new paradigms marrying Western and Cambodian cultural
constructs with a view to invigorating the local arts scene. Of the various
bi- or multi-lateral governmental or quasi-governmental initiatives aiming
to support performing arts in Cambodia, the French Cultural Centre stands
out for its relatively steady commitment since the early 1990s. UNESCO
has also played a role in coordinating or raising the profile of certain
projects. Another important force in recent theatrical developments in
Cambodia is constituted by the many initiatives sponsored by local and
international NGOs: these have accounted for some of the most dynamic

3
Samritechak by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro opened in Phnom Penh in 2000, and
played at the Venice Theatre Biennale in 2003.
4
Where Elephants Weep: A Khmer Rock Opera, music by Him Sophy, libretto by
Catherine Filloux, inspired by an original concept by John Burt, Cambodian
premier produced in association with Amrita Performing Arts and John Burt,
Executive Producer, 2008.

theatrical activity in recent years, although the artistic dimensions are

often subordinated to quite pragmatic development issues (HIV/AIDS or
landmine awareness, democracy or literacy training, etc). It is also true
that there is a long history of regional intercultural exchange in Southeast
Asia—perhaps even a form of artistic syncretism—that is particularly well
represented in the spectrum of traditional performing arts genres that were
well-established before the Khmer Rouge period. This covers everything
from classical Khmer court dance to the local form of a Chinese-style
popular opera (see Phim and Thompson 1999). Many of these theatrical
traditions were severely weakened by the upheavals of the twentieth
century. But several continue to prosper, at times with the help of national
or international organisations promoting the preservation of cultural
heritage. Recent years have seen a series of international and regional arts
festivals held in Phnom Penh. The Philippine Educational Theater
Association (PETA), a group committed to theatre for development, has
taken a leading role in this context, promoting regional exchange in the
arts and thereby offsetting to some degree, or in any case complicating the
East-West dynamic prevalent in many other development initiatives.
Our project does not fit wholly within any of these established forms.
While it is important to us to avoid as much as possible the typically one-
sided relations in which foreign researchers reap great (intellectual,
academic) profits from their incursions into far-flung cultures, with the
local populations represented only by ‘research assistants’ or informants,
the indispensable yet often invisible Sherpas of academic research, we also
hope to avoid the opposing presumption, equally self-serving in the end, of
simple, unreciprocated aid to a weak or needy culture. This is of course a
fine line, if there is a line at all. But it is why we have attempted to make
the project both very Cambodian (idiomatically attuned to Cambodian
culture, addressing questions peculiar to Cambodia, and as a project
appropriated by Cambodian actors), and at the same time very
international (in the hopes it will offer some much needed talk-back to the
West on essential and as yet ‘unfinished’ Western business).
Conflicting Dramas
The Khmer-language staging of Sihanouk has been conceived as providing
a kind of critical counterpoint to another historic international staging of
Cambodian history: the UN-backed International Tribunal set up to try the
crimes of the Khmer Rouge, currently in session in Phnom Penh.5 The

5
See the official Tribunal website: http://www.eccc.gov.kh/.

Tribunal represents a significant development in the history of international

UN-sponsored tribunals since Nuremburg for a number of reasons. It is the
first such event in Asia, and the crimes in question cannot be easily
mapped onto the models of ’ethnic’ conflict that have dominated the
discourse surrounding other such tribunals (Rwanda, Bosnia). The
Cambodian Tribunal has also established a special Victim’s Unit
highlighting the difficulties in making the voices of the victims heard. The
Khmer Rouge period was a particularly revealing – and tragic – symptom
of the ideological battles of the Cold War and the Tribunal promises to
offer a new perspective on this recent history. And with a budget expected
to exceed 170 million dollars, it is by all measures a formidable operation.
Yet its mandate is limited, and will leave unanswered a number of
fundamental questions. Its specific modalities continue to be the object of
intense debate pivoting around differences between so-called international
and national demands or expectations. One crucial disagreement, for
example, concerns the numbers of defendants to be brought to trial, with
international judges seeking an increase, and national judges, in
accordance with Prime Minister Hun Sen’s publicly proclaimed position,
seeking to keep numbers down. While the Prime Minister frequently
accuses the Tribunal of orchestrating an international conspiracy to send
Cambodia reeling once again into civil war, the international
responsibilities and complicities in the Khmer Rouge tragedy have been
decisively left out of this high-profile international staging. By adopting a
narrowly nationalist frame and limiting chronological jurisdiction to the
exact period of Khmer Rouge rule the Tribunal’s remit does not include
actors or actions beyond Cambodia’s borders, favouring instead the
construction of a strictly Cambodian story of villains and victims.
However these are perhaps not simply contingent political limitations
imposed on an otherwise unassailable juridical process. The Tribunal itself
constitutes a significant intercultural intervention into Cambodian society,
history and memory, the implications and consequences of which remain
to be adequately explored. The long philosophical and institutional
traditions of which the tribunal, as a court of justice, is a product are
culturally and historically determined; they do not have universal
applicability. Indeed, the Western institutions of the theatre and the
tribunal have been intimately linked ever since they arose together, along
with the emergent political institutions of the sovereign democratic state,
in ancient Greece. It is our contention that in order to formulate a
meaningful assessment of the possibilities and limits of the Khmer Rouge
Tribunal it is necessary to situate the latter in the context of the long
history of these Western institutions.

According to Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the theatre

—more precisely tragedy—was a vital social organ of the Greek city:
Tragedy is not only an art form; it is a social institution that […] the city
puts in place next to its political and juridical organs. By installing […], in
the same urban space and following the same institutional norms as the
popular assemblies or tribunals, a spectacle open to all citizens, directed,
acted, judged by qualified representatives of the various tribes, the city
makes itself into a theatre; it takes itself in a sense as its object of
representation and plays itself before the public (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet
1986: 24; 1990: 32-3).
The theatre, according to this description, participates in a kind of mise en

abyme: it represents the city of which it is a constitutional element. And
furthermore, the city itself ‘makes itself into a theatre’ (se fait théâtre): it
takes the theatre as its model. Although they develop the parallel in some
detail, suggesting that the chorus in tragedy occupies the position of the
‘qualified representatives of the city’ (ibid: 24, note 2; 418, note 3),
Vernant and Vidal-Naquet do not explore here the relations between these
two kinds of ’representation,’ political (représentants qualifiés de la cité)
and artistic (objet de représentation). However, the institutional dimension
of the theatre (its function as one of the organs of the state) and its artistic
dimension work together, giving it a critical function. Vernant and Vidal-
Naquet continue:
But if tragedy appears thus, more than any other literary genre, rooted in
social reality, this does not mean that it is the reflection thereof. It does not
reflect this reality, it puts it in question. In presenting it as torn, divided
against itself, it renders it entirely problematic. […] The world of the city
finds itself […] put into question and, through debate, contested in its
fundamental values (ibid: 24-5; 33).
Indeed, Greek tragedy pretty much begins with the dramatic account, at
once mythical and political, of the origins of the tribunal: the terrible story
of the House of Atreus.6
Four years after Sihanouk, the Théâtre du Soleil staged a complete
version of this tragic cycle, appending Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis,
which recounts the beginning of the story, to Aeschylus’ trilogy, the
Oresteia (cf. Dion, Ertel et al 2007: 3-4, 23-28). This foundational myth of

6
The following notes on theatre and the staging of justice owe much to Hélène
Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil. See Williams 1999, Prenowitz 2003, Prenowitz
2006: 83-97 and Thompson 2006: 197-215, 265.

the Western tribunal can be summarised as follows: Once upon a time,

before the advent of the tribunal, justice was savage, and the Furies, those
ancient matrons of memory, those uncompromising goddesses of justice as
retribution, ensured that the guilty paid for their crimes with atrocious
suffering. Thus Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in
retribution for his murder of their daughter Iphigenia. In this mythical, pre-
juridical system, the irreparable loss of life, the unbearable suffering of
survivors, was recognized in the very excesses of the retribution, even as
the blood could not be made to flow back into the veins of the dead, even
as the suffering of the survivors could not be erased. The retribution was
not intended to repair the loss, even less to prevent its recurrence in the
future (because from this point of view such a loss is unique, it is never
repeated). It can be understood, on the contrary, to have served to mark the
excessiveness, the uniqueness, the irreparableness, indeed the injustice of
the loss. However, this was a situation of interminable cycles of revenge.
In retribution for the murder of her husband, Clytemnestra is murdered by
her son, Orestes. The Furies naturally turn their attentions to Orestes and
set off in hot pursuit. But Orestes is saved by the invention of the tribunal
and the ‘modern’ concept of justice. This great ‘progress’ for humanity,
involving the principle of measured, calculated dispassionate punishment,
forces the Furies into retirement and thereby puts an end to the cycle of
revenge – along with the cycle of plays.7
Yet the theatre shows that the tribunal renders a justice founded on a
lie, on the concealment of a certain injustice at the heart of ‘justice.’
Because the modern, Athenian, juridical notion of justice is conditional: it
is committed to calculating the incalculable. The suffering of the victim
cannot be quantified, but such quantification is precisely what the tribunal
does. Thus the tribunal, and therefore the state, are in some sense
complicit in the violence of the crime they pretend or intend to repair. It
must be said that this is by all accounts a structural necessity: the state—as

7
There is an interesting relation between this legal or legal-political revolution and
a certain artistic revolution: the tribunal is a powerful and over-determined
metaphor for the theatre, and as Vernant and Vidal-Naquet point out, tragedy,
along with the tribunal and the ecclesia, is part of a social structure that has marked
the entire history of Western civilization. Yet perhaps there is something of the
unconditional single-mindedness of the Furies’ unattenuated fury, their
unrelenting, inappropriable demand, their refusal of any recuperative work of
mourning, that stirs below the surface of the European aesthetic tradition. As if the
birth of tragedy (and the polis) entailed the sacrifice of an older, incommensurable
proto-aesthetic order – and art, ever since, has entailed a performative rehearsal,
from within and without at once, of this constitutive revolution.

sovereign democratic state—could never choose to render a justice more

just than that offered by the tribunal. However this lie is extremely
convenient for the smooth functioning of society. The ‘new’ concept of
justice embodied by the tribunal amounts to a strategy for managing grief,
for imposing ‘reasonable’ limits to mourning, in order to ensure the
smooth functioning of the state. And this ambiguous stroke of genius
constitutes the very origin of the politico-cultural tradition of what we call
the West – which is still defined in many ways by its beginnings in this
originary ‘progress.’
The tensions highlighted in this extremely selective account of the
Greek tale of the foundation of the tribunal can be seen to have re-emerged
in a spectacular manner in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Nuremberg
trials gave new life to a very Athenian juridical understanding of justice.
In Shoshana Felman’s words, Nuremburg was based on a notion of justice
‘not simply as punishment but as a marked symbolic exit from the injuries
of a traumatic history: as liberation from violence itself’ (2002: 1).8 ‘Never
Again’ was the rallying cry at the foundation of a new Western
philosophico-political order, even as the Holocaust became, in Andreas
Huyssen’s words, ‘a cipher [...] for the failure of the project of
enlightenment (2003: 13).’ And this failed ‘project of enlightenment’ was
built in many ways on the Greek legacy of which the tribunal is here
representative. So while the Holocaust can be seen to have marked the end
of a social-philosophical experiment that began with the silencing of the
Furies, the ‘Never Again’ response to the Holocaust (the Nuremburg trials
with the corresponding transformation of international law, including the
legal invention of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity,’ as well as the
development of global institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, UNESCO…) could only go through the

8
Our historical reading differs somewhat from Felman’s. She sees the Nuremberg
trials to have been at the origin of such a new conception of justice. We see this
novelty to itself be a repetition. Where we see an essential failure of justice in the
name of justice, she reads, via Benjamin, the nobility of the tribunal’s ever ardent
attempt to give expression to that which cannot be expressed – the abyssal
suffering of the victim – even as it orchestrates the foreclosure of this very
expression. The post-war institution of the universal declaration of human rights
certainly brought a new form of humanity to the tribunal – the notion of judging
crime committed not against an individual or a house, or a state, but against
humanity itself. But we would argue that this new form develops on the precedent
of the tribunal in its very early Greek conception of healing society of its otherwise
ever-open wounds. Though Felman's book does not treat the question of theatre
itself, the recurrent use of the theatrical metaphor to highlight the ‘hidden link’
between trials and trauma is telling.

same old tired motions. The irony is painfully apparent: once again we say
‘Never Again.’
In a 1993 interview, Jacques Derrida points out that this paradox is at
the heart of the traditional concept of progress, starting at least with the
‘philosophy of emancipation’ formulated during the Enlightenment.
Everything that heralded an Enlightenment philosophy, or inherited from it

[...] fights [...] a ‘return of the worst,’ which teaching or awareness of the
past are supposed to prevent (Derrida 2002: 22).
From the Greek tribunal to Enlightenment progress to today’s ‘Never

Again,’ not much has changed. The principal response —or the principle
of the response—the West has been able to offer to its own history of
trauma upon trauma is a certain commitment to ‘teaching or awareness of
the past.’ And this response has been singularly ineffective, it seems, in
preventing ‘the worst’ from being repeated. In a typically deconstructive
gesture, Derrida takes a (political, philosophical) position in favour of
progress even as he suggests a critique of the very idea of progress from
which this idea can never simply recover.
Although this Enlightenment battle often takes the form of a conjuration or

denial, we have no choice but to join in the struggle and reaffirm this
philosophy of emancipation (ibid).
Derrida has even less patience with the ‘end of history’ reaction against
this Enlightenment-Hegelian-Marxist concept of simple progress.
Still, their very affirmation attests to the possibility of what they oppose:
the return of the worst, an ineducable repetition compulsion in the death
drive and radical evil, a history without progress, a history without history,
etc (ibid).
Neither the progress story nor the end-of-progress story go very far in
convincing Derrida they can prevent the return of ‘the worst.’ He opts for
a logic of spectrality which is also the undoing of philosophy itself:
Another, still more radical way for philosophy to ‘struggle’ with the return
of the worst consists in disavowing [...] what this recurrence of evil may
well be made of: a law of the spectral, which resists ontology (the phantom
or ghost [le revenant] is neither present nor absent, it neither is nor is not,
nor can it be dialecticized) as well as a philosophy of the subject, of the
object, or of consciousness [...] which is also destined, like ontology or like

philosophy itself, to ‘chase after’ specters, to chase them out or hunt them
down (ibid: 22-23).
Western philosophy, along with all its avatars or representatives (ontology,

‘the philosophy of the subject, of the object, or of consciousness,’ etc.),
‘disavow[s]’ this ‘law of the spectral’ not because returning ghosts are
necessarily evil, but rather because they cannot be made to stay put within
the traditional philosophical categories, because they cannot be made to
comply with the philosophical demand that clear distinctions be established:
between presence and absence, past and present, repetition and progress,
good and evil, etc. For the best of reasons, in the name of doing good, in
the name of progress understood as progressively less bad, philosophy
wants to iron out these distinctions – and yet Derrida’s point is that this
obsession with either/or oppositions, this refusal to entertain the possibility
of anything (like a ghost) that does not comply with such an obsession, is
precisely what condemns in advance this ‘good’ initiative to an eternal
repetition of the same. Derrida continues:
Thus it also consists in failing to understand certain psychoanalytic lessons

about the phantom, but also about the repetition of the worst, which
threatens all historical progress (ibid: 23).
If ‘historical progress’ means ever more success in preventing ‘the return

of the worst,’ then the fact that ‘the worst’ has indeed returned in the 20th
century, one might even say with a vengeance, must constitute a very
serious threat to such an understanding of progress. Yet Derrida suggests
that there may be another kind of progress, and furthermore that any
consequential concept of progress must accept a reckoning with the ever-
present threat of returning spectres rather than simply disavowing it in a
desperate, defensive, symptomatic gesture:
To which I will add [...] that it only threatens a certain concept of progress,
and that there would be no progress, in general, without this threat [...].
Yes, a ghost can come back, like the worst, but without this possible
coming-back, and if we refuse to acknowledge its irreducible originality,
we are deprived of memory, heritage, justice, of everything that has value
beyond life and by which the dignity of life is measured (ibid).
Once again, Derrida is not arguing in favour of accepting any evil return,
but rather that one can only hope to have some say in what returns or
doesn’t, and what effects this return or non-return has, if one grapples with
the spectral possibility of the return.

Tragic theatre is not simply opposed to the juridical imperative of

‘Never Again.’ According to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, as we have seen,
tragedy, democracy and the tribunal developed together in ancient Greece
and were structurally entangled. Along with philosophy as Derrida
describes it, they can be understood to have laid the groundwork for a
cultural transformation in the West aimed at preventing the return of the
worst. In this sense, tragedy must be submitted to the critique Derrida
addresses to philosophy, as a cultural institution that represses the ghost.
In a 1998 debate concerning Cixous’s theatre, Derrida discusses the
relations between the theatrical, the juridical and the political. He refers in
particular to Cixous’s play, The Perjured City, written for the Soleil in
1994, after the company had completed its House of Atreus cycle. 9 The
play revisits the origins of the tribunal by bringing the Furies back from
their slumber to deal with the infamous French scandal of the 1980s, the
‘affaire du sang contaminé.’10 This was a modern blood crime, in which
HIV-contaminated blood was knowingly distributed to hospitals by
officials charged with protecting the public’s health. Thousands were
infected. Derrida says:
[...] there is something in all of [Cixous’s] plays which constantly

overflows [déborde] the political, opens the political onto something which
doesn’t let itself be politicized [politisé]. For example, in The Perjured
City, the question of justice defies political response, which is to say
juridical response […] (Calle-Gruber 2000: 462).
So this theatre, very much situated in the tragic tradition, is able to point
out the limitations of politics and the tribunal, by staging something that
exceeds them. Yet Derrida is quick to insist that the theatre itself is
constrained by the same limitations:
For example, in The Perjured City, the question of justice defies political
response, which is to say juridical response which is to say theatrical
response [...] That limit is in question, that is, the moment where with the
politicality of the political it is the theatricality of theatre which is
overwhelmed [débordée] by what happens [arrive]. This is not a
denegation of the political: one wants to fully assume political and juridical
responsibility, but something happens [arrive] which does not let itself be
understood by the theatre, any more than by the City (ibid).

9
Cixous’s play The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Furies (Cixous 2003)
was written for and staged by the Théâtre du Soleil in 1994: La Ville parjure ou le
réveil des Erinyes (Théâtre du Soleil, 1994).
10
See Casteret 1992.

And yet perhaps the theatre is capable of staging what it cannot

comprehend. Perhaps it does not necessarily, in advance, on principle,
simply banish the ghost. A certain theatre, at least, may admit, may allow,
a kind of haunting. It broods over the ever-present threat of return, and
over the compromises made in the name of progress. Vernant and Vidal-
Naquet continue:
When exalting the civic ideal and affirming its victory over all forces from
the past, even Aeschylus, the most optimistic of the tragic writers, seems
not to be making a positive declaration with tranquil conviction but rather
to be expressing a hope, making an appeal that remains full of anxiety even
amid the joy of the final apotheosis. The questions are posed but the tragic
consciousness can find no fully satisfactory answers to them and so they
remain open (25-6; 33).
Like the tribunal, Cixous’s Terrible but Unfinished Story... intervenes after
the end. Genocide has happened, again. As much as a third of the
Cambodian population has perished. The country is occupied by its
traditional enemies. But even in plain view of all the dead, there is still,
somehow, a view to the future. The story is terrible, but unfinished.
In the same roundtable discussion with Derrida cited above, Cixous
describes the challenge that the theatre takes up:
How can one attract the attention of the world when one is becoming
invisible? War, immolation, fasting? When Gandhi fasted, he was able to
stop 600,000 people. That’s where I situate myself [...]: I seek
efficaciousness in action. I seek force, dynamism, energy, I look for what
is going to make things move forward, what is going to interrupt the
process underway which is the process of repetition. History [L’Histoire]
repeats the death penalty: one entire people is put to death after the other.
Is there a means of keeping repetition from repeating itself? (Calle-Gruber
2000: 461).
Tragedy, in Cixous’s interpretation, does not give up in the face of the

endless tragic cycle it archives and foretells. But, for the deconstructive
dramaturge, the promise of justice, of a justice beyond the painful,
pragmatic limitations of the tribunal, can only take shape in the artistic
intervention, and precisely in its difference from the traditional scene of
justice. As the doubling up of the ‘Never Again’ suggests (‘keeping
repetition from repeating itself’), such a promising theatrical gesture can
only grapple at once with the necessity and the shortcomings of the
tribunal. Without repressing or denying the ghost (and in any case such
repression or denial always signs an unconditional surrender to its return),

but in imagining some other way forward – while stepping back from any
mechanical, linear, dialectical notion of progress – in which all returns
may not be the same.
This is a question revisited throughout Cixous’s oeuvre:
And History? A terrible question [l’Histoire? Question terrible] that has

haunted me incessantly. It has long resonated for me as the echo of a fault.
I didn’t feel guilty but I was, or at least I wasn’t guilty but I felt guilty, etc.
I formulated and then dismissed my shame: you write after people die. My
path is escorted by the phantoms of peoples; the whole span of my texts,
they are there (1989a: 11; 1990: 26).
The question trying Cixous here recalls that of the Furies in their struggle
with the new legal order: can there be an appropriate response to the
traumas of what we call ‘injustice’ without even knowing what ‘justice’
means? But Cixous seems to ask in addition: is a response that would be
only appropriate, that would be only fitting or adequate, in other words a
simply reactive response, really responsible in such cases? Is it acceptable
to only respond? To wait until the crime has already been committed?
Should justice not overflow its case? Exceed it? Even precede it? Chase it
down, like the Furies, but by somehow leading the way? Cixous’s work
goes to the heart of the aporia famously formulated by Adorno: all poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric – which we might gloss by saying that it is
complicit with the crime – and yet this fact does not obviate the imperative
to write poetry after, indeed on, Auschwitz.
In a 1989 interview, Cixous ruminates at length on this paradox, which
seems to remain insoluble for her, even though she has clearly taken a
stand to ‘speak about that which takes our breath away.’
‘[S]pectacle’ doesn’t destroy profound emotions, and [...] perhaps this

charm, this seduction, this pleasure permit us to tolerate the intolerable.
What would the naked intolerable be? It would be the vision of charnel-
houses, the naked charnel-house, bones, the grimace of the concentration
camp. These are things which the individual must go on a solitary
pilgrimage to contemplate. We must go to Auschwitz or what remains of
the Cambodian charnel-houses and wrap ourselves up in meditation on
these remains. But this is without language, it’s obviously done in silence,
and it’s not art (1989: 176).
The contemplation of the intolerable happens in silence. It avoids art and

the pleasures of ‘spectacle,’ which can always be construed as a barbaric
instrumentalization of trauma, putting it to use, extracting some aesthetic

profit or surplus value from it. And yet is silent meditation in itself any
‘better’?
Once there is art, of whatever kind, there is transposition, there is

metaphor, and language is already metaphor. Theatre is another kind of
metaphor. But this is not only a question about theatre, it’s the question of
art in general. And it’s the question of the word placing itself on that which
would otherwise be silence and death. It’s a huge problem, it’s the problem
of the poet. Can a poet permit him or herself, and does s/he have the force
to speak about that which has been reduced to silence? Wouldn’t this be
blasphemy? Isn’t it a necessity? Isn’t this exactly what we must attempt to
do, knowing all the while the paradox, knowing there is a price to be paid
on both sides: something is lost but something else is safeguarded (ibid).
Poetry, the word ‘placing itself’ on silence and death compounds the
trauma, it multiplies it hyperbolically precisely through its belittling
feebleness. And yet it is also a feeble resistance against loss. And perhaps
against the repetition of repetition this loss forebodes.
This is the question I am always asking myself. My choice has been made,
after all I’ve decided to try to speak about that which takes our breath
away. Because more than anything else I’m suspicious of silence. There is
such a thing as a respectful silence, there can be a silence which sings, but
I’m suspicious of human silence. In general it’s a silence which represses
(ibid).
The theatre project we have initiated, involving a Cambodian production

of Cixous’s epic play about the horrifying, inexorable process of
Cambodia’s descent into genocidal horror, is particularly susceptible to the
double pressures of this paradox: it could be construed as a self-regarding,
self-serving intervention that turns the trauma of a distant country, or even,
for young Cambodian actors, that of seemingly distant ancestors, into a
profitable (academic, theatrical…) enterprise. And yet, is the solution
therefore silence? Isn’t this potential ‘blasphemy’ also a ‘necessity’?
The Sihanouk project, for us, is an attempt to draw some concrete
consequences from our conviction that this question of what to do with
memory is one with regard to which the West (the whole Aeschylus—
Enlightenment—Nuremburg sequence) has at least as much to learn from
its others, in this case Cambodia, as vice versa. We feel that in more than
one way this project stands a chance of interrogating the traditional power
relations in which it is necessarily caught, perhaps interrupting a certain
silence with a unique polylogue.

From Stage to World to Stage

This project began as a dream or a thought experiment, a purely theoretical
hypothesis formulated by Ashley Thompson after seeing the original
production of the play and subsequently becoming involved in Khmer
studies and the ‘rebuilding’ of Cambodia in the 1990s.11 In 2003,
Thompson arranged for an initial draft translation of the play to be
completed.12 Over the following years, we evoked the possibility of a
Khmer staging with members of Phare Ponleu Selpak Arts Centre (PPS)
in Cambodia’s northwestern Battambang province. But it was only in
2007, as we observed theatrical developments at PPS, along with the
founding of a new troupe called Kok Thlok in Phnom Penh, that we began
in earnest to explore the possibility of a Khmer staging. After much
discussion, both groups decided to participate in launching the project, and
we agreed to approach the Soleil in the hopes that they might become
involved in one way or another. Mnouchkine gave strong support,
suggesting that she could run a preparatory workshop in Cambodia with
the actors. With these elements in place, the project was actively launched
in 2007.13 The first workshop, bringing together 60 Cambodian actors
from the two Cambodian troupes, was held over the course of two weeks
in December 2007 at the PPS compound in Battambang under the
direction of Georges Bigot, who had played Sihanouk in the 1985
production of Cixous’s play, and Maurice Durozier, who had played
Sihanouk’s faithful Prime Minister Penn Nouth. A second three-week
workshop, led by Mnouchkine and supported by six actors from the Soleil,

11
Ashley Thompson completed her PhD, Mémoires du Cambodge, under Hélène
Cixous’s direction at the Université de Paris 8. From 1994 to 2000 she taught
Khmer civilization at the Department of Archaeology of Phnom Penh's Royal
University of Fine Arts, and worked for APSARA, the national Cambodian
Authority for the management of Angkor under the direction of State Minister
Vann Molyvann.
12
Funding was secured from the Asian Cultural Council, New York, for Oum
Sophanny, a Cambodian writer, to undertake the translation. Several people have
subsequently worked on new translations of an adapted text: Thach Deth, Michel
Antelme, Ashley Thompson and Ang Chouléan.
13
Our seed budget, from the World University Network, was quickly
supplemented by funding secured by the Soleil from the City of Paris and
CulturesFrance, a French governmental organ charged with promoting French
artistic activity abroad. Subsequent funding from the British Academy and the
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies of the University of Leeds
contributed to support for later workshops and history classes.

followed in January 2008.14 Workshop/rehearsals have since been held

twice a year. The theatrical work has been complemented by archival-
based history classes run by Ashley Thompson at the Bophana Audiovisual
Centre, Phnom Penh, along with literacy training for a number of actors.
The following historical/biographical overview of the major ‘players’
aims to offer a more concrete idea of the project and the groups or people
involved thus far.
Phare Ponleu Selpak15

Phare Ponleu Selpak is an Arts Centre in Cambodia’s northwestern
Battambang province. It has its origins in a drawing school opened in 1986
for primary- and secondary-school-age children in Site 2, a Cambodian
refugee camp on the Khmer-Thai border. Site 2 was effectively an open-
air prison between a war zone and strict border controls, its population
held hostage by the military strategy of a fitful resistance campaign and
the limited hospitality of a number of ‘third countries.’ Located on arid,
unforgiving land, Site 2 was built almost entirely of perishable materials
as a result of camp management policies designed to discourage it from
becoming a permanent encampment. And yet it ‘flourished’ for more than
a decade as the second largest urban concentration of Cambodians, with a
population of over 200,000. Many of the children of Site 2 had spent their
entire lives in this ‘temporary’ camp. The outside world was for them a
fantasy that acquired great psychological importance.
The drawing school was founded by Véronique Decrop, a French artist
working with the education team of a Thai Jesuit refugee relief
organisation. Decrop’s pedagogical philosophy involved offering her
students a certain disciplined freedom. She encouraged drawing on
location and taught the elements of perspective, but she refused the use of
grids or rote copying exercises and never altered a student’s work. Her
approach was immensely popular with young students, but controversial in
camp administrative circles, Cambodian and foreign alike. A recurrent
critique concerned the art school’s own implicit critique of what is

14
Short clips of the January 2008 workshop appear in Catherine Villepoux’s recent
film: Ariane Mnouchkine: l’Aventure du Théâtre du Soleil (Arte France
Développement 2010).
15
Unless otherwise noted, the following section is derived from our personal
experience with PPS, since Site 2, as well as www.phareps.org. Comments on
Phare’s early years draw from a more substantial analysis of the political, artistic
and ideological context in a forthcoming article by Ashley Thompson on
contemporary Cambodian art.

typically considered to be traditional Khmer art pedagogy. The attempt to

subvert ‘Khmer tradition’ in the name of liberating the Khmer themselves
may appear to be an old colonial trick. But the situation was more
complex. In fact, most of these ‘traditional’ Khmer pedagogical techniques
originated in the French colonial Arts School founded by French
authorities in Phnom Penh in the early twentieth century. And more
importantly, Decrop conceived the work of the school to constitute an
ongoing critique of the neo-colonial structures at work in the camp.
Decrop moved the art school to Cambodia’s Battambang Province
when all remaining border refugees were repatriated to Cambodia in the
early 1990s, following the signature of Peace Accords between warring
Cambodian factions and the official departure of Vietnamese troupes from
Cambodia. She ultimately transferred the school’s direction to a group of
her students who had by then become teachers themselves.16 The school
developed in a spectacular manner in the late 1990s and early 2000s with
the founding of a circus school and, ultimately, a professional touring
circus group under the direction of Khuon Det, who had been a student of
Decrop in Site 2. Circus activities significantly enlarged PPS’s student
recruitment base, attracting a wide range of poor, uneducated, trafficked or
abandoned children from the surrounding neighbourhoods into the
expanding centre.17 Following an initial 1994 proposition, in 2007 PPS
was designated by the Cambodian Ministry of Culture as the nation’s
‘western cultural pole.’ The international success of the PPS circus, with
numerous tours in Europe and North Africa, brought a good deal of
attention to the centre as a whole, and consequently a host of new funding
opportunities. Phare Ponleu Selpak is now one of the country’s most
important art centres, comprising training and professional production in
circus, theatre, music, plastic arts and animation. It hosts international
festivals and artistic exchanges. It offers training and employment to
foreign volunteers wishing to contribute to and learn from arts development
work in the region.

16
The school was named Phare, French for Lighthouse or Guiding Light, and an
acronym for the French NGO which initially supported the school: Patrimoine
humain et artistique des refugies et des enfants. In Cambodia the school was
renamed Phare Ponleu Selpak, ‘Ponleu’ being the Khmer rendering of Phare –
light, guiding light, brilliance, and ‘Selpak’ meaning ‘Art.’
17
In the framework of an accord between the Cambodian Ministry of Education
and PPS, and with financial support from the French embassy and Japanese
bilateral aid, a public primary and secondary school was built on its grounds
between 2002 and 2006.

Several of the Cambodian founding directors maintain leading roles in

the centre. PPS now has a professional Khmer executive director who is
seconded by the ‘founders,’ responsible for strategic and artistic planning,
along with a team of permanent Khmer administrative personnel and a
constantly evolving group of foreign support staff. The former drawing
students from Site 2 have different visions of and roles within the
organisation. Yet their common childhood experience of the liberating
powers of art continues to inspire their work in many ways.
An ‘Awareness Theatre Group’ was officially founded by PPS in 2000
as an offshoot of circus activities led by Khuon Det. The group comprises
young circus trainees who display particular talent for the theatrical
aspects of performance, and it aims to educate popular audiences on
pressing social issues such as HIV/AIDS, child trafficking, hygiene, drug
abuse or domestic violence. The group typically works on contracts from
international, national or local organisations involved in the social and
educational development sectors and its theatrical training has been ad
hoc. As a general rule, the actors themselves are from difficult
backgrounds and have had limited formal education. An important aim of
the Sihanouk project is to contribute actively to the company members’
personal and professional development. This has happened, for example,
through the organisation of literacy classes and archival workshops on
Cambodian history, as well as intensive hands-on experience with the
technical, administrative and artistic dimensions of the theatre. Nonetheless,
it must be said that the economic and social conditions in which the
majority of the actors live continue, for many, to pose serious practical
obstacles to participation on the project. Indeed, raising adequate financial
support has been one of the project’s more prosaic ongoing challenges.
Kok Thlok
The Kok Thlok Theatre Company was founded in 2006 at the initiative of
Thach Deth, a Franco-Khmer linguist then based in Phnom Penh, Denis
Paillard, another linguist based at the University of Paris 7, and a group of
Khmer actors led by Eing Hoeun. The troupe is composed primarily of
professional actors, actresses and musicians trained at Cambodia’s Royal
University of Fine Arts in the pre- and early post-war period (early 1970s
and 1980s). Most are, or have been nominal employees of the Department
of Performing Arts of the Ministry of Culture. Many teach at the
secondary or university level. When the National Theatre burned down in
1994, these actors and actresses were left without a rehearsal and

performing space.18 In subsequent years, the arts sector has not been a
governmental priority,19 and this has accelerated a turn by many
performing artists to other means of daily survival. Kok Thlok was
founded in response to this situation, providing the group members a
means of pursuing careers in the arts, and thus conserving threatened
performance traditions.
The group boasts expertise in traditional dramatic art forms, as well as
Western-style ‘spoken’ theatre. Many of the artists had some basic training
in Khmer classical dance before studying other dramatic genres. The
group shows particular dedication to resurrecting Khmer dramatic forms
and narratives little known today, as well as the nearly-lost tradition of
popular performance in rural settings.20
It was decided in the end that Kok Thlok should maintain its
independent identity and continue its important work, rather than merging
into the new theatre company. However the active collaboration of Kok
Thlok in the project’s early stages was crucial, particularly as it offered a
generational and professional perspective that contrasted fruitfully with
those of PPS and the Soleil.
The Théâtre du Soleil

The Théâtre du Soleil was founded in 1964 by Ariane Mnouchkine, and
quickly established itself as one of the most innovative theatre companies
in Europe.21 It was involved in the political and artistic upheavals of 1968,

18
The artists and the ruined theatre where a number of them subsequently lived are
the object of Rithy Panh’s film, The Burnt Theatre (Rithy Panh, dir., Le théâtre
brulé [Catherine Dussart Productions/INA, Les Acacias/ARTE, 2005]). For further
notes on this film, see Ashley Thompson (forthcoming).
19
Because of a number of lucrative real estate deals, making way for commercial
developments, some of the most important national cultural institutions have been
effectively eliminated (as when the remains of the National Theatre were
demolished) or greatly weakened (as when the northern campus of the Royal
University of Fine Arts was moved from the location it had occupied for many
decades in the city centre to a remote site ill adapted to teacher and student needs).
20
Suggesting a return to lost origins, the troupe’s name is quite telling in this
respect. Kok Thlok is a legend and the legendary place where a travelling Brahman
met and married a native Naga Princess to found the kingdom we know as
Cambodia today. For more information, see http://kokthloktheatre.org.
21
An extensive bibliography on various aspects of the Soleil, from its history to its
methodologies and influences, aspirations and ideals, to individual productions,
etc., can be found at www.theatre-du-soleil.fr. For historical accounts most
pertinent to present discussions, see the two texts available on the site by Anne

and the Soleil’s artistic and political commitments are famously intertwined.
And yet, unlike some ‘politically engaged’ theatres, the art is not in any
straightforward way instrumentalized as a vehicle for a pre-established
political discourse. Likewise, the political critique and intervention is
neither idle posturing nor a cynical attempt to establish avant-garde kudos.
Mnouchkine’s artistic influences include certain experimental European
approaches (the work of Jean Vilar or Jacques Copeau, for example), as
well as a number of mostly Asian theatrical traditions (from Balinese
masks to Indian Kathakali to Japanese Bunraku…). The Soleil troupe
members themselves are of a wide range of nationalities and this reflects
the international perspective and ambitions of the company.
Of Algerian and German Jewish ancestry, Hélène Cixous grew up in
Algeria, which was then a French colony. As a Jew, her French citizenship
was revoked during the Second World War and so it is hardly surprising
that, after moving to France to continue her education, she should have
developed a strong critique of European philosophical and political biases.
Best known internationally as a radical feminist theorist, she is above all a
prolific writer of fiction whose work is at once highly poetic and
committed to deep philosophical explorations. The Sihanouk play, Cixous’
first for the Soleil, articulates the Shakespearean reference in an entirely
original manner to present a number of contemporary ethical dilemmas in
all their complexity. In writing the play, Cixous did a great deal of
historical research on the topic, and simply as an historical reconstruction
of a complexly overdetermined and fateful sequence in recent world
affairs, it is a unique achievement.
Workshop Notes: Propaedeutic Epilogue

This project has entailed a willful intervention into Cambodian artistic and
social traditions. In its conception and development, we have attempted to
avoid the often hidden traps of neocolonialist arrogance. This is reflected
in part in the double orientation of the project: toward Cambodia and
Southeast Asia, but also toward the West. It is our contention that a certain
encounter with Cambodian cultural paradigms may offer new critical
insight into Western concepts of history, progress, memory, mourning and
justice. While we are wary of the lure of over-simple discourses on

Neuschäfer: ‘1970-1975: Ecrire une Comédie de notre temps - La Filiation avec
Jacques Copeau’; and ‘1975-1999: De la création collective à l’écriture en
commun.’ Numerous monographs have been dedicated to Mnouchkine and the
Soleil. More recent work includes Miller (2006) and Feral (1998).

intercultural collaboration and the facilitation of ‘local’ initiative or

indigenous empowerment, we also believe that one cannot avoid these
intractable ethical complications by renouncing any attempt to intervene,
to establish a collaboration or exchange. The artistic dimension of this
project is for us crucial. A certain approach to what might be called
‘artistic in(ter)vention’ – as distinct from humanitarian or development
aid, technology or knowledge transfer, education, health or human rights
initiatives – seems to hold out the possibility of another, less troubled
relationship, precisely because it revolves around a creative, inventive
process. With this in mind, we will briefly describe two of its important
components: the play ‘itself’ and the overarching theatrical approach that
is guiding the work. Each of these has been in many ways imposed from
the ‘outside,’ or in any case from the outset, and yet we hope to
demonstrate that they have allowed for an unprecedented experience of
intercultural artistic reflection and invention.
The Play
The play, Cixous’s Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk,
King of Cambodia, is one of the most profound, subtle and meticulously
researched artistic responses to the Khmer Rouge tragedy to date. In the
theatrical domain, at least, there is no other work, from Cambodia or
beyond, that undertakes such a sustained, unblinking exploration of the
historical, human and philosophical dimensions of this period. For this
production the play is undergoing an extraordinary process of translation-
transformation. The need for a Khmer translation of the French text itself
poses almost insurmountable challenges. These are due in part to the same
factors that make any poetic literary work strictly speaking ‘impossible’ to
translate: one can never reproduce in the target language all the textual
effects or idiomatic subtleties of the source text. But translation constitutes
a particular challenge here because the cultural and linguistic differences
between French and Khmer are so great. For instance, Cambodian
literature does not include a genre that can be taken as in any simple way
‘equivalent’ to the European theatrical tradition derived from ancient
tragedy via Shakespeare and modern European drama. So the translation
must either effectively invent a new Khmer genre or opt for an audacious
transposition of the play into an existent Cambodian form.
Beyond the problems of the translation properly speaking, during the
process of ‘creating’ the play, a number of quite radical solutions have
been considered. For instance, at one point early on, the question of state
censorship was discussed with all the partners involved: there is a

possibility the Khmer government will forbid the production as it stands

for political reasons. One response to such an eventuality, initially
suggested by Mnouchkine, would be to entirely transpose the play in order
to eliminate any explicit references to recent Cambodian history, so that
the production would be unassailable from a censor’s point of view, while
retaining, in a displaced, metaphorical form, its exploration of the issues
involved and the core of its political and poetic message.
More generally, work on the text has been continuous and has passed
through a number of stages. Formal collective readings have been
organized from the beginning, guided by the translators and interpreters,
or by troupe members. These inevitably lead to discussions of possible
interpretations of the text, as well as historical interpretations understood
to be made by the text. These collective readings, nominally organized to
familiarize the actors with the history and the text itself, have consistently
informed translation and adaptation choices. They have also contributed to
a broader operation of transfer of a certain authorial agency to the actors.
Theatrical work on the text has been central to this process. Workshops
opened in 2007-08 with relatively straightforward divisions between
improvisational exercises on the one hand, and textual work on the other.
However, as the actors have developed familiarity with both text and
technique, boundaries between the two forms of preparatory work have
eroded. Here too typical hierarchical relations between text and practice
are shaken up. The text is not memorised, to then be pronounced or
otherwise interpreted on stage. The general narrative outline, meaning and
dramatic function of a given scene are instead progressively internalized
by the actors through the readings and improvisational propositions.
Improvisations can lead to condensation of the original text and at times to
its erasure. At the present stage, it seems likely that certain parts of the
play will ultimately be rewritten on the basis of improvisations as they
come to be fixed in the final rehearsal period. In this way, while the
original text came at a certain point in the project’s evolution to ground
improvisational work, the roles have in some sense been reversed over
time, with theatrical work coming to ground the collective composition of
a ‘new’ text. The original text will not disappear, but its form and authorial
presence will be of a radically altered nature in the final adaptation.
Theatrical Approach
Despite the fact that there are more men than women in the troupe, and
more male roles than female roles in the play, women hold a preponderant
presence on stage. This situation bears witness to the talent and

commitment of the female professional cohort, as well as to a certain

political and aesthetic commitment of the project: a fundamental goal is to
seek ‘truth’ rather than ‘reality,’ that is, to privilege a process of
identifying and giving expression to the inner state of a given character
rather than simply rendering outer appearances. In such, there is no
veritable obstacle to women playing men, as demonstrated in Figures 1
and 2.
Figure 1: Chea Ravi as the deceased King Father Norodom Suramarit (left), and
San Mardy as his son King Norodom Sihanouk (right) in a workshop for Part I,
Act I, Scene 2. In this early scene King Sihanouk seeks political counsel and
personal consolation in the statue he has erected in the royal palace in honor of his
recently deceased father. The statue comes to life, to then play a key role as a
bridge between the living and the dead throughout the play. Here, King Sihanouk
updates his father on the increasingly dire geo-political situation, and his own
radical strategy for maintaining Cambodia’s neutrality in the ‘Vietnam’ war: he,
the King, will abdicate the throne in order to found a political party, run in the
country’s first elections, and thus ensure his ‘reign’ as Head of State. (Photo by
Loeum Lorn, August 2010, Phare Ponleu Selpak, Battambang.)

Figure 2: Workshop for Part I, Act II, Scene 4: Henry Kissinger (centre, played by
Huoth Hieng) meets American commanders in South Vietnam (General Abrams,
left, played by Preap Pouch; General Taber, right, played by Chhit Phireak). This
is the horrific moment when Nixon’s secret decision to bomb Cambodia is
confirmed on the ground. (Photo by Loeum Lorn, August 2010, Phare Ponleu
Selpak, Battambang.)
The Théâtre du Soleil has a very particular artistic history and a unique
way of operating as a troupe. It is a large company with a democratic
approach to everything from menial chores to important artistic decisions.
The company prepares each production for many months, often years,
making use of a process called ‘collective creation’: whether working from
a text or devising a new scene, no aspect of the play (from the text to the
dramaturgy or scenography to the costumes, music, props or make-up...) is
fixed in advance. During long sessions of semi-improvisational work, the
actors are free to propose any number of ideas: a new way of playing or
dressing a certain character in a certain scene, a new sequence, or dramatic
situation, a new prop, etc. The improvisations are then discussed, and
promising components are retained for future use. In this process of
creation, several actors will try their hand at playing any one character;
each succeeding incarnation will make use of what has been attempted
before, such that the final version presented to the public will be the work
of a large number of artists and not only of the director or the actor listed
on the programme. It is this very open-ended democratic approach to

theatre making that has been imposed, or at least proposed, through the
participation of Ariane Mnouchkine and other members of the Soleil in the
workshops. Yet it has been appropriated with such apparent ease by the
troupe that the origin of this theatrical methodology (which was developed
under Mnouchkine’s guidance from a critique of European theatrical
traditions and out of a deep interest in Asian theatrical forms) has been all
but forgotten.
Delphine Cottu, an actress who joined the Soleil after the original
Sihanouk production and who accompanied Mnouchkine in the initial
Cambodian workshops, has joined forces with Georges Bigot to co-direct
subsequent workshops. Their role is not to direct in any traditional fashion,
but more fundamentally to make their experience with collective creation
available, to suggest and orchestrate exercises and to offer to the troupe’s
discussions reflections on the workshops’ progress from their vantage as
outside/inside observers. Videos of workshops are shared with Mnouchkine
and Cixous for their input. Khuon Det, who is now artistic director of PPS,
leads revisions with the actors in-between formal workshop periods and
will collaborate with the two Soleil representatives in the final production
process. Ashley Thompson directs historic, linguistic and intercultural
interpretation in and outside of formal theatrical workshops. But, crucially,
this collaborative ‘direction’ functions as a means of bringing the artistic
collectivity to work as a whole to create the play. The process is complex,
involving, evoking and at times transforming individual histories and
personalities along the way; while, conversely, the collectivity changes in
accordance with the evolution of its individual members and member
relations.
New propositions are conceived collaboratively. All project participants
work to devise the staging choices and to dress the actors for a given
scene. Reference is often made in this preparatory work to theatrical
exercises that are also part of the daily routine – for example incarnating
the character of Pol Pot as a snake after an exercise on animals – as well as
to historical knowledge and audio-visual documentation developed for the
project or consulted at Bophana. Propositions which appear successful in
one way or another to the group are then discussed, adopted, adapted and
further developed by others. In this way, through collaborative conception
and personal embodiment, most project participants develop intimate
familiarity with the play’s wide range of dramatic characters and events.
At the same time, collective creation is underway, with the artistic
decisions regarding a character, an interaction or a scene always resulting
from active, embodied exchange.

One unexpected result of this process has been the emergence in the
later workshops of a certain kind of chorus with a remarkably hybrid
cultural pedigree. As the actors held increasingly informed and active
discussions about narrative developments and the emotional states of
characters in preparation for making theatrical propositions, with actors
interrupting each other to support, contradict or adjust a proposed
interpretation – or at times to begin to play it out in taking up a prop or
putting on a bit of costume – a kind of spontaneous, ad-hoc chorus began
to take form, halfway-on and halfway-off the stage. Very quickly, these
democratic exchanges came to be integrated into the theatrical
propositions themselves. First there emerged storytellers, along with a
hybrid form of dramatic presentation, combining narration and acting or
narration and enacting thereof. Accompanied by training and exercises on
the chorus in classical Greek tragedy led by the Soleil members, the
storytelling gradually developed into a more elaborated dramatic form of
collective participation in the interpretation and staging of the work.
While no final dramaturgical decisions have been made, numerous
propositions have received the approbation of all concerned and promise
to structure the production. These have drawn from forms of expression
with which the actors are familiar. For example, the figure of the Demon
in classical Khmer dance (yakkh) has lent his formal postures to
introductory narration of scenes of violence against the backdrop of the
American bombing of Cambodia. A female narrator using classical dance
movements has emerged as a likely lead for narrating intimate scenes.
This particular actress, Chea Ravi, is also currently being provided special
training in classical Khmer sung chorus technique. Certain social groups
have been identified as potentially constituting a chorus, such as villagers,
palace servants and journalists. Drawing from popular character types
associated with these groups (the abused, frightened, angry or gossipy
villagers, the high-strung palace servants, the pushy press corps...) the
chorus members actively discuss narrative developments and the
emotional states of characters, to effectively stage the process of collective
creation as described above. These choruses thus constitute a self-reflexive
theatrical trope, as the creative search—and particularly the very process
by which a Cambodian troupe comes to grips with this French play and
with the Cambodian/world history that is its subject —itself becomes a
vital part of the production. At the same time, this device has deep and
heterogeneous but overdetermined roots. On the one hand, the ancient
Greek invention of the chorus, as discussed above, cannot be separated
from the invention of democracy, which it represents and performatively
enacts. And this double invention is clearly active in the democratic

practice of collective creation. On the other hand, these choruses have

different ancestors closer to home, with most Cambodian dramatic forms
incorporating chorus and chorus-like elements: from classical dance drama
to shadow puppet performances that include bawdy interludes in which
drunken villagers comment on the action. The undecidable—or
overdetermined—provenance of this innovation is for us a hopeful sign. It
suggests that new ways forward can be found or invented whereby
potential stumbling blocks may be transformed into extraordinary means
of transport.
Sihanouk is scheduled to open in the last quarter of 2011.
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Galilée
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– A Sourcebook. London: Routledge

‘MY DOG GIRL’:
COK SAWITRI’S AGRAMMATICALITY, AFFECT
AND BALINESE FEMINIST PERFORMANCE
HYPATIA VOURLOUMIS
A large audience has gathered at the TIM theatre space, the centre for
arts in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia.1 TIM is the site for many artistic
endeavours, though these were stifled for much of the thirty-two years of
censorship of Suharto’s ‘New Order’ era. The year is 2004 and a renewed
sense of urgency has instigated diverse enactments including dance,
theatre, spoken poetry and performance art, drawing in urban crowds of
all ages and backgrounds. Six years after the fall of the New Order
regime we are witness to a solo performance by Cok Sawitri. A prolific
Balinese artist and activist, Cok Sawitri writes as an essayist, novelist,
poet, journalist; she performs, teaches and directs; and works as a civil
servant during the day to make ends meet.2
The stage is set: a single figure circled by a faint line of light
crouches before a mirror. ‘Who is outside of me? This is I: listen,’ the
figure speaks. ‘Speak to me,’ she says to her reflection. Her portrayal
faces the audience. ‘Speak to me,’ her image mouths at us.
In Aku Bukan Perempuan Lagi (I am Woman No More) Cok Sawitri’s
polyvocality unfolds through a self-interrogation that simultaneously
addresses her spectators (she speaks to the mirror with her back to us as
her image in the mirror speaks directly to us). This monologue/dialogue
culminates in the moment when Cok parts her legs and exposes her vulva
to the mirror, which reflects it back to the audience. The space between
her legs becomes flooded with a red light as she enacts a genesis.
Through this moment of invagination, pushed and withdrawn from

1
TIM (Taman Ismail Marzuki, Ismail Marzuki Park) is named after the Indonesian
composer Ismail Marzuki. Interestingly, in light of this study’s concerns, Ismail
Marzuki composed many popular songs that rendered the Indonesian woman as a
frail and domesticated national symbol.
2
Cok Sawitri is pronounced Chock Sa-wee-tree. Throughout this study Cok
Sawitri will be referred to by her preferred name, Cok.
108 ‘My Dog Girl’: Cok Sawitri’s Agrammaticality
within, she steps beyond the boundaries signified by the circle of light
that has vanished during her labour. What is outside of her is born from
and into a being that embodies both genders and none at the same time.
The ungendering or rather transgendering of her body is made manifest
through an effusion of gestures and sounds that alternate between
incoherent trills, grunts and harsh staccato voicings, tense fits and starts,
glides and high leaps. Through this torrent of sound and shape Cok
moves to the margin of the stage and depicts a redress. Methodically she
dons an elaborate headpiece and grasps at a bow and arrow before
turning to face her audience.
Figure 1: Cok Sawitri gives ‘birth’ to gendered difference. Performed at Taman

Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta, Indonesia 2004. (Photograph by Yulia Ekawati
Sudjatmiko.)
Emanating from this performance the trajectories that weave through this
chapter contend with the ambiguities and crossing of thresholds that the
term transnationalism evokes by focusing on the use of paralanguage in
Cok’s work.3 By way of engaging with discursive practices that attempt
to categorize Balinese performance and identity alongside theories on the
always political performativity of gender and language, I argue that
Cok’s radical expressions (bodily and o/aural) explicitly dismantle those

3
Paralanguage is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the non-lexical
component of communication by speech, for example, intonation, hesitation,
noises, gesture, and facial expression.’

Hypatia Vourloumis 109
forces that deny traditional figures such as the ‘dancing Balinese woman’
a postmodern being.
Importantly, gesturing to a transnational sphere can only happen
through a deep engagement with the local and national forces that inflect
and inform Cok’s work. I explore how the figure of the Balinese woman
speaks to the larger sphere of the nation through articulations surrounding
the relationship between women and the state. The legitimacy of
Indonesian culture is inextricably linked with a portrayal of women as
domesticated bodies of cultural expression. The force of the Indonesian
national language, a language that in its proliferation as an anti-colonial
political project aims to unify an archipelagic multitude within a single
state identity, inevitably ties definitions of womanhood to notions of
tradition and modernity. The nation as well as (and via) the gendered
body is constructed through a process of signification and it is women’s
labour that instigates the social and cultural processes that in turn
reproduce national space. This reproduction happens by way of the
regulatory norms of ‘naturalized’ gendered hierarchies where the
feminized body, as both traditional and modern, becomes the contested
site where notions of East and West collide. In her essay ‘Castration or
Decapitation?’ Hélène Cixous explains how these dualisms and
oppositionalities function:
[E]very theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole

conglomeration of symbolic systems—everything, that is, that’s spoken,
everything that’s organized as discourse, art, religion, the family, language,
everything that seizes us, everything that acts on us—it is all ordered
around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman
opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference posed by
cultural discourse as ‘natural,’ the difference between activity and passivity
(1990: 347).
According to Cixous it is this ‘natural’ coupling we must deconstruct in

order to transform culture. Furthermore, Cixous stresses that such a
political move cannot be accomplished without reflection on language:
‘…no political reflection can dispense with reflection on language, with
work on language’ (ibid: 348). This concern is shared by Cok when she
speaks to her reflection in the mirror that also reveals the audience sitting
behind her. What is reflected back to her is language in relation to the
presence of others. And when she speaks to the mirror with her back to
her audience Cok’s doubled language speaks directly to them.
The multiple refractions produced through this necessary staged
reflection on language reveal how, as discourse proliferates in the name

of modernity, women—historically understood as passive harbingers of

Indonesian tradition—are bound to the nation. In short, this reflexivity
points to the ramifications of Indonesian state narratives that decree that
overly assertive women represent modernity gone astray. In an essay
titled ‘On the Public Intimacy of the New Order’ anthropologist Suzanne
Brenner writes that ‘as active citizens of the state and major contributors
to the Indonesian economy, New Order women were encouraged to
participate in the government’s campaign to promote development, but
only in ways that would not interfere with the stability of the family or
their roles as the guardians of morality and tradition (1998a: 22-3).
According to Brenner, central to ‘traditional’ stability and order is the
notion of a nurturing woman who focuses on her spouse and family;
constrained in her personal behaviour, relationships and public activities
in order to maintain cultural and national continuity and coherence: ‘In
the ideologies of the New Order, the family/household is not considered
to be autonomous in any way; it is merely a fraction of a national whole,
a unit that has no independent meaning or existence apart from the
nation-state’ (1998b: 238).
In turn, Indonesian scholar Saraswati Sunindyo writes that Indonesia
as Ibu Pertiwi (Mother Earth/Motherland) was symbolized during the
anti-colonial struggle as a suffering feminine beauty. Her research shows
how women have played a major role in the military since the anti-
colonial revolution while at the same time being relegated to the
domestic sphere. Saraswati argues that this is made evident in the
institutionalization of women’s roles in the military whereby women are
subordinated as either mother or ‘little daughter’ figures. She points out
that ‘masculine imaginings of Indonesian nationalism’ construct a
heterosexual ‘national feminine’ which is gendered and domesticated
while at the same time paradoxically used as a sign that Indonesia has
achieved gender equality (1998: 1).
The fixing of the feminine body through state discourse leads to the
opening question Judith Butler poses in Bodies that Matter: ‘Is there a
way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the
performativity of gender?’(1993: 1). Butler is interested in the ways
identity constructions are ‘done’ and naturalized through a regulatory
performativity understood as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to
produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’(ibid: 3).
Although Butler relies on J. L. Austin’s notion of the performative
speech act as that which does something, in this case words produce
gender, (I say you are a girl therefore you are a girl), she is just as
invested in Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin in order to think how

identity is constructed through and by historically repetitive forces

temporally external to the subject.4 The materiality of sex, in other
words, the gendered and sexualized body, is delineated in discourse that
repeats itself.
I aim to approach this notion of 'the materiality of the body’ by
emphasizing sound and gesture as extensions of the body that are clearly
material manifestations. I want to argue that a ‘differential consciousness’
born out of constraint—a theatrical agency—can be glimpsed in the
paralinguistic, in the agrammatical, in the deconstruction and
reconfiguration of sonic and gestural articulations (see Sandoval 2000).
Importantly it is through the work of a Balinese woman that the question
Butler poses can be addressed. Cok’s performances put pressure on
Butler’s claim that ‘every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior
chain of acts which are implied in a present act and which perpetually
drain any ‘present’ act of its presentness’ (Butler 1993: 244). The work
studied here speaks to Butler’s grappling with how and if bodies
excluded from prescribing norms come to be bodies that do not matter.
From within this crux the figure of the native informant as explicated
by Gayatri Spivak rears her head. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Spivak writes: ‘Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution
and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a
pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling that is the displaced
figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and
modernization, culturalism and development’ (1999: 304). If we can
understand the category of ‘woman’ as fixed in language through

4
In How to Do Things with Words Austin claims that poetic and theatrical
language pales in comparison to speech acts uttered in the proper context and fails
to succeed performatively because it parasitically cites language used in ordinary
circumstances. This possibility of failure fuels Derrida’s critique of Austin in
‘Signature Event Context’ (1982). Here Derrida argues that all language is
citational, that the performative cannot function if it does not repeat itself. By
critiquing the valorization of the speech act over writing Derrida shows that
writing can only function by way of iterabilty, that signs are legible only because
they are repeatable. Writing as citation undermines the fixed context necessary for
Austin’s performative because it can move through space and time and still
function performatively as exemplified through Derrida’s use of the signature.
What is enabled through Derrida’s critique is the understanding that all
communication depends on repetition without boundaries, whether spoken or
written, and thus contexts are destabilized. Derrida questions the very meanings of
the word ‘communication’ as no context can entirely contain the polysemia that
constantly threaten its fixity as a sign. Communication instead becomes a series of
perpetual citations, quotations, re-insertions that are repeated in difference.

Butler’s work then Spivak shows how the category of the subaltern
native informant is fixed in a discursive oscillation between taxonomies
of femininity and postcoloniality. A reading of Indonesian state discourse
would support Spivak’s claim that the figure of the ‘third world’ woman
is displaced and ‘caught between culturalism and development.’ Arguably,
however, the functionality of postcolonial studies requires the hailing of
the postcolonial subject; inadvertently negating a prior agency and
subjectivity to the object of study outside of postcoloniality’s necessary
dualisms. The native informant points to a necessary interlocutor and for
Spivak this interlocutor is the West. Yet a native informant can determine
the ways in which she speaks, thus undermining the hegemonies born out
of the West’s encounter with its other.
I include Butler and Spivak’s postmodern and poststructuralist
concerns and methods in this study of a Balinese artist’s work to reveal
the ways certain moments in Balinese performance are already
negotiating with these predicaments. The performances studied are not
drained of all ‘presentness’; they do not ‘disappear.’ Indonesian women’s
repudiation of Western feminism through the valorization of local and
historical methodologies of redress exposes such problems and
discrepancies. Furthermore, much like Spivak’s own tracing of her move
from colonial discourse studies to transnational studies in A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason, I want to underline that these performances must be
understood as relationally transnational and not merely postcolonial or
Southeast Asian. As Ella Shohat writes: ‘genders, sexualities, races,
classes, nations, and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed
entities but rather as parts of a permeable interwoven relationality’ (1998:
1). Following Shohat, I situate ‘diverse gendered/sexed histories and
geographies in dialogical relation in terms of the tensions and
overlappings that take place ‘within’ and ‘between’ cultures, ethnicities,
nations’ (ibid). This methodological ‘overlapping’ also enables a re-
reading of the Indonesian state ideology ‘Unity in Diversity.’
The archipelago’s inherent heterogeneity is contained through the
force of institutionalized language where a necessarily distorted and
reinvented Javanese indigeneity is reified in order to act as the legible
signifier of Indonesia. However, it has historically been the island/province
of Bali standing in for ‘mother culture,’ a singular, recognizable island
site that functions internationally as a major part of Indonesian national
identity. The voices of particular Balinese women address the ways in
which such cultural stereotypes are institutionally produced and
perpetuated and how these trappings are rewoven into textual, verbal,
bodily resistances. These reconfigurations highlight the problems that

arise out of certain scholarships that, as Chandra Mohanty points out,

celebrate representations of third world women as ‘a singular, monolithic
subject’ (1991: 51). Adhering to Mohanty’s thesis, I refuse to treat
Indonesian women as a homogeneous group. Intrinsically a poly-cultural
nation—if one could speak of an Indonesian essence it is precisely that it
is made up of innate archipelagic, fragmentary difference—it is by way
of Cok’s work that the question of the regional can be tentatively
addressed. Differences in material experiences due to ethnicity, class,
religion, caste structures and urban and agricultural settings are just some
of the aspects that inform the variations present in Bali’s social fabric.
The archipelagic nature of the nation and the innumerable cultures and
consciousnesses it produces must be acknowledged and it is by way of
the close study of one of these cultural multiplicities, in its relationship to
local phenomena as well as the omnipresent workings of the state and
global forces, that an exploration of particular feminist experiences and
performances can begin to be understood as being simultaneously
Balinese, Indonesian and transnational.
Cultural constructions are ideological discourses that differentiate
genders and in resisting traditional notions of Indonesian femininity
interventions in Balinese performance and writing tear asunder the
accepted convention of female passivity. The performances studied show
how an intentional agrammaticality can speak back. However, following
Spivak (1988), I wish to avoid celebrating the notion of an integral free
subjectivity made manifest by way of paralinguistic endeavors. In other
words, I am not claiming that the moments of counter-articulation
discussed here point to moments of total liberation for the performer.
Rather, this project is opposed to essentialist notions of the marginalized
subject, as any attempt on my part to locate such subjective agency will,
according to Spivak, necessarily lean on presumptions gleaned from
Western discourses that fix the subject as an othered entity. Spivak is
critiquing philosophical discourses that seek to establish a universal idea
of the ethico-political subject as normative narrative. This does not mean
however that certain sights and sounds do not hint at, through momentary
intimations, consciously performed commitments to the questions
surrounding agency. The elusive subject here figures much in the same
way as the ephemerality of sound and gesture and thus by hearing and
seeing sound and gesture (without essentializing the source of these
emanations) my interest lies in how and what these performances do to
the ‘mechanics of constitution’ of the subject through language (ibid.
294). This is why thinking through the historical, social and political
specificities that inflect voice and movement are imperative to any such

analysis.
We must delve deeper into what it means to be a Balinese woman as
understood by these particular cultural workers as well as the discursive
drives that begin with anthropological practices promoted by colonialism
that are in turn adopted and elaborated upon by the Indonesian state. By
way of Cok Sawitri’s performances a Balinese voice makes itself present.
The performance piece Aku Bukan Perempuan Lagi (I am Woman No
More) dismantles hegemonic hierarchies through the depiction of a
woman who breaks away from corporeal paragons. Cok critiques the
ongoing depiction of Balinese women as delicate, silent dancers and
domestic servants. She uses the mirror, speaks and screams to it (‘mirror,
mirror on the wall’) and through it speaks to her audience by questioning
her representation reflected back to her. This intense ongoing inquiry
adheres to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s claim that the cultural performer must
‘break off the habit of the spectacle by asking questions aloud; by
addressing the reality of representations and entering explicitly into
dialogue with the viewer/reader’ (1991: 93). In her book Woman, Native,
Other Trinh T. Minh–ha’s project echoes both Cok and Cixous when she
speaks of thinking postcoloniality and feminism as ‘mirrors’ where
‘writing is meshing one’s writing with the machinery of endless
reflexivity’ (1989: 26). Within Cok’s performance her explicit mirrored
dialogue questions the figure of the ‘traditional’ Balinese performer. A
disidentification with the pervading and omnipresent cultural artifacts of
her island is sensed by way of her refusal to abandon the postures
inherent within Bali’s culture of dance. Cok’s rendering of these stances
and steppings are subverted through her negotiations with the category of
gender as seen in her embodiment of the ‘male’ as she engages with wide
swaggers, leaps and side steps that bring the knees up high whilst
thrusting out the groin. These movements are masculine as understood in
the context of Balinese dance. Women tend to be swathed in cloth that
limits the movement of the legs, brushing the ground as they glide over
its surface. Cok stamps her feet, toes arched and hurls her body through a
torrent of sound and shape. This performance is not a simple refusal of
one over the other but rather an amalgamation of two opposites that in
turn creates an alternative gendering. As a ‘woman, native, other’ Cok
echoes Trinh T. Minh-ha’s desire: ‘I’d rather make of writing a site
where opposites lose their essential differences and are restored to the
void by their own interchangeability’ (ibid: 48). Weighed down by a
filigreed crown Cok saunters across the stage and in wielding a bow and
arrow insinuates a potential penetrating femininity.
I am Woman No More demonstrates that any presumed category such

as that of ‘women’ and ‘Bali’ is fraught with problems. Cok’s work

comes to critique Spivak’s notion of the domesticized woman ‘violently
shuttling’ between culturalism and development by questioning the very
categories of culture and modernity. Her work denies those historical
fallacies and discursive practices that promote Bali as a ‘living museum,’
an exotic isle floating outside of history. In his book Bali: A Paradise
Created Adrian Vickers shows how ‘over three centuries the West has
constructed a complex and gorgeous image of the island that has come to
take over even Balinese thought,’ concretized through layer upon layer of
Western and Indonesian state discourses (1989: 2). What these imaginings
share is the image of Bali as a feminine dancing beauty historically
mythologized as ‘a solitary female figure, swaying towards us’ (ibid).
The feminized body as the carrier of Balinese tradition makes possible
Bali’s yielding to its tourism. But Bali is also part of the Indonesian
nation-state and plays a significant role in the identity politics of the
nation as it presents itself domestically as well as outwardly. Needless to
say, there is an inextricable entanglement between the histories and
vestiges of feudal and colonial violence, regional and quotidian
expression, and the centripetal institutionalization of the archipelago.
The island and people of Bali have long experienced complex
encounters with the fields of anthropology and ethnography and their
respective documentations of Balinese identity and performance. From
Margaret Mead’s diagnostic anthropology, to the Geertzs’ ethnography
that includes the hailing of Bali as a ‘theatre state,’ to Antonin Artaud’s
excitable speech surrounding the Balinese performance he witnessed in
1931 that informs his Theatre of Cruelty, Bali has long been viewed as a
land rich in traditional arts and cultural commodities. The fixing of a
Balinese religious and cultural canon, instigated by Dutch colonial
authorities and touring artists and anthropologists, stems out of certain
transnational forces that enable a desirous occidental gaze to hold onto a
Balinese ‘authenticity.’ As Chandra Mohanty writes: ‘Anthropology and
its nativization of third world women forms a significant context for
understanding the production of knowledge about third world women’
(1991: 32). The ‘nativization’ of easily accessed subaltern subjects tends
to freeze them as formed spectacles in space and time.
In 1936 Margaret Mead arrived in Bali with Gregory Bateson under
the protection of the Dutch administration then governing the island.
Entering the Balinese scene schooled in Boasian anthropology that
functioned on the principle that the Balinese people were ‘apolitical
primitives,’ Mead’s aim was to study the Balinese character through an
analysis of gesture. This research was conducted because it would prove

beneficial to American society: ‘In a good and very important sense the
ways of life of simpler and different peoples can serve as symbols for
nostalgia or the dreams of civilized spectators; they can mobilize
longings, sharpen social perceptions, crystallize attitudes toward change’
(Mead 1970: 331). Mead’s statement begs the question: At what cost to
the ‘simpler and different’ people of Bali? The benefits of Mead’s
research for a burgeoning feminist movement in the ‘civilized’ US were
made possible by the denying of those same freedoms within a Balinese
context.
Mead, in her frustration with her subjects, reverts to planning a
psychiatric project on the cultural aspects of schizophrenia that results in
her book co-written with Bateson The Balinese Character. According to
biographer Tessel Pollmann, in an important essay that exposes Mead’s
disturbing anthropological approach, the study implies that ‘Balinese
women are essentially frigid, as wives and as mothers. This, added to the
inspiring of fear in children, is the source of Balinese schizophrenia’
(1990: 30). Mead determines that Balinese women are innately theatrical
and that this theatricality proves that they are the source of a general
Balinese madness. Mead’s anthropology becomes diagnostic whereby
she locates psychosis in the figure of the female. Concluding that all
Balinese people are crazy Mead deems schizophrenia to be the Balinese
norm. Mead’s native informant is schizoid because she will not produce
a normative narrative.
The effects resulting from this, as Mohanty writes, ‘implicit
assumption of the “West” as the primary referent in theory and praxis,’
are still prevalent today (1991: 52). In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
Gayatri Spivak states that the ‘rejection of affect served and serves as the
energetic and successful defense of the civilizing mission’ (1999: 5).
Echoing Mohanty’s project, Spivak is working against the grain of
disciplines such as ethnography that deny the native informant
autobiography and produces the native informant as a ‘blank’ that
generates a ‘text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-
model discipline) could inscribe’ (ibid). It is this rejection and
incomprehension of affect by Margaret Mead that propels her to claim
that Balinese women are riddled with psychosis, inspire fear and are
therefore inhuman(e). Their innately theatrical bodies offer Mead the
canvases upon which she inscribes her still influential take on ‘the’
Balinese character.
In rare interviews with Mead’s subjects Pollmann quotes I Made
Kaler, one of Mead’s main native informants. I Made Kaler states: ‘To
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson I never talked about what was

invisible, but very much alive in Bali. Talking was too dangerous
regarding the Dutch. Margaret Mead herself never broached a political
discourse’ (1990: 20). Here we have a native informant that deliberately
disinforms and complicates Spivak’s concluding remarks in ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’5 The subaltern native informant here does speak by
choosing when not to. As a result of Mead’s denial that Balinese people
were political beings she was blind to Balinese nationalist stirrings
particularly amongst the female population. Pollmann quotes Ibu Yasmin
Oka, a teacher at the only high school in Bali before the war:
‘Balinization is to discourage us from learning things. It goes on till the
Japanese invasion. During those years of the Balinization-policy, we
always wonder: why has Bali to remain static? Why don’t we change
when times change?’ (ibid: 16). In turn, Balinese historian Dr. Ide Gde
Ing. Bagus recalls that his primary school was built to resemble a
Balinese temple: ‘Balinization is this: the Dutch wanted us to be a living
museum’ (ibid: 15). Through these interviews and other shared dialogues
with Balinese inhabitants that recollect and critique the Balinization-
policy Pollmann deadpans: ‘The Balinese need Western guides to teach
them how to remain authentic Balinese’ (ibid: 14).
It was through the nationalist struggle that men and women were able
to do away with certain aspects of Balinization, the burden of performing
‘Bali.’ Although nationalism was a gateway out of colonial strictures
Balinization was to rear its head once again under the patronage of the
Indonesian nation-state. The modernizing Indonesian nation, aware of
the West’s historical enamourment with Bali as a cultural artifact,
capitalized on foreign interest by promoting Balinese culture as the
primary site for touristic consumption. As Vickers explains, Sukarno, the
first president of a newly independent Indonesia, is said to have
‘Indonesianized’ Bali and ‘Balinized’ Indonesia (Vickers 1989: 175).
Indonesian ‘culture and beauty’ has been carried upon the feminized
body from colonial times till today as an object fixed through historical
narratives and rhetoric now centralized and broadcasted from the
auspices of an Indonesian state apparatus.6 Balinese women’s labour is

5
Gayatri Spivak writes: ‘The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global
laundry lists with “woman” as a pious item. Representation has not withered away.
The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not
disown in a flourish (1988: 308).
6
This problematic representing of Bali/Indonesia through the figure of sensual
femininity is replicated on the cover of Jim Schiller’s book Imagining Indonesia:
Cultural Politics and Political Culture where one is confronted by an image of a
woman’s profile lasciviously smoking a large cigarette.

the condition of possibility of the preservation and continuation of

Balinese culture and society through their contribution and management
of the local economy as well as the daily manual work and overseeing of
the practical, spiritual and aesthetic requirements of ritual and religion
within a domestic, communal, transnational sphere.
In her essay ‘Women vs Men: A Strife in the Field of the Performing
Arts,’ Cok Sawitri, as a native informant who inscribes her own cultural
identity by repudiating the West and the Indonesian state as perennial
centres, writes on a women’s arja performing troupe in Bali where
feminist interventions can be traced back to the 18th century and provide
sites of resistance that do not privilege Western models: ‘Unfortunately,
the Balinese intellectuals do not seem to realize that what has been
happening in the field of the performing arts may save them time and
efforts in their search for an appropriate women’s movement model’
(Sawitri 2001: 135). Her critique is directed at the tendency of
Indonesian academics and activists to separate the traditional from the
modern (following Western modular disciplines) and to deny the
workings of an ‘avant-garde’ within local histories and the traditional
arts.
Cok’s essay is addressed to both Balinese men and women in
reference to the public domain of Balinese performance. She reprimands
Balinese women dancers who have embraced their position as delicate
and exotic representations of Balinese culture. ‘Such is the poetics of
Balinese women. At night they dance, delicately and sensuously; in the
daytime they sweat to keep the “kitchen smoking”’ (ibid: 130). Cok
correctly points out that Balinese women have now become synonymous
with Balinese dancers and reminds the reader that this has not always
been the case. Through the recounting of a forgotten feminist Balinese
struggle Cok explicates that Balinese women were prohibited from
dancing in public and it was through the efforts of one female dance
troupe dating back to the beginning of the 20th century that things
changed. It is through this remembering and recording of a counter-
history that Cok critiques the female dancer of Bali today who is content
to function as mere decoration to the ‘tourist party’ thus negating her
position as artist and activist: ‘Women – bearers of the sensual image –
who are now trapped by praise, forgetting the original motive of their
forerunners struggle’ (ibid).
As an interesting counterpoint to Spivak’s writing in ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ on the practice of sati in India, the story Cok recounts
is that of a Balinese queen who refused in the 18th century to commit
suicide by jumping into the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. The

male arja dance-drama performance group at the cremation mocked the

queen by portraying a story of a disloyal wife. Arja has been historically
used as an instrument of political control because of the tight networking
between Balinese arts, religion and political authority. Cok explains that
arja as a performance safeguarded men’s domination over women and
was used to ‘expose any individual who was rebelling against the
existing value system’ (ibid: 132). Needless to say, most stories depicted
the subordination of women in order to preserve Balinese civilization.
Cok writes that the queen’s stance against the patriarchal structures of
Bali has largely been forgotten because the story has long since been
stifled and ignored and connects this event with another feminist
intervention. In the 1920’s, a group of women from the village of
Tapean, Kelungkung formed their own arja troupe. By way of utilizing
the religious doctrines of Bali these women argued that when the Hindu
deity Siwa (Shiva) danced to keep the universe running s/he took the
form of a hermaphrodite. There was public outburst but little formal
resistance to the female dancing troupe because the participants were
able to prove through the usage of this religious doctrine that divine
inspiration (taksu) has no gender. This transition is nothing new to those
cultures embedded in Hindu mythology. In an essay titled ‘Transatlantic
Inscriptions: Desire, Diaspora, and Cultural Citizenship,’ May Joseph
offers us a poem:
Ardhnareshwara, halfwomanman, poised in movement, between many

worlds
Ardhnareshwara, the foraging for an epistemological underground,
the simultaneity of different imaginative realms of the erotic,
Ardhnareshwara, the embodiment of the khush,
in transit through mutable desires
Ardhnareshwara, bisexual deity transsexual being
transnational spirit
Ardhnareshwara, halfwomanman
poised between strangleholds,
in transit, between here and there (1998: 364)
This halfwomanman ‘in transit between here and there’ can be seen in
Cok’s genesis of her own ungendering/transgendering in the performance
I am Woman No More. Joseph here echoes the figure of the woman that
shuttles back and forth offered by Spivak. For Joseph this halfwomanman
conduces a ‘foraging for an epistemological underground’ by embodying
difference simultaneously. Joseph alludes to the importance of
acknowledging the possibility for experimentations that take place in the
space one moves back and forth in because for her, ‘cultural citizenship

is a nomadic and performative realm of self-invention’ (ibid: 357). For

Spivak this shuttling produces the figure of the ‘third world’ woman as a
‘violent aporia between subject and object’ and she uses the practice of
sati in India to prove her point. However, Joseph claims through the
figure of a Hindu bisexual deity that ‘the corporeality of life shatters the
legal frames of identity and belonging’ through ‘new sounds, polylingual
sensations’ that are written and performed (ibid: 364). These polysensorial
experimentations are mirrored in Cok’s performance pieces and the
intervention by the all female arja dance troupe in the 1920s.
Cok’s remembering of the queen who refuses a fiery end and the self-
inventing female dancers critiques a specific history that foregrounds the
participation of Balinese women in dance—a phenomenon so commonplace
today that has lead to the notion that all Balinese women can dance. Cok
is at pains to remind women and men in Bali today of the efforts made by
this female dance group and argues that here is a model for feminist
interventions in the larger sphere of women’s struggles in Indonesia. She
chastises the tendency of feminist groups in the capital Jakarta to deny
activism in the ‘traditional’ realm deeming such disciplines as dated and
ineffective. Cok points out that this ‘victory’ led to the gradual
acceptance of women in other forms of the performing arts which in turn
led to the presence of women in other public domains such as schools
and various forms of employment. This struggle for the right to perform
in public is imbued with theoretical and political moves that act as
precursors for the right to citizenship and belonging.
In her anthology of poems Karena Aku Perempuan Bali (Because I
am a Balinese Woman) the Balinese poet and journalist Alit S. Rini also
expresses the complicated relationship women in Bali have to their role
as carriers of tradition. Alit wrestles with her contradictory feelings
regarding her social responsibilities by expressing love and pride towards
her culture as well as claiming to be imprisoned by it:
While we are so close to life

that always makes us weak
days flow with ritual breath
beginning and ending with offerings (2003: 43).
What is important to note here is that Alit, akin to Cok, chooses to

express her poetry in Indonesian. Although fluent in the Balinese
language of their home these activists, by using the Indonesian national
language, point to how they feel both Balinese and Indonesian at the
same time. The desire for their works to be understood throughout the
archipelago reveals a commitment to a language that induces commonality

and legibility throughout a vast space made up of different cultures and

ethnicities. Yet at the same time a vexation with this very same language
is made apparent through their respective critiques of the linguistic
protocols of the nation-state. This is made evident in another common
concern these two Balinese cultural workers share - their negotiation
with the figure of Megawati, the first female president of the nation who
held office from 2001 to 2004. In a poem entitled ‘Woman that fans hot
air’ Alit writes:
the woman is still

amidst the blowing wind
bringing the wounded
screaming to change the face of the sky
at first with so many flags
with colours so deep and bright (2003: 43)
Here Alit is expressing her disappointment with the lack of changes

under Megawati’s rule. At first Megawati, surrounded by flags and
promise, seemed to represent positive and progressive changes within
Indonesia’s political landscape. Yet Megawati stood still. To have a
woman lead the largest secular Islamic nation is profoundly symbolic but
Megawati’s ineffectiveness propelled Cok and Alit respectively to
address her lacks. Both Cok and Alit critique Megawati’s compliance
with the image of herself as mother figure as well as daughter of
Sukarno.
In her 2004 performance piece Anjing Perempuanku, (My Dog Girl),
Cok sounds screams that gesture at Indonesian state ideology and
language through the figure of Megawati. For the first showing of this
performance to the public Cok sets her stage in a small Balinese rural
village under an open sky. The audience members make up a tiny yet
vociferous locality in the vast Indonesian archipelago. Local government
officials have been invited as well as people of all ages from the
surrounding area.
My Dog Girl begins with the sound of a steady drum beat and a
sudden single screaming word. The jolting word that infiltrates and
enlarges the space emanating from an unseen mouth is a shock not only
because it is uncomfortably shrill but also for its unexpected and abrupt
presence. The word is anjing, meaning in English: dog. And to scream
this word in Indonesian is to act out an extreme insult. Through this
piercing sound the contexts and conventions of Balinese theatrical
performance are instantly reconfigured and questioned.
A lone figure emerges and shuffles to the margin of the stage

provocatively weaving her body through the punctuations of the screams.

The body and head of the undulating figure are completely swathed in
white cloth echoing the dress of pious Muslim women as well as the
dress of nurses and nuns. The simultaneously covert and overt hyper-
sexualized motions of the body jars with the blank surface of the costume
as the audience inscribes upon it its own understanding of how a woman
dressed this way should normally perform. Here we have a material
manifestation of that ‘blank’ that Spivak refers to and it is by way of the
affect motioning beneath the blank that this figure resists and
complicates its role as textual, cultural and gendered object. This figure
incessantly dances, repeating over and over again the same ebbs and
flows. As the performance unravels the dancer morphs into an enduring
figure, one that never ceases in its repeated gestures, one that never tires,
never gives up on itself.
Meanwhile, a woman appears and stands at the front of the stage
ready to directly address the spectators. She is holding reams of paper in
her hands, a political speech written for the benefit of the people. She
seems nervous and unsure of herself. The woman begins a monotonous
unemotional delivery (without any trace of affect) and is promptly
interrupted by Cok who approaches her and attempts to coach her in how
to be more expressive. The political speaker seems to accept and listen to
this meddling, takes a deep breath and begins to speak again. But nothing
has changed in her voicing, it is exactly the same as before so she is
again instructed by her voice coach to stop and try again. Is it from a
refusal on her part or an inability? As this scene is repeated over and over
again it becomes apparent that the woman politician is a portrayal of
none other than the president of the country, Megawati, and her speech
the actual one she gave at her inauguration. Meanwhile as the ‘president’
repeatedly attempts (or refuses) to produce some emotion the searing
scream of anjing continuously shatters and enlarges the space. As the
word anjing contrapuntally weaves in and out of the atonal monologue it
reveals an affect that carries more weight than the countless number of
words in the speech it is juxtaposed against. One word has more power
than a thousand depending on the way it is performed. The one word can
occupy a longer period of space and time if it is expressed in writing and
on the stage as it is used as an everyday insult:
Anjiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing
The coherency of the iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii sound in this context exposes the

incoherencies of the correct political writing. This performance should

not be understood as a mere ridiculing of political power and its
accompanying language but more as an attempt to critique the separation
between what is deemed as correct Indonesian and everyday talk. The
material effects that correct language has historically produced in the
Indonesian political landscape is alluded to through the shadow of a
skeleton hanging behind the platform. Which is more violent? The
piercing scream of an insult or the unaffected voice that sends bodies to
torturously flail whilst all the while the marginal body dances its eternal
being?
Figure 2: Cok Sawitri (on the right) coaches the figure of ‘Megawati’ on how to
produce feeling in her political speech making. Karangasem, Bali, 2004.
(Photograph by Yulia Ekawati Sudjatmiko.)
With My Dog Girl Cok Sawitri has created a radical commentary on the
ramifications of the speech act made in the name of political power by
way of a humorous and scathing portrayal of the clash between empty
political slogans and quotidian expression. This portrayal of Megawati’s
utterances directly refers to the relationship Indonesian women have to
nation building. Julia Suryakusuma, in her essay ‘The State and
Sexuality in New Order Indonesia,’ discusses the expected role of
women in the indoctrination program of the Suharto government that is
still in effect today. All civil servants, indoctrinated in the Pancasila
decree, were required to become members of KORPRI (Korps Pegawai

Republik Indonesia, Civil Service Corps of The Republic of Indonesia)

and a female subsidiary of KORPRI, Dharma Wanita was formed to
support their spouses in the upholding of the nation-state.7 ‘State Ibuism’
is the ideology of Dharma Wanita and ‘defines women as appendages of
their husbands and casts female dependency as ideal’ (Suryakusuma
1996: 98). ‘State Ibuism’ (State Motherism), a term Suryakusuma has
coined (in Indonesian Ibu means mother), refers to ‘the domestication of
Indonesian women as dependent wives who exist for their husbands,
their families, and the state’ (ibid). Throughout the Indonesian
archipelago every village head’s office prominently flaunts a poster
listing the Panca Dharma Wanita (Five Responsibilities of Women): A
wife is to (1) support her husband’s career and duties; (2) provide
offspring; (3) care for and rear the children; (4) be a good housekeeper;
and (5) be a guardian of the community (Sunindyo 1996: 125). As
Suryakusuma writes the main purpose of Dharma Wanita is ‘to organize
and control the activities of civil servants’ wives and ultimately those of
civil servants, whose careers are affected by the performance of their
wives in Dharma Wanita’ (1996: 99). Megawati as the ultimate ‘State
Ibu’ is married to the nation and the portrayal of her language reflects
this for as Trinh T. Minh-ha argues in Woman, Native, Other: ‘Nothing
could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for
example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of
revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-
convention-language of ‘clarity’’ (1989: 16). In My Dog Girl the
intertwining of the incessantly repeated scream anjing as well as the
marginal dancer’s tireless cyclical gestures that thread through
Megawati’s normative rehashing of ‘well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-
language of clarity’ bring us to the vital realm that is the relationship
between iterability and theatricality.
In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler writes, ‘performativity must be
understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the

7
The self proclaimed ‘tongue of the people,’ Sukarno announced the five
principles of Pancasila, the state ideology, in his speech ‘The Birth of Pancasila’
presented to the Independence Preparotary Committee in 1945. In the order given
in his speech the principles are nationalism, internationalism (or humanitarianism),
democracy (or consent), social prosperity, and belief in God. Pancasila (Five
Rules), expressed and forged through Indonesian, functions as a totalizing
ideology; one that seeks to promote ‘Unity in Diversity.’ As with the choice of a
variety of Malay for the structuring of the national language it is sophisticated in
its cultural neutral identity as it intends to define the basic values of an
encompassing ‘Indonesian’ political culture.

reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects

that it names.’ (1993: 2). Indebted to Derrida’s theory of iterability Butler
claims that even the ‘I’ of the subject is constructed and cannot exist
outside of a system of language and power that imprisons it: ‘The “I” is
thus a citation of the place of the ‘I’ in speech: it is the historically
revisable possibility of a name that precedes and exceeds me, but without
which I cannot speak’ (ibid: 226). However, I would argue that Derrida
complicates this further by using the function of the signature as an
example of an inscripted ‘I’ that does something in the present. The
performative accomplishes something by writing itself. Thus, a recording
can act performatively in the here and now. This iterability also connotes
theatricality because theatricality emphasizes the mobile and multiple
ways in which the performative statement is expressed and received in
specific and always singular contexts. Theatrical agency is where the
performance of presence can happen because theatricality cites difference.8
Thus, when Cok engages with an exaggerated imitation of both
masculine and feminine gestures in I am Woman No More and has the
‘president’ repeat her political speechmaking again and again in My Dog
Girl she performs how ‘this kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to
the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention
that it also reverses’ (1993: 45). If both the categories of nation and
gender are naturalized through grammatical norms then Cok’s
performances reveal ways in which an agrammatical theatricality comes
to speak back. Cok’s work critiques Butler’s notion of presence as
‘drained of all presentness’ by way of emphasizing performance in
excess of the performative, and in so doing, highlights the complicated
relationship between the materiality of the body, affect and language.
In Parables of the Virtual Brian Massumi critiques the bracketing of
the body and affect in cultural theory. Massumi is interested in the
moving body that feels - moving feelings and feeling movement - and
argues that the link between sensation, movement and affect provides an
important conceptual interstice for the theorizing of embodied practices.
In a similar vein to Butler, Massumi questions how it is that ‘the body
can perform itself out of a definitional framework that is not only
responsible for its very ‘construction’ but seems to prescript every
possible signifying and countersignifying move as a selection from a
repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined

8
Butler herself admits that if sex is a regulatory ideal – an ideal construct forcibly
materialized through time - then the fact that reiteration is necessary proves the
instabilities and possibilities of the rematerialization of that regulatory law (1993:
2).

terms?’ (Massumi 2002: 3). Massumi argues that a way to begin

answering this question is through an understanding of how ‘positionality
is an emerging quality of movement’ (ibid: 8). He explains that the
difference between stasis and movement is not a binarism because
‘emerging’ dynamically unites in its passage. The passage is in itself a
transition and variation that is always related to a positionality that is in
itself an indeterminate process. Furthermore, Massumi claims that this
movement is both immanent and social and that immanence must be
sensed as an unfolding trajectory.
Working against the fixing of the body in ‘cultural freeze-frame’
Massumi breaks down the oppositions inherent to theories of construction
by suggesting that when the body moves it transforms itself and does not
simply leap from one definition to the next. Massumi explains that affect
is a realm of intensity that becomes the point of emergence of
contradictions where ‘[t]he charge of indeterminancy carried by a body is
inseparable from it’ (ibid: 5). Therefore, when Cok questions her own
and her spectators’ reflection in the mirror to then regenerate an
indeterminate sounding and moving body and when the swathed
undulating woman incessantly gestures against the background of coded
political speech punctured by shrieks; these moving moments and
feelings reflect Massumi’s notion that affect is an ‘expression-event’ and
is the ‘system of the inexplicable: emergence, into and against
regeneration (the reproduction of structure)’ (ibid: 27). Affect then
becomes an emergence of possibility, an event, a moving fact that is
‘about a process before signification and coding’ (ibid: 7).
This understanding of affect as an immanent process that is an event
prior to signification leads me to look at the work of Antonin Aratud as
read by Jacques Derrida. Deconstructing Butler with the help of Artaud’s
lucid writings I bring his and Cok’s work together in a tentative
conversation that proves productive because of their common emphasis
on ‘incoherency’ as a site for linguistic and thus political agency.
However, it is crucial to point out why this dialogue is a strained one.
Writing in the 1930’s Artaud was invested in a viewing of the Balinese
dancer as a gestural creature, a being with ‘natural reflexes’ rather than
‘conventions like language’ and thus echoed the way the ‘savage’ was
presented through the anthropological discourses of the time (see Rony
1996: 3). Albeit, the negotiation with speech in relation to convention
and context that is performed theatrically is one that Cok and Artaud
share by way of their seizing of the questions surrounding the
relationship between language, sonority and bearing.
Deeply affected by the sight and sounds of Balinese theatre Artaud

believed that whole stories and worlds could be conveyed through other
modes beyond those of conventional language. Artaud sought to discover
new signs and symbols, inspired from hearing, viewing and feeling
sound and gesture. Thus, in ‘The Theatre and its Double’ Artaud
expressed his fascination with the Balinese theatre group he witnessed in
Paris through the actor’s/dancer’s use of ‘precisely that sort of language
foreign to every spoken tongue, a language in which an overwhelming
stage experience seems to be communicated…[]’(1958: 57).
Artaud, in emphasizing sounds/gestures over correct speech acts
struggles with his perceived imprisonment of the subject through
institutionalized discursive tools. His thinking reveals the political
implications of affect and theatricality as a way of being that dislocates
the relationship between coherent language, manifested in speech and
writing, and the ways societal beings move and negotiate with one
another. For Artaud the stage is the last place, the only place, to
dismantle the frameworks that capture the body that signifies and is
signified. When Cok speaks to her reflection in the mirror in the scene
that begins this chapter and asks: ‘Who is speaking?’ while at the same
time she says this is ‘I’ she echoes Derrida’s writing on Artaud in ‘La
Parole Soufflée’: ‘Consciousness of speech, that is to say, consciousness
in general is not knowing who speaks at the moment when, and in the
place where, I proffer my speech’ (1978a: 176). This refusal of
signification incites Derrida to claim that ‘Artaud knew that all speech
fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception,
offering itself as spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech.
Becomes a signification which I do not possess because it is a
signification’ (ibid: 175). Here we can see how Butler’s ‘I’ that signifies
prior to the subject is indebted to Derrida’s theorizing and how
Massumi’s notion of an a priori resistance tremoring in affect as a
process before signification is implicit in both Cok’s and Artaud’s
articulations. Cok’s performance piece I am Woman No More offers a
way out of the fixity of the circumscribed self as she labours to perform a
genesis that destabilizes and transforms her self-reflecting ‘I.’
In turn My Dog Girl’s vacuous reading and incessant repetition of
conventional political speechmaking is also echoed in Artaud’s rejection
of the text in the theatre:
Occidental theatre recognizes as language, assigns the faculties and powers

of a language, permits to be called a language (with that particular
intellectual dignity generally ascribed to this word) only articulated
language, grammatically articulated language, i.e., the language of speech,
and of written speech, speech which pronounced or unpronounced, has no

greater value than if it is written. In the theatre as we conceive it, the text is
everything (1958: 117).
As seen with the Dharma Wanita posters that proliferate throughout the
archipelago the text is the platform for the construction of the female
body within the Indonesian nation. These dictations are replicated
through the ultimate figure of state authority in My Dog Girl where the
actor depicting Megawati clutches onto her sheets of paper and
conventionally drones on. Cok’s wails, cackles and the searing scream of
anjing illuminate the problematic valorizing of grammatically coherent
written speech over affective sounds. Derrida points out that Artaud
refuses both signification and representation and in light of this ‘end of
diction’ and dictation Derrida asks: ‘How will speech and writing
function then? They will once more become gestures; and the logical and
discursive intentions which speech ordinarily uses in order to ensure its
rational transparency, and in order to purloin its body in the direction of
meaning, will be reduced or subordinated’ (1978b: 240). This notion of
speech and text as gestures speak to Massumi’s concept of affect as
processual movement that while exposing oppositional social and
political constructs dynamically and indeterminately bridges them.
Echoing this move, My Dog Girl’s blank body that inscribes itself as it
sways to screaming insults and diction embodies a ‘corporeality of life’
that shatters, in its moving affect, ‘the logical and discursive intentions
which speech ordinarily uses’ (ibid). Cok’s releasing of sound and
gesture highlights her feelings and as she leaps between meanings she
transforms them and herself.
Through her performances and writings Cok Sawitri offers us a
resistant figure of native informancy, a ‘transnational spirit’ that answers
back to Butler’s performatively configured subject drained of presence
by way of a releasing of the text and delving into the realm of the
multiple ‘Is,’ incoherencies and agrammaticalities. If, as we have seen
with the state ideologies of ‘State Ibuism’ and ‘Balinization’ the
Indonesian female body as a signifier must be fixed through indoctrination
and circumscription to accumulative and repeating constructs, Cok’s
innovative theatricality begs the question: Does paralanguage cite?
The mobile sounds and stances effusing from these works agitate
those ‘naturalized’ hierarchies perpetuated through language whilst
gesturing toward the protocols of the Indonesian nation-state and beyond.
Ella Shohat writes that transnational feminism is concerned less ‘with
identities as something someone has than in identification as something
one does’ (1998: 51). Cok engages with the same concerns and crucially,
through certain doings, enacts moments where glimmers of recourse

shine through. Movement is the condition of possibility of a

transnationality as well as a regeneration of textual, verbal, bodily
resistances. Cok does not shuttle back and forth between dichotomous
definitions only to disappear in her displacement. As she leaps from one
meaning to another Cok experimentally attempts to transform herself and
the shores she bridges. Cok Sawitri’s challenging work allows her as
well as her viewers to feel the ‘expression-event’ that enables, however
momentarily, to sense what Artaud asks of us: ‘Let words be heard in
their sonority rather than be exclusively taken for what they mean
grammatically, let them be perceived as movements’ (1958: 119).
Anjiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!
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‘I AM CULTURES’:
EA SOLA’S TRANSNATIONAL,
TRANSCULTURAL ARTS AND ANSWERABILITY
RIVKA SYD EISNER
Dancing Memory
Growing up in war-torn southern Vietnam, one of Ea Sola’s most lasting
childhood memories is of seeing women on a televised newscast searching
through a mass grave for the remains of disappeared family members. She
recalls watching the women as they held the bones in their hands:
And I remember oldest mother,

Oldest woman,
Oldest wife,
Who came and cry.
Cry on the bone.
You know,
And they take the bones on their hand
And they cry.
And they try to find which bones.
They think,
‘This bone is mine,
Is my son or my husband.’
This image I cannot forget
[. . .]1
Wartime images like these are seared into Ea Sola’s memory and
indelibly inscribed upon her body. ‘The body doesn’t forget,’ she says,
and so it is through the body, her own and others,’ that she must answer to
the world’s past, present and continuing legacies of violence. As someone

1
The Story with Dick Gordon, ‘Dancing with Memory,’ The Story on American
Public Media,
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_278_Dancing_With_Memory.mp3/view,
accessed 2009.
134 Ea Sola’s Transnational, Transcultural Arts and Answerability
who ‘crossed war’ and traversed countries and continents in order to

survive, as a person of multiple ethnicities, Ea Sola’s movement and
memory-based arts practice is transnational and transcultural in its
founding impulse, aesthetic creation and in its socially-oriented inquiries
into how we might learn to live together with greater respect and equity.2
This chapter explores Vietnamese-French choreographer Ea Sola’s
transnational, transcultural performance praxis through her life history,
self-reflection and staged works.3 Centrally, I am interested in the ways in
which Ea Sola engages a politics of answerability through her arts
practice. Ea Sola’s choreographic work can be understood as a form of
‘social practice,’ one that extends within and across cultural and national
borders (Jackson 2008: 136). Her social practice, or politics of performance,
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. The performance politics she enacts is memory-based: her
personal history and past experiences inspire and compel both the ethical
and aesthetic dimensions of her choreographic work.
Life and Art

Ea Sola’s arts praxis shares social commitments similar to those
articulated by Russian literary and cultural theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin.
Considering the politics of his own artistic practice, and the problematic
gap he observed between ‘art’ and ‘life,’ Bakhtin writes that in order for
both to be meaningful, art and life must become mutually answerable to
one another. Art becomes ‘too self-confident,’ ‘high-flown,’ and
narcissistic without a sense of social connection and responsibility
(Bakhtin 1990: 1). Life, on the other hand, is vacant, unimaginative and
lacking in thoughtful, creative possibility without art. For Bakhtin, art and
life must be enjoined through a politics of answerability, a personal/social
accountability and responsibility, for both to be meaningful beyond the

2
This chapter engages transnational as well as transcultural dimensions of Ea
Sola’s performances and performance politics. Many aspects of Ea Sola’s
performances and personal history are not exclusively bound or determined by
categories of the nation and must also be addressed through questions of culture.
3
Special thanks to the Department of English Language and Literature and the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the National University of Singapore, the
Department of History and Area Studies at Aarhus University, and the Danish
Council for Independent Research|Humanities (FKK) for supporting this research.
Great thanks also to Company Ea Sola for their time, energy, resources and
generosity.

Rivka Syd Eisner 135

self and the self-serving. Art must answer to life and life to art, he writes,
‘so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain
ineffectual in my life’ (ibid). In his view, by virtue of being born into a
shared world, we are always already deeply enmeshed within historical,
political and social fabrics wherein it is our responsibility to become
accountable to others. In the pursuit of living more justly with others,
Bakhtin seeks to ‘become answerable through and through’ by way of his
arts practice (ibid: 2). Becoming answerable is a continual process. It can
never be finally achieved, but rather is best understood and enacted as a
lifelong engagement.
For Ea Sola, life and art are inseparably joined. She believes art has a
responsibility to address unjust social conditions, particularly issues of
violence and inequity. Ea Sola’s sense of enduring social commitment
stems from her own complex cultural and national history, from her
personal memories of experiencing the brutality and destruction of war.
The war in Vietnam was transnational and cross-cultural in its geopolitical
causalities, aspirations and destruction. Due to Vietnam’s history of
colonialism, war and resulting global diaspora, some scholars contend that
its cultures, histories and politics are therefore best addressed through
‘transcultural, transnational, and translinguistic dialogues’ (Wilson 2001: 1).
As a bearer of this history, Ea Sola’s politics of performance carries an
additional mandate to that of Bakhtin: in the pursuit of becoming
answerable to others, Ea Sola is compelled to create performances that
engage with the transnational dimensions of social problems, address
international audiences, and speak within as well as across cultures. Her
history ‘make[s] it impossible for her to separate art from society from
politics.’4 Ea Sola creates performances that are transnational and
transcultural in their political scope and social intention. Memories she
‘cannot forget,’ such as the image of mothers searching for the bones of
their loved ones, continue to haunt her thoughts, live in her body and
compel her work. Through her arts practice, she seeks to make meaningful
political-artistic interventions within an increasingly interconnected,
interdependent world.
With the aim of exploring the transnational, transcultural dynamics of
Ea Sola’s politics of performance and social practice, I divide this chapter
into three parts. Part one discusses Ea Sola’s personal history of diasporic,
mixed cultural identity and the emergence of her social engagement with
and through performance. Part two addresses trans/national social

4
Thomas Hahn, ‘Ea Sola- Harmony Between Body, Soul and Expression,’ Ea Sola
The White Body, http://www.grand-theatre.nl/producties/prod_thewhitebody.html,
last accessed 2009.

commitments in Ea Sola’s performance process, specifically focusing on

her international tours, rehearsals, and her choice to live and produce her
work in Vietnam with Vietnamese performers. Part three briefly describes
and reflects on two of Ea Sola’s recent works, Air Lines (2008) and The
White Body (2009), looking at the shift in the scope of her choreographic
subject matter from a specific focus on Vietnam to performances that
address globally-pervasive social problems and their transnational
implications. All three sections illuminate ways in which Ea Sola engages
a transnational, transcultural politics of performance as a way of becoming
answerable to others.
Part I: History, Memory and the Body

A. Street protest: Emergence of a performance politics
I spoke with Ea Sola about her personal history, performances and the
social and aesthetic aspects of her work on two separate occasions. The
first conversation was in July 2006, before the Vietnamese premiere of
Drought and Rain Volume II (2005) in Hue. The second took place at her
home in Ho Chi Minh City, in February 2009, as she rehearsed for The
White Body. During the latter conversation, we sat and talked in her living
room. An electric fan whirred in the background, circulating a warm
breeze around the room, as the voices of children playing in the alleyway
filtered through the open windows. Ea Sola sat curled up in a cushioned
chair, dressed all in black, her long, dark hair falling around her shoulders.
When I asked how her choreographic career began, Ea Sola recounted her
experience of fleeing Vietnam and then proceeded to tell the story of her
first street performance in Paris, the unexpected start of her engagement
with embodied performance and politics.
As a teenager, Ea Sola became a refugee of the Vietnamese-American
War. In the early 1970s, she was forced to flee Saigon for Paris with her
French-born mother, while her father, a Vietnamese who joined the
communist front, stayed in southern Vietnam. She did not want to leave,
even though life in wartime Vietnam was often desperate and dangerous.
She recalls hiding in shelters as bombs fell and shook the earth. She
remembers having nothing to eat during the Tet Lunar New Year holiday
and Communist ‘general uprising’ of 1968. Several years after leaving
Vietnam, she finally arrived in France with her family.
Although it seemed like a place of peace and prosperity in contrast to
Vietnam, France offered Ea Sola little consolation. Having grown up in
the countryside forests of the Mekong Delta region in southern Vietnam,


she had only known a life riven by war. Suddenly in France, everything
familiar, everything she loved, felt far away. France had been a
dominating colonial power in Vietnam for nearly a century, it waged and
lost the First Indochina War from 1945 to 1954, and set the stage for the
United States’ brutal, decades-long military entanglement in her country.
But somehow life in Paris seemed virtually untouched by these histories.
Living safely in France, Ea Sola could not stop thinking about the
continuing struggles faced by people in Vietnam. Unfamiliar with the
culture in which she suddenly found herself; troubled by the decadence of
Parisian life; disturbed by society’s lack of knowledge, sense of
connection, and concern regarding the plight of people in Vietnam; and
deeply angered at the ‘faceless’ governmental powers that were inflicting
so much damage, Ea Sola says she ‘rejected everything’ as a conscious act
of defiance.
One day, she went out into the crowded streets of Paris and stood
motionless in the middle of the sidewalk. She stood there for hours. She
returned to that same place day after day. Though she did not know it at
the time, years later she would remember this silent, impromptu street
protest as a critical beginning of her lifelong engagement with
performance. Remembering it, Ea Sola says:
Years, years, ago

In fact I begin the work already,
But I never think,
That I do a work.
And I, ah,
Didn’t think that I wanted to dance.
It was a protest.
Yes.
And from that protest,
I continue,
To protest.
[. . . ]
So there is no idea about dance,

In that,
At that time.
So, I just stand up and say no.
[. . .]
No, no to these people.

And I thought,
That if everyone stop
Like I am stopping,

There is no war possible.
Connecting the story of her first street protest to her memory of escaping
Vietnam, Ea Sola’s narrative underscores how this performance emerged
from a place of deep personal frustration, pain, anger and urgent need to
take action. ‘So, I just stand up and say no.’ She performed an intervention
of silence and stillness amidst a fast-paced city that could ignore the
strange behaviour of a young girl in the street or the plight of a distant
people. However, as she stood in the street, day after day, passersby began
to take notice. They paused, in the hustle-bustle of daily life, to ask why
Ea Sola was in protest. Recalling this experience, Ea Sola says that
perhaps more than anything, this street performance taught her about the
power of the body-in-action, of active stillness, as a means of engaging in
critical questioning, dialogue and perhaps even social change.
The story of Ea Sola’s first street protest recounts her discovery of the
power of embodied performance as a means of social intervention. While
grounded in and informed by her history, this initial protest and Ea Sola’s
later performances are not about reliving personal suffering or wallowing
in individual pain. Her works are not trapped in a cyclical, individually-
oriented Freudian melancholia. They are social in their founding impulse
and aspirations. As exemplified in this first performance, Ea Sola’s
difficult history and the continuing emotional pain she felt from years of
living in a war zone, becomes ‘not simply a cause for action’ but rather ‘a
kind of action’ (Asad 2003: 69). Ea Sola’s street protest can be seen as an
active, agentive practice of performing pain from private, interiorized,
personal reflection in a shared space of social discourse. Her first
performance was a social intervention, an embodied enactment of her
transnational, transculturally oriented politics, and her later performances
have followed in this tradition. Emphasizing the social imperatives
discovered and initiated in the street protest and the powerful way these
commitments continue to drive and permeate her work today, Ea Sola
says, as if confirming it also to herself, ‘[i]t was a protest. Yes. And from
that protest, I continue to protest.’ As I listen to Ea Sola describe her
performances, I begin thinking of her work less as dance, in any traditional
sense, and more as a deeply embodied, poetic form of cross-cultural and
transnational social address.
B. Engaging ethics in/through the social body

As our conversation continues, Ea Sola explains that for her, making
performance is ‘a sense, an ethic, and a way to live.’ Leaning forward and


pointing a long, graceful finger in my direction, she unapologetically
states, ‘I am not the person who can make soft things, you know,
[performances] that make you feel good.’ Not surprisingly, her commitment
to addressing social issues through her performances does not please all
critics or audiences.5 People often go to the theatre to be entertained, to see
something beautiful and exciting that helps them forget the world’s
problems rather than remember and engage with them. Instead of seeking
to entertain audiences, she hopes to unsettle people’s complacency and
inspire them to feel deeply and think critically about shared social
concerns. Over the years, her work has engaged the trans/national legacies
of war and violence, gender and ethnic discrimination and marginality,
tyrannical governments, consumer capitalism, the dangers of social
ambivalence and global economic disparity, among other important issues.
Her work invites performers and audiences to reckon with problems of
social injustice and to imagine alternative possibilities for living more
equitably in relation to others, be they in a distant land or on the same,
shared street.
Answerability and responsibility must be practiced, embodied and
lived, in order to have a material effect. Ea Sola’s performances enact J. K.
Gibson-Graham’s assertion that ‘[e]thics involves the embodied practices
that bring principles into action’ (2006: xxviii). Ea Sola practices the
cultivation of ethical thought and action through the body. The individual
body, for Ea Sola, is also always a social body. In her first street
performance, Ea Sola’s culturally marked, diasporic body performed as a
synecdoche, standing in and standing in protest for the millions of others
who could not be physically present. For Ea Sola, the body is singular and
plural, self and social, thinking and feeling, overfull with memory,
historical, politically positioned, and ethically entwined with others. When
we spoke in Hue in July 2006, Ea Sola articulated the connection between
individual and collective memory, the body and the social in this way:
The memory is always,

In the body,
Of the body,
And the memory of the body is,
At the same time
Individually driven,
And also collective.
[. . . ]

5
See Shannon Jackson’s more detailed discussion of the critiques and praises of
performance as ‘social practice’ (2008: 113-18).

The memory connects to

An ethic.
Memory, ethics and the body are inseparable in life and in her performance
praxis. Her performances are enactments of the subjunctive ‘what if’ of
imagined individual and social possibility. Ea Sola stopped in the middle of
the Parisian sidewalk because ‘if everyone stop like I am stopping, there is
no war possible.’ Through this seemingly simple act, she performed
recognition of, and hope in, the necessary covalence between individual
and collective action. Today, Ea Sola’s performances continue to compel
audiences to reckon with global injustice and inequity. Her performances
show us the situated and transnational dimensions of shared problems
while inviting us to re-envisage the world in the ‘subjunctive register,’
opening rather than closing the door of possibility so that we might begin
imagining and enacting new forms of what the world ‘could be’ and
become (Pollock 2008: 122).
C. ‘The country is in the body’: return to Vietnam

Throughout her career, Ea Sola has worked with prominent figures in the
fields of theatre and dance. Most notably she has worked with Butoh
master Min Tanaka, the writer, artist and director Roland Topor, as well as
with students of the renowned theatre-maker Jerzy Grotowski.6 The
influence of these artists can be felt in Ea Sola’s choreography, her choice
of subject matter and political positionality, and in her approach to
rehearsal and performance creation. However, Ea Sola ‘claims her
independence from any kind of “school” in dance’ and never received
formal training in any one specific tradition.7 During her twenties, Ea Sola
began developing her eclectic style and approach to choreographic work
through experimenting with street performance and happenings, studying
various theatre methods, and collaborating with dance and performance
groups across Europe. From 1980 to 1990, she had her own company
dedicated to ‘explor[ing] the memory of the body’ where she created a

6
Min Tanaka once composed a solo work for Ea Sola and she also collaborated
with him on his performance, The Rite of Spring. With Roland Topor, Ea Sola
worked as dancer-choreographer in his King Ubu.
7
Thomas Hahn, ‘Ea Sola- Harmony Between Body, Soul and Expression,’ Ea Sola
The White Body, http://www.grand-theatre.nl/producties/prod_thewhitebody.html,
last accessed 2009.


series of projects under the title ‘States of the Body.’8 Then, in the late
1980s, when the initiation of Ĉ͝i Mͣi economic policies began enabling
Vietnamese living overseas to go back to their former country, Ea Sola
returned to Vietnam to reunite with her family, remake home, and
continue her movement-based work.9
Describing the moment she set foot in Vietnam again Ea Sola says:
‘[f]inally I discovered, the country is in the body.’10 For Ea Sola that body
is transnational and holds, at very least, two countries and cultures.
Resisting claiming, or being claimed by, any one national identity, Ea Sola
describes her sense of doubled identification in terms of culture. When I
ask how she thinks of her identity, of being French and Vietnamese, Ea
Sola answers definitively:
My culture,
Is cultures.
[. . .]
I am cultures.
But I am not interested in
Identity.
Of course,
There is identity.
But these words,
I do not want to use,
For the moment.
Anymore.
I believe more in cultures.
[. . .]
‘My culture is cultures. I am cultures.’ In this statement, Ea Sola performs

the body/self beyond any singular notion of national identity, or hyphenated
national identity (e.g., Vietnamese-French), into an active, intersubjective
embodiment where cultures are inherited, practiced, stretched, punctured,
stitched together and remade. Refusing to recognize identity as an inherent,

8
Hopkins Center, ‘Company Ea Sola, Drought and Rain Vol. 2,’ The Moore
Theater at Dartmouth College, http://hop.dartmouth.edu/assets/pdf/notes-easola
.pdf, last accessed 2009.
9
Ĉ͝i Mͣi is the name given to a series of economic provisions that Vietnam
initiated in 1986, as the country began shifting from a centrally planned economy
to one driven by the market.
10
Public Media http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_278_Dancing_With_Memory
.mp3/view, last accessed 2009.

‘already accomplished fact,’ perhaps Ea Sola would be more comfortable

with Stuart Hall’s articulation ‘of identity as a “production,” which is
never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not
outside, representation’ (1990: 222). Through her personal history,
everyday life engagements, and in the processes of creating and staging
her movement-based works, Ea Sola actively produces herself as
‘cultures,’ as someone who lives, thinks and communicates her work inter-
and trans-culturally.
D. Drought and Rain

Back in Vietnam, between 1991 and 1996, Ea Sola engaged in ‘five years
of anthropological research’ in order to study ‘traditional music, dance,
religion and village customs.’11 She wanted to learn about the daily lives
and beliefs of rural Vietnamese people and to better understand how living
through decades of war affected, and still continues to impact, people’s
lives. To fully immerse herself in this work, Ea Sola chose to live in a
remote village in the Red River Delta area of northern Vietnam. While in
the village, she was drawn to learn more about the daily lives, knowledges,
beliefs and memories of the older women in the community, while she
studied Vietnamese performance styles such as tu͛ng (classical court
opera) and chèo (folk opera). Her experiences with these women in rural
Vietnam inspired her first internationally acclaimed work, Drought and
Rain (Sécheresse et Pluie), in 1995.
Drought and Rain catapulted Ea Sola to the forefront of the contemporary
dance world. She caught the attention of international audiences, in large
part, because the performers in Drought and Rain were the older
Vietnamese women she had lived with in the northern countryside. Most of
the women were not professional performers; they had danced ‘in their
villages when they were young, and [...] had to abandon their dancing
because of the war.’12 As good cadres they left ‘their farms and signed up
as factory workers’ when the newly founded communist North Vietnam,
led by Ho Chi Minh, called on them to do so.13 These women survived the
devastating Japanese occupation during WWII, lost family members and/or

11
Ea Sola’s research in Vietnam was supported by a Leonardo da Vinci scholarship.
12
Hopkins Center, ‘Company Ea Sola, Drought and Rain Vol. 2’ The Moore
Theater at Dartmouth College, http://hop.dartmouth.edu/assets/pdf/
notes-easola.pdf, accessed 2009.
13
Thomas Hahn, ‘Ea Sola- Harmony Between Body, Soul and Expression,’ Ea
Sola The White Body, http://www.grand-theatre.nl/producties/
prod_thewhitebody.html, accessed 2009.


friends during decades of war with the French and the Americans, and
endured years of postwar poverty when peace finally came to Vietnam. The
very presence of their bodies on stage, in theatres around the world, was
itself a kind of testimony to their hard-won survival.
The women’s spare movements in Drought and Rain expressed the
vitality and richness of longstanding histories and knowledges of
Vietnamese traditions combined with the poignancy of personal and
shared memories of labour, loss and survival. Their gestures were stark
and unadorned, conveying and condensing whole lifetimes into a series of
hand movements and precise steps, without attempting the mimetic
imitation of any one person’s experiences. The movement style of Drought
and Rain, and in Ea Sola’s performances in general, shares philosophical
and aesthetic connections with Bertolt Brecht’s sense of ‘gest,’ or gesture,
where performers work to convey ‘overall attitudes’ regarding social
events and relations through stylized movement rather than realistic
depictions (Brecht 2001: 104). For example, towards the end of Drought
and Rain, in a gesture that has since reappeared in other works by Ea Sola
(in Requiem, 2000, and again in Drought and Rain Volume II), the women
took photographs of people who died during the war out of the pockets of
their áo bà ba.14 The women held the pictures out to the audience in a
shared exchange of bearing witness, both to the memory of these particular
individuals and to the millions of absent others.
Figure 1: The performers in Drought and Rain show their photographs to the
audience. Photograph reprinted with permission from Company Ea Sola.15

14
Áo bà ba are traditional Vietnamese long-sleeved blouses.
15
Special thanks to Company Ea Sola for permission to use the photographs in this
chapter.

Part II: Trans/national Politics of Performance Process

A. International touring
Since Drought and Rain, Ea Sola has chosen to create her dances in
Vietnam with Vietnamese performers. However, for reasons of censorship
and/or sponsorship, even if she rehearses there, her work may not
necessarily be performed in Vietnam. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that
the subject matter of Ea Sola’s performances is most often directed toward
audiences outside Vietnam. By this, I do not mean that her work is
irrelevant to or unappreciated by Vietnamese viewers, but rather that her
primary imagined and intended audience is largely located outside of
Vietnam.
The subject matter of Ea Sola’s performances is primarily directed
toward audiences in overdeveloped nations, or perhaps more accurately,
international middle and upper class audiences including those in
Vietnam. However, Ea Sola is acutely aware that the international tours of
her performances provide important occasions for cross-cultural learning
and transnational exchange for her Vietnamese collaborators as well as for
international viewers. In the case of Drought and Rain, it is likely that the
older women had little ability to travel within Vietnam, let alone visit
other countries. The women offered Ea Sola an intimate glimpse into their
lives and she, in turn, was able to give them the opportunity to express
aspects of their memory and cultural history to people around the world.
Ea Sola’s international tours have a dual, trans/national focus on social
engagement: they provide her Vietnamese collaborators with valuable
experience abroad, expanding the scope of their knowledge beyond the
borders of Vietnam, and they offer foreign viewers the chance to acquire a
better understanding of Vietnam and Vietnamese people while critically
reckoning with the social issues addressed in her performances. In both
instances, for the Vietnamese performers and foreign audience members,
Ea Sola’s performances provide the rare, valuable occasion for transnational,
cross-cultural communication, witnessing, and learning. These exchanges
are enabled through the performances themselves, post-show question and
answer sessions, visits to university and high school classrooms, and
through the many informal opportunities for communication that arise
during tours.
The transcultural and transnational connections enabled through Ea
Sola’s work often occur in small, subtle ways. Ea Sola recounted one
particularly memorable event that took place while on tour with Drought
and Rain in the United States. After a performance at the Spoleto Festival


in Charleston, South Carolina, the women were told they had been invited
to lunch at an audience member’s home. When the women arrived, they
were informed that their host was none other than William Westmoreland,
the commanding general and Chief of Staff to the U.S. Army during the
Vietnamese-American War. Being from northern Vietnam, the women had
taken part in the communist mobilizations during the war and had lost
family members and/or loved ones. When Ea Sola heard who the host was,
she was shocked. She relayed the news to the women and asked them what
they wanted to do. Right away, the eldest member of the group spoke up
and said matter-of-factly, ‘Well, let’s have lunch!’ As this story
illuminates, the international tour of Drought and Rain enabled encounters
that few would have imagined possible.
On another occasion, also during the U.S. tour of Drought and Rain,
Ea Sola received a letter written by an audience member thanking her for
the performance. It was sent by a woman whose son had died fighting in
Vietnam during the war. She wrote that seeing the older women perform
helped her feel closer to her son. For the first time, the woman recounted,
she felt a sense of consolation and comfort. She felt a connection to the
women through their shared, yet admittedly very different, experiences of
devastating loss. For Ea Sola, experiences like receiving this letter, and
taking the performance of Drought and Rain to the United States in
general, also provides her with consolation. Making performances like
Drought and Rain, Requiem, and Drought and Rain Volume II, that
remember the war not just for what it was but for how it continues to
impact people’s lives today, is an enactment of Ea Sola’s politics of
answerability through art. She brought Drought and Rain, and its sequel,
Drought and Rain Volume II, to the United States ‘because the war
involved two’ and because she wanted to say to the American people ‘now
we are together.’16 ‘Now we are together,’ and we must continue to
remember the war in order to keep learning from it, in the hope and pursuit
of making less violent, more humane futures together.
The practice of touring, which is often viewed primarily in terms of
economic gain and/or the pursuit of personal fame, is a central site and
process of social engagement for Ea Sola. The two stories recounted above
are examples of the myriad small, personal ways the international tours of
Ea Sola’s performances enable important connections between people who
would otherwise not have the chance to meet and learn from one another.
Bringing work made by Vietnamese performers to international audiences,

16
Public Media at http://thestory.org/archive/
the_story_278_Dancing_With_Memory.mp3/view, last accessed 2009.

and giving her Vietnamese collaborators the opportunity to travel and

meet people in other countries, is a critical part of Ea Sola’s transnational,
transcultural performance politics. It would not have been enough for
Drought and Rain to be performed solely in Vietnam. To open possibilities
for transnational connections, conversation and redress, the performance
and the particular performers involved needed to travel to the United
States, ‘because the war involved two.’
B. Making art in Vietnam

When we spoke in Hue, Vietnam in 2006, before the premier of Drought
and Rain Volume II, I asked Ea Sola to describe her creative process. Ea
Sola answered with an indirect but telling statement about the political
foundation and focus of her work. ‘The contemporary aesthetic belongs to
questions first’ she said, ‘contemporary dance is built by questions, and
that brings the form.’ As with her first street protest in Paris, Ea Sola’s
subsequent performances are active processes of critically embodied
questioning, of kinetic remembering and learning thorough the body. Her
performances are the questions in motion. Her work is made to illuminate,
provoke, inspire, unsettle, ask and explore questions rather than provide
answers.
Producing conceptual and/or socially engaged art in Vietnam poses
particular challenges for artists. Artistic production of all kinds has
historically been, and still is, affected by Communist Party censorship and
ideological stylistic conventions, as well as by a lack of resources and
funds due to decades of colonial rule, brutal war and poverty.17
Government ministries oversee the public display and dissemination of art
and other cultural works in Vietnam. Art deemed to be politically
incongruent with Party values and beliefs will face varying degrees of
obstruction from the government censors. For example, works of art
judged to be sexually distasteful will often, but not always, be curtailed or
forbidden while works viewed to be politically threatening toward the
government are disallowed. Not surprisingly, government policies have
contributed to an overriding focus on formal aesthetics, the public
promotion of art that is ideologically aligned with the Party, and the
absence or careful veiling of politically sensitive subjects.

17
For a more lengthy discussion of the difficulties facing Vietnam’s dance
communities and programs, see Cheryl Stock’s essay ‘Doi Moi and the crisis in
Vietnamese dance’ (2003). To learn more about the political and cultural history of
contemporary painting in northern Vietnam, see Nora A. Taylor’s detailed 2004
monograph.


Art critic Natasha Kraevskaia’s speculations regarding the lack of
political focus (other than government sanctioned views) in visual and
performance art seems applicable to other areas of art production in
Vietnam, including dance. She writes:
[t]his absence of social and political engagement in mainstream art could

be explained by the artists responding to official censorship. It may more
likely be simply an individual mechanism—a fear of overstepping the
borders of the ordinary and conventional. Or further, it could also be a
natural reaction to the overwhelming predominance of socialist realist
propaganda art in the pre-doi moi period (2002: 368).
It is likely that all three factors greatly contribute to the rarity of socially
and politically engaged art (visible) in Vietnam. Those who attempt to
show artistic work, privately or publicly, without going through the proper
channels risk drawing unwanted government attention, closure of the
show, and depending on the level of the offense, sometimes more serious
forms of punishment. It is also important to note that when artistic work is
making a political statement that could be viewed as socially improper or
threatening to the government it may easily go unnoticed by those not
intimately familiar with local contexts and histories, or the symbolic
meanings employed by artists, due to the oblique and coded ways in which
politically sensitive critiques must be made.
As a French citizen who has lived, trained and performed across
Europe, Ea Sola has greater access to foreign funding agencies and arts
networks than do most artists who are Vietnamese citizens. The majority
of her financial support comes from Europe. Ea Sola’s transnationality—
her foreign connections, French citizenship, and cross-cultural fluency—
enable her to live and work in Vietnam without the same degree of
financial limitation and government involvement that Vietnamese
nationals might face if they engaged in similar kinds of work. In addition,
because Ea Sola does not have to rely on the small amount of funding the
Vietnamese government allocates for the arts, she is not beholden to their
interests and conditionalities.
However, as with other artists working in Vietnam, she must still work
within and around the constraints of state censorship. Due to her work’s
unconventional character and engagement with sensitive subjects, she does
face scrutiny and strong pressure from censorship authorities. She must
also always consider the risks faced by the Vietnamese citizens with whom
she collaborates. To protect their reputations, careers and livelihoods, as
well as her own, Ea Sola maintains a high degree of privacy while
rehearsing her work and is careful about the kind of information she

makes public. Despite these challenging conditions, Ea Sola says she has
never yielded or compromised her work, but rather has found ways of
working around or through limitations. Rather than deter her, these and
other constraints seem to inspire inventiveness and a deep sense of
determination in Ea Sola’s work.
Undaunted by pressures and parameters, Ea Sola still chooses to make
her performances in Vietnam. She continues to work with well-established
professional Vietnamese artists, young performers and regular citizens of
diverse ages and socio-cultural backgrounds. Vietnam is where she feels at
home. But moreover, she feels a powerful sense of responsibility to people
in Vietnam, especially to younger generations of artists, to help them
develop their critical thinking, careers and promote a wider spectrum of
possibility for artistic expression. Dance critic and choreographer Cheryl
Stock, who has worked with dance communities in Vietnam since the mid
1980s, writes that Ea Sola’s ‘ideas and works are important in Vietnam in
bringing a unique and innovative approach to revitalizing Vietnamese
traditions,’ in that they ‘counter [ ] the re-Europeanization of the
professional dance sector through the ‘official’ French dance programs,’
and offset the problems of financial dependency, censorship and stylistic
entrenchment in government-subsidized dance schools and companies
(2003: 233). While Ea Sola’s performances cannot be said to follow any
single Vietnamese or any other dance tradition, her work draws, in part, on
Vietnamese knowledges, histories and experiences in order to remember
and remake Vietnamese culture within contemporary contexts and engage
international audiences in critical, transnational dialogue. More than
revitalizing Vietnamese traditions and/or dance in any pure sense, her
work critically questions and reinvents what Vietnamese performance is,
and opens possibilities for what transnationally, transculturally engaged
performance, in Vietnam and elsewhere, might be and become in the
future.
C. Rehearsal as social engagement

Perhaps Ea Sola’s greatest nationally-specific commitment is to help
encourage the development of younger generations of Vietnamese artists.
Where the most common options for young dancers have been to focus on
Vietnamese traditional dance, Chinese styles, or classical European
techniques, Ea Sola offers something profoundly different. Ea Sola’s
dances are generated through an eclectic rehearsal process where critical
questions circulating around a chosen social problem are explored through
a series of workshop-based rehearsals. Rather than having dancers learn a


series of predesigned steps, the development of the movement vocabularies
in her performances is, in part, a collaborative endeavour.18
Ea Sola’s rehearsals involve group discussion and research, not just
about the movement itself but about the social problems engaged through
the performance. She asks her performers to think critically about their
own experiences and everyday lives in relation to larger local and global
social contexts. For example, when working with an entirely post-war
generation cast of professionally trained dancers from the Hanoi Ballet
Opera in Drought and Rain Volume II, Ea Sola began the rehearsal process
by asking them what they knew of the Vietnamese-American war and how
this history affects their lives. At first their response to both questions was
‘not much.’ However, this answer changed as the dancers delved deeper
into the rehearsal process. Later on, Ea Sola asked the dancers to think
about, research and physically explore contemporary acts of violence and
war occurring around the globe, in places such as Iraq, Palestine and
Afghanistan. After months of collaborative development, the resulting
performance powerfully linked memories of war in Vietnam with
problems of everyday social ambivalence, transnational capitalist production
and consumption practices, and contemporary sites of violence worldwide.
The rehearsal process for Drought and Rain Volume II engaged the
dancers in addressing their own lives and histories in Vietnam in
conjunction with larger, contemporary transnational contexts, while the
final performance called on international audiences to reckon with the
devastating human costs of violence, apathy and indifference.
Ea Sola’s work draws on her memories of growing up amidst war,
incorporates aesthetic elements from Vietnamese performance traditions,
borrows from everyday Vietnamese cultural references and social
gestures, and often engages historical and contemporary issues directly
pertaining to Vietnam. However, her performances also stem from her
diasporic, transnational identity as someone who ‘is cultures.’ Her
performances borrow from various national and international arts
traditions, use and refashion globalized popular culture signifiers, and
address social issues that involve but are not specific to Vietnam. Ea
Sola’s work is decidedly not caught up in the ‘overwhelming search for
“Vietnameseness”’ that still characterizes the work of many Vietnamese
artists (Kraevskaia 2002: 368). Likewise, she is not interested in creating
‘multicultural performances’ that too often homogenize and decontextualize
specific cultural practices, histories and knowledges. Ea Sola herself, and

18
While the rehearsal process is highly collaborative, Ea Sola intensively oversees
and personally works on every aspect of her performances (e.g. costumes, music,
lighting, video/visual media, program notes, and of course, choreography).

her work, complicate conservative categories of national and cultural

ascription while resisting the easy pitfalls of uncritical multiculturalism.
Every aspect of Ea Sola’s performance process is socially attuned,
albeit in different ways. The subject matter of her performances is largely
oriented toward audiences outside Vietnam, particularly in Western and/or
overdeveloped nations. The international tours of Ea Sola’s performances
have a multi-sited, trans/national focus on facilitating dialogued and
greater understanding between people of different countries and cultures.
The process of rehearsing and creating her work in Vietnam is an example
where Ea Sola’s performance politics could be said to be most nationally-
oriented, centred in Vietnam and for the benefit of Vietnamese people. For
Ea Sola, making critical, conceptual, transnationally-engaged art in
Vietnam is itself a kind of social intervention. Her decision to make her
work in Vietnam, with Vietnamese performers, is a decisive enactment of
her politics of performance.
Part III: Performing Transnational, Transcultural Art

and Answerability
A. Performance as experience
Dusk falls over Ho Chi Minh City and rush hour traffic thickens on the
streets as Ea Sola and I continue our conversation. Sensing her hesitance
when I refer to her work as choreography, I ask Ea Sola if she indeed
thinks of her work as ‘dance’ and of herself as a ‘choreographer.’ Taking
my question in a related, but somewhat different direction, Ea Sola
answers that she does not make ‘shows.’ She eschews thinking of her
work in commodified terms. A choreographer ‘make[s] a work to show,’
she explains: ‘I don’t feel at all that ah, I make a show.’ Marking a
distinction between ‘making a show’ to entertain and making performances
to engage audiences in critical self-reflection and social dialogue, she
states:
Ea Sola: I don’t feel at all that ah,

I make a show.
[. . . ]
Rivka: What would you say that you make?
Ea Sola: Experience.
With others.


About ah,
Our existence.
Ea Sola does not view her work as ‘a show,’ made for uncritical,
unengaged consumption. She hopes her performances will enable
‘Experience. With others. About ah, our existence.’ This answer locates
her work outside of the realm of simple re-enactment, distancing her
performances from cyclical, repetitively produced and passively consumed
‘show[s],’ into a more dialogic space of possibility for the creation of new
forms of social awareness and action.
Ea Sola makes no mention of Vietnam in her response. She does not
say that her work is about ‘Vietnamese experience’ or that it comes from
any specifically Vietnamese perspective. She answers with the collective
pronouns, ‘others’ and ‘our’ to make a broad, socially inclusive statement.
The inclusiveness of her response and her resistance to bind her work, or
her identity, to any particular culture, ethnicity, social class, or country, is
all part of a larger shift that has been taking place in Ea Sola’s
performance work over the past few years.
B. ‘Vietnamese,’ ‘Asian,’ or ‘Transnational’ performance?

It was, in part, the West’s orientalist fascination with ‘Asia’ and Vietnam
that helped propel Ea Sola’s early work to the forefront of the
contemporary dance world. Now, more than a decade after Drought and
Rain, Ea Sola is attempting to free her work from the essentializing
categorizations of ‘Asian’ and/or ‘Vietnamese’ performance. She made
this effort explicit in 2005. In a review of her newest solo work, Air Lines,
Le Monde dance critic Rosita Boisseau writes, ‘Ea Sola declared that she
‘wanted to kill the exoticism of the thing called Asian’ in her work’ (2008:
24). Air Lines, Boisseau believes, achieves this goal.
Ea Sola’s plural cultural and national background complicates her
categorization as ‘Vietnamese’ and as a ‘Vietnamese artist.’ However, in
her discussion of Vietnamese visual artists living overseas, Nora Taylor
explains that these labels are difficult to shed, in large part, because of the
art market’s insistence on fetishizing art by ethnicity and/or nation. Taylor
expresses that it is often a struggle for Vietnamese ‘artists to negotiate
identity markers and avoid stereotyping even in a so-called global world'
(2001: 124). Although her career has at times benefited from her work
being dubbed as ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Asian’ performance, Ea Sola wishes to
disconnect herself from the confinements and expectations of these
oversimplified identities. Understanding herself to be within an art world
that ‘has not turned global,’ such that the ‘center-periphery paradigm is

still operative,’ Ea Sola has consciously turned her work in new

geopolitical direction (ibid: 124).
In her two most recent performances, Air Lines and The White Body,
there has been a noticeable shift in Ea Sola’s socio-political scope and
aesthetic choices. Both performances involve Vietnam, in that they
address the interdependence of people, societies and countries around the
globe, but they are not based on issues particular to Vietnam. Also these
new performances do not use traditional or contemporary Vietnamese
music, refer to Vietnamese history, nor do they noticeably draw on
Vietnamese art forms or popular culture as her works have done in the
past. Instead, Air Lines and The White Body take up and refashion an
eclectic patchwork of transcultural, transnational signifiers.
C. Air Lines
Air Lines, Ea Sola’s most recent solo performance, is a continuation of the
more broad-based, globally engaged work that began emerging in Drought
and Rain Volume II. Air Lines is an embodied address to the citizens and
governments of powerful nations regarding the forgotten and disregarded
struggles of refugees, illegal immigrants and other impoverished exiles.
Air Lines reminds viewers that the continued suffering of others around
the world should disrupt, destabilize and disturb our own sense of comfort,
contentment and complacency.
The performance begins with Ea Sola on a darkened stage wearing a
sparkling silver-black evening dress, signifying upper class decadence and
affluence. Sheets of clear plastic cover the floor and part of the backstage
wall. As the lights rise, strong winds blow, billowing the plastic and
illuminating a haunting, ungrounded, dystopian landscape caught
somewhere between the land, the sky and the sea. The place is
unspecified. Neither here nor there. It is everywhere. It is nowhere. It is a
transnational space of the ‘unheimlich,’ the uncanny, that appears both
strange and familiar simultaneously (Freud 2003: 122). Ea Sola seems to
be suggesting that this place of transnational dystopia could potentially be
anywhere.
Air Lines engages a transnational, transcultural politics of artistic
practice in at least three central ways. First, the problems engaged in the
performance concern the suffering of vulnerable individuals and groups
throughout the world and the geopolitics that produce these conditions.
Second, as with Ea Sola’s prior work, this performance is directed towards
international audiences. The performance critiques nation states, and their
citizenry, for their use of and/or ambivalence toward violence. From the


choice of national flags used in the performance, as well the location of the
performance venues, the performance directly (but not exclusively)
addresses governments and citizens living across Oceania, Europe, North
America and East Asia. Third, Ea Sola’s aesthetic choices are an eclectic
assemblage drawn from various countries and cultures. For example, Ea
Sola’s longtime musical collaborator, Nguyen Xuan Son, creates a score
that layers and cuts Mongolian throat chanting, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’
from Symphony No. 9 (chosen specifically because it is the anthem of the
European Union), Turkish and Indian pop music, and sampled sounds that
conjure images of industrial cityscapes.
By association, Air Lines’ focus on particular nation-states also
implicates audience members as citizens of these countries, and highlights
our complacency. While it calls her audiences to uncomfortable attention,
the performance skilfully resists pointing fingers of blame in the viewers’
direction. Instead, Ea Sola invites us to recognize our interconnectedness
with one another. One of the ways she encourages this kind of self-
reflection is by including herself in the discourse. She performs her own
sense of connection and responsibility towards transnational social issues
through her words as well as her body. Expressing her reasons for creating
this performance, Ea Sola states in the performance announcement:
I think of the person to whom we refuse entry to our country, because this
is our country, intangible, as though something eternal. Houses fall down,
roads become cut off, the sky becomes congested, and I sleep, and I live,
easily—and this is why I created Air Lines.19
Although her own experience as a refugee likely informs the performance,

the dance focuses on contemporary contexts that do not involve Ea Sola’s
own history per se. The performance specifically addresses the conditions
of Somali and Ethiopian refugees.20 Rather than refer to her own history of
exile, Ea Sola identifies herself with the audience as part of ‘our country’
who, at least now in her life, is able to sleep and live easily. Because her
current life is comfortable, and she has the luxury of not living in peril, she
feels a sense of responsibility as a globally-engaged citizen and artist to
raise awareness of these problems through her performances. She says

19
Ea Sola via Dominique L’Huillier, mass e-mail message received by author, 9
November 2008.
20
Air Lines uses footage from the 2007 documentary, Martyrs du golfe d’Aden
(Martyrs of the Gulf of Aden) by Daniel Grandclément, a film about Somali and
Ethiopian refugees abused by human traffickers as they attempt to escape by boat
across the Gulf of Eden.

directly to her audiences, because ‘I sleep, and I live, easily’ I must do

something. Watching her performance, viewers may be inspired to think
with her, because we sleep, and we live, easily we too have responsibility.
Figure 2: Ea Sola holds the United States flag in her hands in Air Lines.
Photograph reprinted with permission from Company Ea Sola.
D. The White Body

Like Air Lines, The White Body endeavours to clear the stage of potential
for orientalizing Ea Sola’s work. Earlier in her career, Ea Sola expressed
her hope that her performances create what she views as ‘a national
language of gestures’ within the context of Vietnam (Stock 2003: 233).
Her current work has largely shifted from a focus on the national to the
creation of performances that draw from and remake a transnational
language of gestures. Because of the international problems at hand, the
global dimensions of the political questions she wishes to pose, her own
multi-cultural fluency, and the audiences to whom she speaks, Ea Sola
creates a politics and aesthetics of movement that is ‘agricultural’ and
transnational (Rae 2002). Ea Sola’s performances are cultural bricolages.
They perform something akin to Bakhtin’s notion of ‘heteroglossia’
conveyed through sound, images and the moving body, bringing ‘a
multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationships’ together to create dialogic, polyphonic works that
communicate within and across cultures and nationalities (Bakhtin 1981:
263).
Ea Sola was compelled to create The White Body after reading Étienne
de la Boétie’s 1548 text, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (Discours
sur la servitude volontaire). Although written over four hundred years
ago, Ea Sola says the text ‘contains the foundations and fundamental


questions we face today’ at a time when we too often ‘just work and
consume rather than think.’21 De la Boétie writes that individuals and
societies can reclaim their power, and their humanity, by choosing to stop
giving their support to oppressive rulers. Feeling resonances between de la
Boétie’s critique of monarchies and governments in the 16th century and
today’s world leaders and regimes, Ea Sola was inspired to make a
performance based on the text. ‘The White Body is a work based on the
global context,’ she says, ‘on the pressures and dominations of industries
nowadays which direct our life,’ so that it ‘is no more a work about war in
a country; it is about another kind of war without bloodshed, but which
kills the spirit.’22 Ea Sola thinks people are too complacent. We allow
ourselves to be distracted by the shiny objects, flashy status symbols and
fleeting pleasures enabled by global capitalism, while the powerful take
unjust actions in our name. We are forgetting that the way we choose to
live matters, not just to our own lives but also to others. Upon re-reading
the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude Ea Sola felt de la Boétie’s ideas
needed to be revisited, remembered and reclaimed. She decided that the
text must be heard and seen again, en-fleshed in body and voice.
In February 2009, I watched a final rehearsal of The White Body in Ho
Chi Minh City, before the performance was taken to Hong Kong for its
world premiere. The rehearsal was held in an old, crumbling cement
building that had once been used as a theatre and dance school. When the
stage lights go up, two sheets of sheer plastic separate the three young
Vietnamese dancers from the audience. It is the same kind of plastic used
in Air Lines, but this time the screen is shifted vertically, imposing a
transparent wall between the dancers and the audience. An older
Vietnamese man and woman, both former schoolteachers, sit on the
sidelines and begin reading from de la Boétie’s text, in its original French,
while Nguyen Xuan Son mixes the music live from his laptop. The music
is contemporary, comprised largely of electronic music samples mixed
with Nguyen’s original digital music and self-recorded sounds. On a video
screen at the back of the stage, a quotation from de la Boétie’s text scrolls
by in a similar rapid style to that used in Drought and Rain Volume II and
Air Lines. The text is first displayed in Arabic, then in Hebrew followed by
Russian, Chinese, French, English and several other languages.

21
Sola The White Body,
http://www.grand-theatre.nl/producties/prod_thewhitebody.html.
22
Ea Sola’s written but unpublished response to questions about The White Body
from the Hong Kong Economic Times, 10 January 2009.

At the beginning of the performance, the dancer’s movements are slow

and deliberate. Their backs are bent and their arms are outstretched, as if
carrying an enormous weight. They teeter on tiptoe, fall to the floor, and
press their bodies against the plastic, staring out at the audience like
trapped birds. As the performance progresses, the dancers’ movement shift
between fast, erratic fits, where they conjure images of rock stars singing
to an audience of desirous fans, to the slow strut of lithe supermodels
promoting name brand soft drinks and designer handbags, perfume and
cigarettes. With startling beauty and unsettling directness, the performers
demonstrate and question how our material desires and social values are,
in many cases, sold to us. Listening to de la Boétie’s text while watching
the dancers, I am reminded of how easy it is to become complacent and
distracted from what really matters, how as individuals and societies we
can become increasingly alienated from ourselves and others.
At the end of the performance, a final excerpt from de la Boétie’s text
scrolls across the video screen in a dozen or more languages. The
performance reiterates its central message:
[o]bviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for

he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own
enslavement: [. . .] simply [] give him nothing (de la Boétie 1942: 8).
To resist a tyrant ‘simply give him nothing.’ This phrase recalls Ea Sola’s
first street performance and protest in Paris. ‘I just stand up and say no.
And I thought, that if everyone stop, like I am stopping, there is no war
possible.’ The White Body continues Ea Sola’s commitment to
answerability through her arts practice. As in her prior work, The White
Body focuses on non-violent means of social address and protest through
the entwined politics, poetics and kinetics of embodied performance.


Figure 3: Dancers in The White Body press themselves against the plastic wall.
Photograph reprinted with permission from Company Ea Sola.
Postcapitalist Performance
From her first protest on the streets of Paris, to her most recent works that
increasingly take on what she has called ‘a global point of view,’ Ea Sola’s
performances are powerful enactments of transnational, transcultural social
address. She is committed to creating work that makes a difference and
has no interest in performances whose highest aspiration is aesthetic
beauty. ‘I have no talent,’ she says, for making ‘soft things’ that ‘make
you feel good.’ Sometimes criticized for making performances that are
‘too political’ or appear too bleak, Ea Sola explains:
If the end [of the performance] is black,

Doesn’t mean that life have to be,
Like the performance.
It is just for you to realize,
Right?
To realize,
Because,
You know,
There is no blood on stage.
There is no gun.
The war makes blood,
The war makes,
Gives pain,
But the performance,
Even if it is hard,

You don’t lose nothing.

You just realize,
More strongly.
‘If the end is black,’ Ea Sola contends, ‘[d]oesn’t mean that life have to be,
like the performance.’ Her performances disrupt her audiences’
complacency, shake us awake, invite us to ‘become sensitive,’ and help us
‘to realize’ our connections with others ‘more strongly.’ Ea Sola’s
audiences are addressed as national and global citizens. Like Brecht’s epic
theatre, Ea Sola’s audiences are asked to ‘come to grips with things,’
grapple with the problems of everyday social life, and recognize their
potentials as individuals and societies to actively engage in making change
(Brecht 2001: 23). Resisting easy solutions and oversimplified endings, Ea
Sola’s performances leave viewers with a sense of discomfort and dis-
ease. By making her performances ‘hard,’ she seeks to raise awareness
about problems faced by marginalized individuals and groups, heighten
audience members’ recognition of our interdependence with others, make
us dissatisfied with the status quo, and inspire our belief that critical
change is possible through individual and collective action.
Turning out new work for the sake of enhancing her reputation, or to
meet the expectations of market demands, is not her prime motivation or a
pressure to which Ea Sola falls prey. Referring to the infrequency with
which she produces new work and refusing market determination, Ea Sola
openly states that ‘an artist doesn’t have something important to tell every
year.’23 She felt compelled to create Drought and Rain Volume II
following the events of September 11, 2001 and the resulting decision by
the United States government to go to war with Iraq. Whether or not she
produces work, the subject matter she chooses, and the aesthetic form her
dances take up and create, is less determined by the international art
market per se, than it is about what is going on in the world.
In her rejection of mainstream market determination and refusal to
comply with hegemonic social norms or state demands, and through her
focus on transnational issues and relations of power, Ea Sola enacts what
could be called a postcapitalist politics of artistic practice. In A
Postcapitalist Politics, Gibson-Graham outlines and calls for new modes
of counter-capitalist being-in-the-world, contending that today,
‘[s]uccessful political innovation requires a whole new relation to power’
(2006: 6). New and innovative techniques are needed to enable more

23
Sola The White Body,
http://www.grand-theatre.nl/producties/prod_thewhitebody.html, accessed 2009.


people to re-imagine, push against, wriggle through, crack open, and
transform inequitable power structures be they national, transnational,
non-national or supra-national. As a political and poetic ‘ethical practice,’
Ea Sola’s work participates in ‘[t]he co-implicated processes of changing
the self/thinking/world’ (ibid: xxviii). Ea Sola’s performance process and
staged works offer vital, important examples of postcapitalist arts praxis.
Her work critically and creatively embodies and enacts a politics of
possibility, co-constituting subjectivity and co-implicated responsibility.
Ea Sola’s performance interventions connect geopolitical dynamics
with local conditions. Through this approach, Ea Sola enacts what Gibson-
Graham describes as a ‘feminist spatiality,’ a praxis that simultaneously
engages a ‘politics of ubiquity’ and a ‘politics of place’ (xxiv). She
understands the necessity of addressing the interrelationships between
local and transnational politics within all aspects of her artistic practice: in
her rehearsal process, through international tours, by way of the subject
matter of her performances, and in her aesthetic choices. Ea Sola’s work is
socially meaningful within and across diverse cultures and countries
because it poetically engages the politics of transnational, transcultural
space and place.
To become answerable through his arts practice, Bakhtin sets himself
to the task of ‘translating myself from inner language into the language of
outward expressedness and of weaving all of myself totally into the [. . .]
fabric of life as a human being among other human beings’ (1990: 31). Ea
Sola seeks a similar interweaving of art and life, self and social. ‘Today,’
says Ea Sola in her spare, dimly lit living room in Ho Chi Minh City, ‘I
feel the art has much more responsibility than before.’ For her work to be
most meaningful, it must address social problems through exploration of
their local and global complexity and consequences. Accordingly, it is
necessary for her performances to communicate ideas and stimulate ‘living
dialogue’ within and across countries and cultures (Bahktin 1981: 280).
‘Contemporary dance,’ she says, ‘is an attitude to the world; a
responsibility to oneself, to the other, to the truth.’24 Ea Sola’s
commitment to social engagement and the pursuit of answerability through
performance stems from her personal memory of ‘crossing war’ and
witnessing violence, from her diasporic, plural cultural and national
identity, and from her discovery that the performing body—her own and
others’—can make critical social interventions. When asked if she thinks
her performances can help make change, Ea Sola answers, ‘I don’t know,

24
Ea Sola’s written but unpublished response to questions about The White Body
from a Hong Kong Economic Times reporter, 10 January 2009.

but I hope.’25 Ea Sola’s memory and movement-based performances are

the active materialisations of that hope and belief that better, more
equitable and less violent, social worlds are possible.
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Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical
Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated
by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press
—. The Dialogic Imagination. 1981. Edited by Michael Holquist.
Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University
of Texas Press
Boisseau, Rosita. 2008. ‘Air Lines – l’ébouriffant solo de Sola,’ Le Monde
(12 December 2008)
Brecht, Bertolt. 2001. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an
Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willet. New York: Hill and
Wang
de la Boétie, Étienne. 1942. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Translated
by Harry Kurz. New York: Columbia University Press
Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock.
London: Penguin
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Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London:
Lawrence and Wishart. pp. 222-237
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Expression.’ Ea Sola The White Body.
http://www.grandtheatre.nl/producties/ prod_thewhitebody.html
(accessed 29 July 2009)
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Moore Theater at Dartmouth College,
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/assets/pdf/notes-easola.pdf (accessed 5
August 2009)

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—. 2006. ‘Memory, Remembering, and Histories of Change: A
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in Contemporary Vietnam. London: RoutledgeCurzon. pp. 219-240
Taylor, Nora A. 2004. Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese
Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press
—. 2001. ‘Raindrops on Red Flags: Tran Trong Vu and the Roots of
Vietnamese Painting Abroad,’ in Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina
Chau-Pech Ollier, eds. Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue. New York:
Palgrave. pp. 112-125
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American Public Media
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mp3/view (accessed 26 September 2008)
Wilson, Jane Bradley. 2001. ‘Introduction: Projected Identities/Subversive
Practices’ in Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier,
eds. Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue. New York: Palgrave. pp.1-15

NAMELESS, SEXLESS, ROOTLESS, HOMELESS:
PERFORMANCE IN A TRANSNATION STATE
PAUL RAE AND ALVIN LIM
Nameless, sexless, rootless, homeless

Everyone’s a parent to the orphan
Every god’s a protector to the wanderer
Every land and sky and water is home
It’s forever Zaijian, Selamat, Vanakkan, Farewell
(Kuo Pao Kun, Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral [1995]).
For most of its existence as trading hub, settlement and society, the
Southeast Asian island of Singapore has not been a nation; and even since
Independence in 1965, the contours of its nationhood have been shaped to
an important degree by non-national factors and actors. Moreover, the dual
meaning of ‘actor’—as ‘agent’ and ‘performer’—is no coincidence here.
As we will demonstrate in this article, the mutability of Singapore’s status
as a social, political and territorial entity has lent historical prominence to
its performative constitution, and contemporary significance to its
theatrical self-imagining.
The Singapore government is acutely aware of the need to promote a
sense of national identity amongst a globally-aware populace that have
neither ethnic, religious nor historical commonalities to fall back on.
However, although there is some truth to the widespread international
perception that this has resulted in a ‘nanny state’ that exercises
authoritarian democracy through propaganda and a high level of centralized
political and administrative control, critics do neither themselves nor
Singaporeans any favours by taking such characterizations at face value.
Arguably, the endless reiteration (with minor variations) of the national
narrative through official and civil society outlets is itself symptomatic of
the fact that the nation, unlike the state, is irreducible to that narrative.
Rather, ‘Singapore’ exists in the tension between the nation that is claimed
by and for the state, and the continuous flow of people, ideas, labour,
capital and goods upon which it remains substantially dependent.
164 Nameless, Sexless, Rootless, Homeless
It is for this reason that, for the purposes of this essay, we describe
Singapore as a transnation state, and in the analysis to follow we will
explore how theatre and other kinds of performance have been used not
only to express this transnationalist (sic.) sensibility, but to reflect on the
condition of citizenship that it entails. Before doing so, however, we
would like to locate our argument in relation to several characteristics of
the current literature on transnationalism and culture.
The ‘transnation’ is, itself, something of a contradiction in terms,
combining as it does associations with deterritorializing mobility and
nominalized fixity. However, while its meaning is open to debate, and
some commentators have questioned whether such an entity can be said to
exist at all, one thing most agree on is that ‘transnation’ describes the
extension of national affiliations and practices beyond the territorial
boundaries of the state. This characterization is not so easily applied to
Singapore, whose expatriates are simply too few, dispersed and diversely-
employed to cohere as a transnational citizenry. However, in so far as
Singapore was internationally defined before it was a nation, and globally
determined almost as soon as it gained independence, it is our contention a
Singaporean transnation does exist. However, it is intensive, rather than
extensive: a transnation state.
One telling feature of this characterization—not the most significant in
the broader scheme of things, but germane to the present discussion—is
the role that Singaporean academics have played in the discursive framing,
methodological development and empirical description of transnationalism
as a field of enquiry. Scholars such as the geographers Lily Kong and
Brenda Yeoh, and the sociologist Chua Beng Huat are among the most
eminent Singaporean social scientists, and have played an important
international role in analyzing migration and cultural flows both within the
Asian region, and between Asian nations and the rest of the world. As the
editors of numerous key volumes and journals,1 they have contributed to
the transnationalisation of transnationalism studies, and it is little surprise
that all three hold leadership positions in the National University of
Singapore’s Asia Research Institute, whose self-defined mission is ‘to
provide a world-class focus and resource for research on the Asian region,
located at one of its communication hubs’ (Asia Research Institute 2009:
www).
Thus does the 21st Century Asian university discharge its function
within a Knowledge Based Economy: but we also take this trend to be

1
See, for instance, Chen and Chua (2007), Yeoh and Willis (2004) and Kong and
O’Connor (2009). Chua is the executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies. Yeoh is Editor-in-chief of Gender, Place and Culture.

Paul Rae and Alvin Lim 165
further evidence of the extent to which Singapore is transnationally

constituted. It is apt, for instance, that Filomeneo V. Aguilar Jr’s
observation that ‘in many instances, scholarly texts on transnationalism
serve as an epistemological mirage, which fundamentally dislocated
scholars may have conjoured up precisely to deal with their own
displacement and the existential aridity of their own fragmented lives’
(2004: 97), should appear in a book co-edited by Yeoh. As a Singapore-
based Singaporean, she hardly conforms to Aguilar’s cutting description;
and yet, the question is left open as to whether she and her fellow citizens
are properly at home with the transnational condition, or irrevocably in
thrall to an ‘epistemological mirage.’
It is a question not easily answered by the bulk of the literature on
transnationalism, which, despite a generally high degree of reflexivity
about its role in discipline formation and the discursive production of its
objects of study, nevertheless remains overwhelmingly oriented towards
the social sciences. There, artistic creation and aesthetic experience tend to
be filed under cultural production, and it is surely no coincidence that the
art form that most closely analysed in transnational terms, film, is the one
where aesthetic questions of production and reception are most closely
tied in with more easily quantifiable financial, commercial and technical
considerations.
In contrast, we argue, focusing on performance highlights the affective,
embodied and transformative qualities of the transnational experience, and
doing so within the ‘bounded’ transnation of Singapore provides a rare
opportunity for delimited enquiry in a field that is normally defined by the
transience of its forces, and the dispersal of its objects.
As such, our concern in this chapter is with what might be described as
the poetics of transnationality. This is reflected in our choice of title, and
the methodological approach that it entails. ‘Nameless, sexless, rootless,
homeless’ is a self-description by the narrator of Descendents of the
Eunuch Admiral (1995), by the late doyen of Singapore theatre, Kuo Pao
Kun (1939-2002). One of the most significant and resonant Singapore
plays, we will discuss certain aspects of it in more detail below. However,
we also take it to provide a structuring principle for our analysis as a
whole, because it describes a paradox that is arguably integral to the
condition of the transnation state: subtractive accumulation. In this
particular line from the play, the paradox is at work in several ways. To
describe oneself as ‘nameless’ is nevertheless to name oneself; to list what
one lacks is to begin to say what one has; and to extend that list is to
accumulate an identity, even where negatively defined. In short, one can
define oneself by absence, but one doesn’t disappear. Rather, when

established modes of doing and being no longer apply, one is compelled to

compensate, improvise, act generatively; in a word, perform.
In what follows, therefore, we focus on four different instances of
performance, each conforming to one of the ‘subtractions’ named by
Kuo’s narrator. In being guided by such a directive, we have cast our net
over a range of different events and objects – respectively, a colonial
encounter, a play, a ritual, and two experimental performances – each
requiring a slightly different methodological or analytical treatment, and
each sitting in a slightly different relation to us as researchers, both jointly
and individually. In light of our characterization of Singapore as
intensively constituted as a transnation state, this is as it should be. There
is a tendency, in academic writing on Singapore, towards either nationally-
bounded empirical detail, or postmodernized abstraction on a global scale.
In being attentive to the specificities of our objects of study within the
wider context of transnation formation, we aim to tread a middle path.
Nameless: Sir Stamford Raffles and the founding

of modern Singapore
If a defining feature of postcolonial modernity is the persistent influence
of colonial era discourses, institutions and affiliations upon the
constitution of independent nation states, then one way those states can be
distinguished from each other is the particular combination of continuity
and rupture with the past that they manifest. This is seldom straightforward,
since continuities may be strategically appropriated under the name of
rupture and vice versa, and in this regard Singapore is no different from
many other nations that gained independence from the British in the wake
of the Second World War. However, if Singapore’s abrupt and unlooked-
for entry into nationhood is one distinctive feature of its postcolonial
identity, this is only exaggerated when aligned with its entry into
coloniality almost 150 years earlier; and nowhere is this better exemplified
than in the prominent position that Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826)
continues to enjoy as its ‘founding father.’
The official story is that in 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles of the British
East India Company performed a nine days wonder. Before he arrived on
the island once known as Tumasek or Temasek, and variously referred to
at the time as Singapura, Sincapore, Singaporra and Singapore, it was
assumed by the colonists to exist as if outside space and time, ‘until our
coming unknown in modern history or geography,’ as one participant of
the ‘founding’ put it (Crawford, cited in Moore and Moore 1969: 20).

The trope would prove tenacious, and propel some remarkably florid
flights of rhetorical fancy in imperial and post-imperial historiography:
‘The island and its people, sleeping through the fables of pre-history,
looking backwards through time to valiant kings and proud empires, had
been translated within a few hours into the nineteenth century’ (Pearson
[1961], cited in Moore and Moore 1969: 19); ‘It is difficult now to
imagine the emptiness, the bright white calm of that extraordinary
morning of 29 January 1819…apart from the brief tropical storms which
are frequent at this time of year, and the daily tides sliding from one
horizon to the other, an immemorial stillness enveloped the scene’ (Moore
and Moore 1969: 17). Thus was the stage set for an almost miraculous
entrance, wherein naming and knowing would coincide: ‘it would be
difficult to imagine that, had there been no Raffles, there would have been
any Singapore’ (Wurtzburg 1954: 501); ‘Raffles, a beacon of almost
blinding light at the beginning, pointing the way’ (Moore and Moore
1969: 1).
He came in the full ripeness of his developed powers, and every step he
took for the establishment of a new colony was marked by the confidence
and unerring touch of one who wielded an instrument perfectly edged.
Some nine brief days he remained; but when he left, it is not too much to
say all the plans of the future city were so clearly defined that not even
after one hundred years are these plans exhausted or superseded…Raffles
planted a seed. That was all. But it was the seed of a city, and the city was
destined to become a nerve-centre of the whole world (Cross 1991 [1921]:
32).
It is tempting to dismiss such excesses, but at least two considerations

should give us pause. The first is the continuing currency some version of
this story enjoys in otherwise proudly independent postcolonial Singapore.
In 1972, seven years after independence, a statue of Raffles was erected on
the banks of the Singapore River at the site where he is presumed to have
landed in January 1819. A white polymarble cast of an 1887 bronze
original which remains on display nearby, it stands atop a pedestal
carrying the following inscription in the four official languages of
Singapore: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil:
ON THIS HISTORIC SITE

SIR STAMFORD RAFFLES
FIRST LANDED IN SINGAPORE
ON 28TH JANUARY 1819
AND WITH GENIUS AND PERCEPTION
CHANGED THE DESTINY OF SINGAPORE

FROM AN OBSCURE FISHING VILLAGE

TO A GREAT SEAPORT AND
MODERN METROPOLIS
Figure 1: Statue of Sir Stamford Raffles at the 'Raffles landing site,’ Singapore.
(Image: Paul Rae.)
Today, the statue is an integral part of the iconology of Singapore. For

example, in the 2005 National Day Parade, it featured on a float in a
procession that told an upbeat and patriotic version of Singapore’s history.
In 2008, it was a character in The Last Temptation of Sir Stamford Raffles,
by the young playwright Ng Yi-Sheng, ‘haunting’ a ‘real’ Raffles as he lay

syphilised on his deathbed, his past and Singapore’s future parading before
him.
The fact that these two examples – there are others – are performances,
points to the second reason we should be attentive to these rather
ostentatious narratives of Singapore’s founding. Their persistent theatricality
– setting the scene, describing the entrance – reproduces (we might go so
far as to say ‘sustains’) a powerfully performative quality to the originary
event, such as we are privy to it. And it is this, more than his face and
posture, that may be the more enduring legacy of Raffles, or, at least, those
aspects of the colonial encounter that have been strategically incorporated
into Singapore’s national self-imagining under the synecdoche ‘Raffles.’
Seeking to deny Dutch hegemony in the East Indies, Raffles and his
men exploited a succession dispute within the Riau Johor sultanate in
order to establish a free port on Singapore. Since the death of their father
in 1812, two half-brothers—Hussain and Abdul Rahman—had been vying
for the throne of the sultanate. The elder, Hussain, held the rightful claim,
but the younger, Abdul Rahman, had been installed under the patronage of
a powerful neighbouring dynasty, and in alliance with the Dutch.
Disapproving of the move, however, one of the former Sultan’s wives,
Tengku Puteri, had refused to hand over the sacred regalia and instruments
required for the ceremony that would have legitimated Abdul Rahman’s
status. This provided the window of opportunity that Raffles and his
second in command, Major William Farquhar, needed. They summoned
Hussain to the then sparsely inhabited island of Singapore, and offered
him $5000 a year in return for the opportunity to set up what was called a
‘factory’ at the mouth of the river. Hussain agreed, and a signing
ceremony was hastily arranged for the 6th February. Another of Raffles’
men, Crawford, provided the fullest description of the event, which
includes the following details:
The Ships being decorated, flags, boats, all clean and fine, serene weather,
formed a pleasing picture, and must have an imposing effect on the minds
of the inhabitants. On shore some field pieces were mounted, the artillery
and seapoys drawn up under arms…In one of the tents a cold collation was
provided, another was fitted up in ‘State’…The Sultan was escorted by a
military guard, making a respectable appearance, their dress is rather
uniform, pikes decorated with stained hear and feathers, flags white and
red, the standard carried before his person was one of the last colour…Our
troops formed lines on each side of the red carpet and presented arms on
his passing between them. At the entrance of the tent he was received by
Sir Stamford, who led him to the chair on his right hand…On presentation
of the preliminary articles, the seapoys fired three volleys. Then Sir
Stamford presented his commission from the Marquis of Hastings, a Malay

translation was read by the Sultan’s secretary (the best dressed man among
them, a scarlet loose coat over a silk gown, a handsome kris [dagger], the
coat ornamented with gold lace) in a loud voice to the inhabitants (Malay
and Chinese), who had surrounded the tent and squatted on their hams,
behaving throughout the ceremony with respectful decency and silence (in
Moore and Moore 1969: 25-6).
And so on. At the end, Raffles issued a proclamation that a treaty had been
concluded between ‘the British Government and the native authorities, and
a British Establishment having been in consequence founded at Singapore’
(in Moore and Moore 1969: 27). As well he might, because in fact the
proclamation had no basis in law, either Malay or European. Farquhar had
failed in his own bid to secure the sacred regalia from Tengku Puteri for the
ceremony, and Raffles was himself acting at the very limits of the authority
vested in him by the British East India Company. In effect, the ceremony
was required to lend legitimacy to a transaction where there was little, if
any. By treating Hussain royally and nominating him Sultan in the treaty,
Raffles granted him sufficient authority in turn to grant the British the
rights to the settlement.
Thus was Singapore founded in a flurry of naming, claiming and
proclaiming; of performances and performatives, and performances as
performatives. By this token, the epithet ‘nameless’ does not apply to
Singapore literally, but rather because of the degree of contingency that
underwrote its naming. ‘Singapore’ and ‘Raffles’ carry almost talismanic
properties in the city state today, and the official integrity of both is
maintained through careful regulation.2 At the same time, the terms are
ubiquitous in public discourse and conversation. ‘Raffles’ names numerous
key places and institutions, and, as a brand, is a local byword for quality
and excellence. ‘Singapore,’ encompassing as it does island, nation, state,
city, and primary object of secular identification and/or ideological
interpellation, is a constant point of reference in public and private
interactions alike; more so, we suspect, than in countries where the
transnational influence is less keenly felt.
The scope and frequency with which such names are reiterated, and the
persistence of their performative force, points to a number of features all

2
For example, the Registry of Societies (which governs, amongst other things, the
registration of theatre companies), lists several terms that can only feature in a
society’s name ‘with a letter of support from the relevant authority,’ including
‘Raffles,’ ‘Stamford Raffles,’ ‘Lion City’ and ‘Temasek.’ The guidelines go on:
‘The word ‘Singapore’ or its abbreviation is allowed to be used within brackets at
the end of the society's name, eg. ABC Society (Singapore) to indicate the society's
place of registration’ (Ministry of Home Affairs 2009: www).

too easily obscured by the creation myth of modern Singapore’s founding

outlined above. First, despite Crawford’s amusing description of Hussain
materializing ‘as if dropped from the clouds’ (in Moore and Moore 1969:
21) neither the Rajah nor Raffles appeared out of nowhere. That the British
East India Company established a small settlement on the island in 1819
was the result of numerous individual and institutional agents acting on
diverse and sometimes contradictory motivations within a complex set of
historical, political and economic circumstances.
Second – and relatedly – Singapore was far from the singular,
autonomous entity derived from imperial hagiographers reverse-engineering
the city and nation it became into Raffles’ ‘vision’ from the outset. For
centuries, the island was perceived relationally, as a strategic consideration
within a constantly shifting set of regional power alliances and economic
trade-offs with European colonial powers. For Sultan Hussain, the move to
Singapore strengthened his claim to the Sultanate within the Riau-Johor
archipelago. For Raffles, writing in 1820: ‘It gives us the command of
China and Japan, with Siam and Cambodia, Cochin China, etc…Singapore
may, as a free port, thus become the connecting link and grant entrepôt
between Europe, Asia, and China’ (in Boulger 1999 [1897]: 312).
Third, in contrast to the image of Raffles as incisive genius and creator
of worlds, the improvised ceremony described by Crawford underscores
the ambiguity at play in the founding of Singapore. It served both to
mediate diverse interests, and shape perceptions of the relations between
them. But the forces that were harnessed remained fundamentally outside
the control of any of the actors involved.
As such, modern Singapore was, at its founding, plurally constituted,
relationally determined and performatively produced; and while we could
no doubt identify similar characteristics in almost any political-territorial
entity, what is distinctive about Singapore is the extent to which the
interplay of these factors continues to dominate the social, political,
economic and cultural life of the nation. In the three sections that follow,
we explore how that pervasive sense of other times and places informs
present-day cultural practices.
Sexless: Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral

The English and Mandarin versions of Descendants of the Eunuch
Admiral, both written by Kuo Pao Kun, premiered two months apart at the
Victoria Theatre in Singapore in 1995. The play text consists of a series of
sixteen scenes, which fall into three inter-connecting categories. The first
are those that describe the exploits of Admiral Zheng He, a Chinese

Muslim eunuch who commanded an imperial armada on seven expeditions

between 1405 and 1431, sailing at least as far as Africa and India, and
possibly America, for the purposes of trade, diplomacy and as a show of
military might and cultural pre-eminence. Other scenes are narrated by a
contemporary voice, a corporate employee who dreams of Zheng He, and
wonders if, paradoxically, she or he is his descendant. Yet others detail a
range of castration methods. No characters are assigned to the texts,
leaving a great deal of leeway open for directors and performers to
determine how the three elements are interlinked, and how closely Zheng
He and the employee are identified with each other.
Figure 2: Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral by Kuo Pao Kun, in a version

presented by The Theatre Practice, September 2010. (Image courtesy of The
Theatre Practice.)
On a superficial level, the identification is comprehensive, for both are

subject to a combination of global opportunity and personal emasculation.
In an early scene, the employee draws a direct comparison with the
hierarchical meritocracy in which the eunuchs operated: ‘Of course, every
time they get a promotion, they have to go and show their treasures
[amputated penises] again. You know, as when every time we get a
promotion or a new job we have to show our certificates, diplomas,
degrees and testimonial letters’ (2003: 40). Elsewhere, however, the
similarities are not so exact: ‘Yes, each night, through my own fear and
uncertainty, I discover more agony in him, more respect for him, and more
suspicion of him’ (38). Between the strange paradox of continuity and lack
in the play’s title, and the completist doubling of its production history, lie
the central themes of loss and fulfilment that make of Descendants of the

Eunuch Admiral a parable about the price of belonging in and to a highly

globalized city state.
The central dilemma of this condition is perhaps most succinctly
articulated in the closing lines of the play, spoken by the contemporary
narrator(s):
I cannot tarry
I must Hurry
The sea, the land, the sky is waiting
The Market is calling me! (67)
It is a deeply ambiguous ending. In an earlier scene, Zheng He attends a

polyglot market-festival, ecstatically described as ‘a celebration, a meeting
of friends thirsting for each other’s goods and each other’s company and
the great coming together’ (59). However, as the capital letter indicates,
the Market alluded to in the final line of the play refers less to such an
event, than to an expansive condition of exchange, one that includes the
‘loyal creature’ of the Eunuch himself, who ‘[h]as always been, and still
is, highly marketable’ (58), and indeed encompasses the very horizons of
the speakers’ perceptions, be they the sea, the sky or the land. By contrast
with the ‘great trading festival’ in which trade and companionship are
sought out and celebrated in equal measure, therefore, the Market submits
the entire world to a totalizing logic of exchange value.
In the Singapore context, the play seems to suggest a distinction
between the heterogeneous Asian contact zone of the market, and the all-
encompassing Market to which the city-state’s instrumentalist philosophy,
materialist society and homogenizing public culture are yoked. What
perhaps even Kuo could not have foreseen, however, was how closely his
description of the Market would resonate with the prevailing thinking of
Singapore’s government at the time. During his 1999 National Day Rally
Speech, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong described Singapore society
as made up of two types of people: ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘heartlanders.’
Both were necessary for Singapore’s well-being, he said, and the challenge
was ‘…to get the heartlanders to understand what the cosmopolitans
contribute to Singapore’s and their own well being, and to get the
cosmopolitans to feel an obligation and sense of duty to the heartlanders,’
failing which, ‘our society will fall apart’ (1999: 41). The former, hailing
from the government-built housing estate ‘heartlands’ of the republic,
played ‘…a major role in maintaining our core values and our social
stability,’ while the latter, defined by their ability to ‘…work and be
comfortable anywhere in the world,’ were indispensable in generating

wealth: ‘The world is their market. Without them, Singapore cannot run as
an efficient, high performance society’ (40).
Whether or not this is an accurate analysis of Singaporean society is a
moot point.3 What is significant is that Goh reiterated and – given that the
speech is the most important annual statement of government rationale and
policy – to a certain extent enacted the totalizing process whereby the
world is perceived first and foremost as a market. However, the salutary
lesson of Kuo’s play, with its obsessive, recurrent descriptions of
castration techniques, is that totalization comes at a price. ‘To keep my
head/ I must accept losing my tail’ begins one meditative scene in the play
(Kuo 2003: 54), but while the economistic narrative may itself be one of
profit and loss, it is not one that can account for this more profound
sacrifice. The fundamental irony of totalization is that it is primarily a
process of occlusion or exclusion, predicated as it is on the misrecognition
of a part for the whole. In consequence, it is never complete, driven as it is
by the anxiety that derives from an unacknowledgeable lack. This anxiety
is evident in the apocalyptic undertone to Goh’s analysis of Singapore
society, and it is what accounts for the need to ‘hurry’ in the closing lines
of Kuo’s play. Whoever speaks those lines is driven by the imperative to
compensate for what the Market has subtracted from the world in order to
be the world; but it is a Sisyphean task, since their very entry into the
system is at the personal cost of that which might otherwise plug the gap.
While the play therefore closes on an ambivalent note, a gradual and
potentially enabling distinction nevertheless opens up between the kind of
generative wanderings to which Zheng He is yoked, and the too-
comfortable – too pleasurable, even – castrations of his descendents, who
will have no descendents in turn.
The difference lies in the ways in which the characters relate to the
constitutive lack that drives key aspects of economic globalization.
Throughout the play, what might plug that gap is allegorized as the penis
(regardless of the Descendants’ gender), and it gradually emerges that,
although both castrated, the Eunuch and his Descendants shall suffer
different fates because of the different ways in which the procedure was

3
Eugene Tan sees the distinction as reinscribing old and unproductive binaries
when, in his analysis of Chinese identity in Singapore he writes: ‘The attributes
ascribed to the two groups mirror those of the Chinese-educated and the English-
educated and their relative adaptability to globalization. Ultimately, the
heartlander-cosmopolitan distinction does not assist in bridging the differences in a
globalized world. Instead, it hardens the supposed differences and preserves the
cultural-economic divide within the Chinese-Singaporean community in stark
terms’ (2002: 124).

carried out, be it literally or symbolically. Zheng He, we are told, had his
penis ‘cut, fried and dried’ (40), a technique that traditionally ensured it
could be sutured back to its original place between a eunuch’s legs upon
death, to ensure he could return as a man in the next life. By contrast, his
Descendants are allegorized as having been subject to a more ‘sophisticated’
method, by which a nanny regularly massages the testicles until they are
completely crushed. This retains the penis in place, and ‘it is received by
the subject as comforting, enjoyable and even highly desirable’ (64).
However, since nothing is severed, nothing can be returned upon death:
‘Nothing is missing; everything looks normal and untouched. The only
difference is that life will come to an end after he [the subject] has lived
his own; there will be no afterlife…’ (65). According to the hallucinatory
logic of the play, therefore, the Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral will
not, themselves, have descendants: acquiescence to the most pleasurable
means of castration comes at the ultimate price.
In the local context of its production, the lesson of the play was – and
remains4 – pointed. By entering into a social compact with the ‘nanny
state,’ in which an economically competent government acts in the
interests and on behalf of a quiescent populace, Singaporeans of both
genders are identified by the play as having chosen the latter method of
emasculation. In consequence, they are trapped in and by the totalizing
logic of the Market. By contrast, the possibility of an afterlife means that
Zheng He has a different relationship with the whole. His lack is less
impediment than animating agency; where the Descendants of the Eunuch
Admiral identify only with him, he himself has multiple identifications:
Stop asking, stop

Ma He, Zheng He, Sampoh Gong
Cut and dried, plugged and exiled
Orphan, wanderer, eunuch, admiral
Yesterday, from Liu Jia He to the Western Ocean
Today, from Longyamen to the Suzhou Park
Tomorrow, the Earth, the Moon, Mars and the Sun
Nameless, sexless, rootless, homeless

Everyone’s a parent to the orphan
Every god’s a protector to the wanderer
Every land and sky and water is home

4
The play has been re-staged numerous times in both English and Mandarin, as
well influencing several other Zheng He-themed performances.

It’s forever Zaijian, Selamat, Vanakkan, Farewell (66).5
Simultaneously unfettered and unfinished, Zheng He is not bound by

cultures or places, and yet his journey is never complete: he is constantly
animated by the promise of a restoration to plenitude, but will never attain
it, because he will never die. ‘I felt I had come closer and closer to him,
closer to this 600-year-old legend of a molested and incarcerated man,’
confesses his Descendant (38), and the slippage between ‘him’ and
‘this…legend’ is no accident. Zheng He is a chimerical figure who
enables, but does not name. His significance lies more in his movement
than in his identity, and the way the unpredictability of the future inheres
in his present.
As such Kuo uses the figure of Zheng He to throw the Singapore
condition into relief; but this is not to say that Singaporeans are identical
to their representatives on stage. The very fact that the play presupposes
familiarity with the full range of its subject matter indicates that audiences
are more likely to recognize – and reconstitute – themselves in the
tensions and correspondences between different contexts, than in any one
character or position.
Such are the nuances that artworks can bring to an otherwise over-
simplified – and over-simplifying – situation. But are they specific to the
theatre, or can they also be seen to be present in less rarified contexts? Our
next example suggests that they can.
Rootless: The Nine Emperor Gods

When Goh Chok Tong distinguished ‘heartlanders’ from ‘cosmopolitans’
in 1999, he said of the former: ‘Their orientation and interests are local
rather than international. Their skills are not marketable beyond Singapore.
They speak Singlish. They include taxi-drivers, stallholders, provision shop
owners, production workers and contractors’ (40). In suggesting the inter-
dependency of the two groups, Goh was seeking to address the political
reality of widening income gaps in a globalizing economy. However, one
of the features of Singapore culture that Goh’s distinction obscured is the

5
Ma He was Zheng He’s original name; Sampoh Gong is the name given to him
by Chinese Indonesian Taoist devotees; Liu Jia He refers to an ‘east river’;
Longyamen, meaning ‘Dragon’s Teeth Gate,’ refers to two rocks that stood at the
mouth of the Singapore River, until they were demolished by the British to widen
access; the Souzhou Park is a Singapore-backed industrial park in China; Zaijian,
Selamat and Vanakkan mean ‘farewell’ in Mandarin, Malay and Tamil,
respectively.

extent to which even ‘local’ orientations and interests are informed by

transnational realities and sensibilities. This can range from working for a
multi-national corporation, to the consumption of Korean, Indian or
American pop culture, to the employment of Indonesian or Phillipino
domestic workers in even relatively low-income households.
As such, many aspects of working class life in Singapore are highly
transnationalised, although how these factors are configured and experienced
vary according to a range of factors, which, in addition to income and
education levels, include religion, ethnicity and racial self-identification.
Moreover, these factors are often conflated, thereby challenging conventional
understandings of what the transnational consists in. This is particularly the
case where questions of faith are involved, and a good example is the
Chinese Jieu Hwang Yeh Dan (ஐⓒ䵎兰), or Nine Emperor Gods,
Festival, which involves numerous temples throughout suburban Singapore
over the first nine days of the ninth lunar month (normally in October).6
Ostensibly Taoist, such festivals actually express a religious,
philosophical and cosmological syncretism that is also informed by
Confucianism, Buddhism, ancestor worship, spirit mediumship and other
aspects of folk religion that have their roots in the Southern Chinese
provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, where the forbears of many Chinese
Singaporeans originated.
This sense that the gods come from elsewhere – from another ‘place’
and from multiple spiritual sources – is central to the dramaturgy of the
festival, and highlights the significance of displacement and mobility to its
meaning. Although today prayers are rather generically made to the
Emperor Gods in order to secure prosperity and well-being, as Margaret
Chan points out (2006: 55), the Wang Ye (ᡁ䵎) are ‘Gods of Pestilence,’
whose worship by Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia flourished in the
nineteenth century against a backdrop of malaria, cholera and dysentery.
Like those migrants, (and indeed some of the diseases that plagued them)
the Gods are believed to travel by water, and the festival always begins
with a colourful parade of illuminated floats, marching bands and lion and
dragon dancers, who travel from the temple to a beach or riverbank. There,
white-clad devotees gather to welcome the Gods. A tall post is erected with
a burning lamp on top that announces their arrival, and, curtained from
view by a cloth, the temple’s censer-master walks into the water to perform
an invitation ritual. Then, having filled an urn with water and covered it

6
The description and analysis that follows is based on our observations of the
festival as it unfolded at the Dou Mu Gong (ᩧẍ㬁) Temple on Upper Serangoon
Road from 29 September to 9 October 2008.

with a yellow pennant, the censer-master approaches one of up to nine

ornate palanquins, each about the size of a traditional bee hive, with
carrying poles on either side, and yokes attached by chains. He places the
urn gently in one of the palanquins, and, as the bearers shoulder the yokes
and move slowly and reverently away from the water, drums, gongs,
cymbals and horns sound out. The palanquins rock from side to side, and
devotees believe that the Nine Emperor Gods are now amongst them.
For the next nine days, the Gods will lodge in the temple. Devotees,
who follow a vegetarian diet for the period, pray, leave offerings, and seek
guidance. Meanwhile, the presumed needs of the Gods shape the
unfolding event. A thick fug of incense and an almost constant barrage of
percussion provide the sensorial medium in which they are believed to
thrive; Hokkien street opera, lion and dragon dances and other
performances keep them entertained, even when no one else is watching.
These culminate on the final day with a long programme of opera, dances
and musical performances. The Gods are then returned to the palanquins,
and for an hour the bearers circle the temple courtyard, which is filled with
scent and smoke from slow-burning sandalwood. A carnivalesque parade
accompanies the palanquins back to the waterside, where the atmosphere
intensifies. All the bands play simultaneously and hundreds of devotees
stand with incense sticks held aloft between their palms. One by one, the
palanquins are carried up to an altar, and divested of their celestial
passengers. In turn, the censer-master carries a smoking urn and places it
in a large bamboo boat festooned with paper bearing the names of
devotees, that has been gathered over the preceding nine days. To shouts
and the crash of cymbals, the boat is towed out into the water and set
alight. As it disappears from view around a bend in the river, the crowd
falls silent, and return to their cars and buses.
The Nine Emperor Gods festival provides an intriguing take on what
‘rootless’ means in the context of contemporary Singapore. Like the other
terms that frame this analysis, it is more productive paradox than simple
loss or lack. Most straightforwardly, this is because the devotees are
seeking spiritual or material increase, rather than mourning their
deracinated condition. Indeed, it is hard to establish specifically where or
how questions of identity figure in the event. But what can be observed is
that the festival makes a virtue of its participants’ own transplanted
condition. The Gods are not so much representatives of an originary
Chinese motherland, as figures of migration and re-settlement; in so far as
the festival provides an opportunity for its participants to reaffirm their
cultural identity, it is one rooted in rootlessness.

As such, the festival stands at the intersection of diverse strands of

Singaporean modernity. The very organization of the event requires
substantial engagement with state agencies, whose technocratic rationality
frames any number of diverse customs and rituals within a standardized
set of public order and public entertainment regulations. Thus, perhaps, is
cultural identity made reflexive in multi-ethnic Singapore; not so much by
symbolic action, as through the filling in of a form. The police are a
constant, if peripheral, presence at the Nine Emperor Gods ceremonies,
with most of the crowd and traffic control given over a private security
firm and temple ushers. Priests direct the details of the religious rituals, the
various cultural presentations are carefully scheduled, and the
organisational performance of the temple’s management committee is
brought to the fore. During the 2008 festival that we observed, for
instance, a ceremony was held to inaugurate new lion dance lions by
having invited local dignitaries ‘dot’ their heads.7
This latter example indicates the ways in which administrative and
organizational factors not only frame the festival, but are integral to its
unfolding, and the same might be said of technology. In particular, electric
light is the third ‘medium’ we could add to smoke and noise as the Gods’
preferred environment. Strings of coloured bulbs illuminate the road for
half a kilometre in either direction outside the temple, which is itself
ablaze with floodlights. Meanwhile, the latest developments in decorative
lighting are adapted to the paraphernalia of the performances. The chariot
that carries the lion dance drum is equipped with its own car battery, in
order to power its UV light strings while on the move; the dragon dance
dragons bristle with tiny, bright, LEDs; and pulsating fairy lights edge the
sides and roofs of the palanquins, enhancing their kinetic qualities as they
rock, and contributing to the trance-like effects of the actions’ extended
repetitions.
All this is captured on video, still cameras, and mobile phones. Such
technologies are ubiquitous, and underscore the extent to which the event
is presented as a visual spectacle, given not only to be seen, but imaged.
Even curtaining the arrival and departure of the Gods from view is itself a
visible act and focal point of the larger ritual, while documentation by
onlookers and devotees alike indicates an ‘afterlife’ for the event, both for
private reference, and in public domains such as the online video sharing
site YouTube. Given the high levels of use and ownership of digital

7
This ceremony is conducted in order to awaken the spirit of the lion. A lion that
dances without having been blessed in this way is thought to bring bad luck.

technology amongst Singaporeans,8 this is hardly surprising, and

underscores the limitations of any characterization of such festivals as
somehow outside or at odds with modernity. It also suggests a blurring of
the boundaries between ‘devotees’ and ‘onlookers’; participants may
occupy multiple positions simultaneously, a point that takes on particular
relevance when the festival and other such practices are considered within
a regional context. The Nine Emperor Gods festival is also celebrated in
Malaysia and parts of Thailand, albeit with local variations. In Singapore,
firecrackers are not permitted. On the Thai island of Phuket, what it is
known as the Vegetarian Festival features parades of devotees elaborately
pierced with a variety of ritual and household objects. The resulting
transnational network of practices and affiliations has contributed to the
development of religious tourism by the devotees of numerous deities.
Every ninth lunar month, thousands of pilgrims from Singapore and
further afield take a short boat trip to pray to the God of Prosperity at the
Da Bo Gong Temple on nearby Kusu Island. Conversely, package tours
are organized by Singapore operators throughout the year to a range of
significant or ‘effective’ shrines and temples in Malaysia and Thailand.
In a nuanced survey of potential intersections between performance
practices and transnational formations, Haiping Yan writes of theatre as a
pertinent terrain for exploring how global forces are encountered and
expressed, because it offers ‘a humanly animated site where living
community and live performance are mutually engendered and the
lifeworld at large is writ small with human materiality’ (2005: 226). The
Nine Emperor Gods festival and other such events are not theatre in the
sense meant by Yan, but the terms in which she couches her analysis
resonate nonetheless. Community and performance are mutually
engendered through the investment of time, resources and energy in a
series of spectacular cultural practices at a number of significant locations
over a short period of time. The results are expressed materially through
the bodies of the participants, and their immersion in the powerful
sensorial medium of the event. What is distinctive is the ambiguous
relationship between the material dimension and the lifeworld to which it
gives form. At some level, devotees believe it is the Gods who rock the
palanquins, rather than the lurching, swaying bearers; should it rain during
the festivities, this will be providence. And yet, for devotees and onlookers

8
According to the Singapore Department of Statistics, in 2008 there were 1310
mobile phone subscribers per 1000 population (Singapore Statistics 2009: www),
while a report by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore concluded
that about 80% of households in Singapore had access to at least one computer
(2009: 2).

alike, the animating force of this lifeworld is irreducible to the actions of

the spirits. Ethnic identities, cultural memories, national imperatives,
regional mobility and affiliations and, most of all perhaps, the pressures
and pleasures of modern living in a globalised economy: these factors and
others contribute to the means by which ‘rootlessness’ is recognized and
negotiated and, for a time at least, resolved in performance.
Homeless: Ho Tzu Nyen and Zai Kuning

The inclusion of spiritual practices in our characterization of the
transnation state requires that we expand the sense of what is meant by
‘nation state’ beyond what is material, territorial or even imagined.
Typically for Singapore, however, this is not so much a straightforward
addition, as part compensation for the erosion of some aspects of those
more commonplace frameworks. In an essay entitled ‘Lost at Home: A
Nation’s State of Geographical Confusion,’ the journalist Cherian George
reflected on the fact, widespread in space-scarce and development-
intensive Singapore, that ‘…the place you grow up in will not be the place
you grow old in, and that you can never go back, because what was there
then is here no longer’ (2000: 190). George recounts the disappearance of
his childhood neighbourhood, demolished to accommodate an expressway
sliproad, and how he salvaged a small piece of tiled floor from the rubble
of his house. It is a detail he returns to at the close of the chapter:
‘Conservation protects only the most widely shared of memories…
Memories recorded self-consciously always miss the mundane. It is the
things one takes for granted that disappear most irretrievably – like the
feel of small mosaic tiles beneath one’s small, bare feet’ (ibid.: 194).
In thinking through the poetics of the transnation state, George’s
observations represent a particularly salient combination of themes. The
conundrum of transnational belonging is one that exercises any number of
displaced, decentred or otherwise mobile subjects. But what is striking
about the Singapore context is the extent to which such dynamics are at
work in the very place Singaporeans would be expected to call ‘home.’ As
George indicates, the city state’s urban environment has undergone radical
upheavals since independence. Massive public housing and infrastructure
development projects were required to meet the demands of a dense and
fast-growing population, and to compress a nation’s-worth of civic,
industrial and military materiel into a small island’s-worth of territory.
Moreover, given how closely national flourishing was yoked to success in
the global economy, local claims for the intangible value of particular
properties or areas tended to carry little weight when set against

quantitative gains in efficiency of the sort enabled by the sliproad that

replaced George’s childhood home.
As George goes on to suggest, although attitudes to conservation have
changed for the better in recent years (partly, we might add, in response to
the needs of international tourists hungry for ‘authenticity’), this, in turn,
can frame the past in particular ways. Buildings of historical significance
are rightly protected, but the value of personal and cultural memories tend
to be downplayed; recalled, if at all, only in the embodied residues of
long-past experience.
This situation presents both an opportunity and a challenge for
performance. Every year on 9th August, the state stages a National Day
Parade in order to renew a sense of national affect in the 30 000 live
spectators, and much larger television audience. Military drills and mass
displays combine with spectacular song and dance routines and fireworks
to provide an aesthetic vehicle for nationalistic messages and sentiments,
among which the concept of ‘home’ figures prominently.9 In this, the
Parade can be said to compensate for the kinds of loss that George
describes, by creating a sense of belonging that resides first and foremost
in the spectator’s embodied responses to the performance, or in emotional
attachments to rather diffuse concepts such as ‘our land’ or the dreams that
Singaporeans can build together.
At the same time, the spectacular and resolutely collective nature of the
event quite clearly overrides the ‘mundane’ and personalised sense of
home that George mourns, and this begs the question of whether such
phenomena can ever figure in the inherently social activity of performance.
In response, we would point to the work of two Singaporean artists who
have addressed these themes not so much through nostalgia or historical
reconstruction, as by integrating them into a larger set of reflections on
transnational belonging.
The first example is a 45 minutes lecture-performance by Ho Tzu
Nyen, entitled House of Memory (2008). Spotlit at a desk adjacent to a
large projection screen, Ho read out a commentary that was accompanied

9
Particularly in the lyrics of the annual National Day song, perhaps the best-
known example being ‘Home,’ performed by Kit Chan for both the 1998 and 2004
National Day Parades. The lyrics of ‘What Do you See,’ the 2009 song by local
‘indie’ band Electrico, featured an exemplary take on the ways in which mobility is
figured as an integral component of belonging: ‘There's a jewel on the ocean,/ a
gem upon the sea/ Where the future is an open book/ A land of destiny/ We could
set our sights into the wind and sail the seven seas/ or climb the highest mountain
top as long as we believe/ What do you see? What do you see?’ (NDP09 2009:
www).

by a continuous montage of film clips that together spanned the history of

Euro-American and East Asian cinema. Prefaced by footage of cameras
being focused, film projectors switched on, and audience members
entering cinemas and watching movies, the montage segued into a
sequence based on the demolition of buildings, and Ho began to speak.
Echoing George’s observation that in Singapore ‘…the place you grow up
in will not be the place you grow old in’ (2000: 190), Ho recounted the
destruction of his childhood home and the difficulty he now has in
recalling it, continuing: ‘I often wonder what remains...what remains of
my childhood – my past – now that there is no longer any physical proof
of the house in which it all took place.’ Ho then went to outline his
response to these thoughts:
A few years ago, I attempted to retrace my own past, and I began upon a
journey, a form of travelling without moving. Yet like any other journey,
there is always the possibility of getting distracted, of wandering from
one’s proper destination. In this case, I drifted off into a somewhat narrow
alley – I drifted into the history of a lost art: the Greek art of memory
(2008: np).
What follows is a lengthy and increasingly complex exposition of the Art

of Memory, which draws extensively on Frances Yates’ seminal 1966
work of that name, and is sometimes illustrated and sometimes
counterpointed by the audio-visual track of the film montage. Ho focuses
in particular on the visualisation technique whereby orators would
recollect their speeches by imagining themselves moving through a house
and entering rooms to retrieve pre-set ‘memory objects.’ However, Ho
conspicuously fails to use this framework as a solution to the predicament
he outlines at the beginning of the performance, at least, not in the terms
one might expect. Flouting the narrative expectation he establishes at the
outset, he does not return to his personal story, and eschews recognisable
visual and verbal references to Singapore. There is no sense in which his
excursion into the art of memory has helped him recover what was lost to
him in any ‘local’ way. Rather, his images of rooms and buildings are
drawn from the films of Resnais, Godard, Antonioni, Tarkovsky,
Peckinpah, Fellini, Pasolini and others, and his commentary takes on an
increasingly theoretical tenor.
Instead, Ho presents a performative deconstruction of the concept of
the ‘House of Memory’ by demonstrating the various ways in which it is
constitutively dependent on acts and images of destruction. This
destruction takes a number of different forms. He begins by tracing the
origins of the Art of Memory to the story of the Greek lyric poet

Simonides, who was able to identify banquet-goers crushed beyond

recognition by a collapsed building, because he had earlier been in the
room and could recall where they were standing. Later, Ho elaborates on
more recent theories of memory, stating: ‘Our memories constitute but do
not restitute a passed event…[T]he very act of recollection does not
preserve the past, rather recollection is that which eradicates the past,
alters the past, transforms the past…and in its place, is a new story.
Memory is not storage, rather, memory is story’ (2008).
The point has particular resonance in relation to the audio-visual track,
for, having established that he no longer remembers his childhood well,
Ho’s film montage can be seen as a set of substitute memories, itself made
up of fragmented outtakes from other narratives of other times and places.
The obsessive film-buffery on display in the selection and editing of the
material is evidence of Ho’s cinephilic tendencies, and hints at many hours
spent in front of the screen during his formative years. Moreover, while
Ho may be atypical in the depth of his immersion in international film
culture, in simple terms, his approach is indicative of the role that
globalized cultural production plays in the way Singaporeans of his
generation and younger foster a transnational worldview.
In House of Memory, then, the actual destruction of Singapore’s
material history throws into relief the fact that memory does not reside in
objects, but is continuously remade and re-narrativized in a dynamic
relation with recollection and forgetting, the real and its representations,
and, of particular significance in the present context, ‘here’ and elsewhere.
When the infrastructure of his childhood fell away, Ho seems to be
suggesting, images of other places crowded in to fill the gap. But rather
than providing the resources to reconstruct an alternative vision or version
of home, they drew attention to the very act of remembering. Memory is
not so much to be recovered, as reflected upon; destruction is not to be
mourned, but rather incorporated, deployed as a motive force by which
one might engage creatively in a process of self-understanding and
presentation.
While Ho’s experience is a common one, his work is provocative
because of an almost ascetic commitment to the concepts he is exploring.
But in the conspicuousness of its absence from House of Memory,
Singapore nevertheless remains a ghostly presence, and the question is
begged as to what conceptions of home, if any, are constituted more in
continuity than rupture. It is a question that has animated Zai Kuning, a
multi-disciplinary artist of mixed Malay-Chinese parentage who in 2000
began a long-term personal and creative project of re-connecting the
Singapore where he grew up with Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago, where

the Malay side of his family originated. The northernmost islands of the
archipelago are visible from Singapore, and the provincial capital, Tanjung
Pinang, is only a 45 minute boat ride away on Bintan Island. However,
interactions between the two sites are almost entirely determined by the
dynamics of the so-called Singapore-Riau-Johor Growth Triangle, a zone
of economic and industrial activity that synthesizes Singaporean capital
and expertise with Indonesian and Malaysian labour and natural resources
in the pursuit of global markets. In Singapore, there is little public
awareness of the region’s shared cultural and geo-political history, nor the
environmental and ecological interdependence of its component parts.
It is perhaps apt, then, that Zai’s original motivation for travelling to
the archipelago was to search for the indigenous Orang Laut, or ‘Sea
People,’ who have traditionally led a nomadic life, borne by the currents
that trace out trade routes, unencumbered by a concern for maritime
borders or visa requirements. Zai’s work subsequently expanded beyond
this to take in the ethnic Malay inhabitants of the region, whom he found
himself drawn to and accommodated by as he waited for the seasonal
appearance of the unpredictable and elusive Orang Laut.
These processes of encounter, and the resulting presentations back in
Singapore, have taken on the cast of an experimental research-based
practice. Part-performance, part-ethnography, the outcomes of this
improvised process of engagement with the culture and concerns of
peoples with whom Zai shares a language and a region, but whose way of
life and social circumstances differ radically from those in which he grew
up, have varied widely. In Riau, Zai commissioned a performance of the
masked Malay theatre form Mak Yong by a fishing community whose
troupe had been inactive for over twenty years. Back in Singapore, a series
of public presentations included compositions for guitar and voice and
lecture-performances incorporating video footage and choreographed
movement. Zai also featured among an international range of artists
brought together to provide source material for Singapore director Ong
Keng Sen’s major intercultural work, Diaspora (2006-9).
However, perhaps the most complete stand-alone outcome to date is a
30 minute film, Riau, which documents Zai’s search for the Orang Laut,
and which features images of life in the archipelago. Narratively, Riau is
anti-climactic. Zai waits months for the Orang Laut to turn up, and when
they do, he spends little more than a drunken afternoon singing songs in a
boat with two of them. The waiting process, however, gives Zai the
opportunity to foster tentative ties with the Malay family that ‘adopts’ him
on one of the islands. This involves helping them build an extension to
their house, which he then moves into. Such incidents are presented in a

mix of colour and black and white footage, with very little on-location
sound. Instead, there are long periods of silence, punctuated rather
dissonantly by Zai’s own music, some of which derives from the live
recording of an improvisation performed in Singapore. When, in the latter
part of the film, we see the two Orang Laut singing and playing the guitar
in their boat, we understand something of the impetus behind Zai’s own
musical performance, and sense a complex set of associations, which
draws attention both to the communal nature of Zai’s initial experiences in
Riau—and the use of performances to mediate the ensuing encounters—
and to the process of cultural enquiry that Zai is enacting when he
accompanies his guitar playing with improvised vocalizations.
In light of such work, and as with the other operative terms in this
analysis, ‘homeless’ sits in a rather ambiguous relationship to the concept
of ‘home.’ Zai Kuning’s project brings us full circle to the relational
location of Singapore that Raffles and his men exploited so skillfully in
1819, and that would ultimately see the island annexed from its
surrounding environment. However, while there is a sense in Riau that Zai
is attempting to go ‘back to his roots,’ his journey is certainly no
homecoming. Much of the footage is in longshot, as if he is positioned
somewhat at a distance from the place he is visiting; people figure only
fleetingly, their individuality withheld, except for the children, who regard
Zai himself as a kind of curiosity. It is a haunting and haunted film, whose
disjunctions between sound and image, curiosity and disinterest, the
personal and the social, leave an unsettled sense of where ‘home’ itself
may reside.
Every year, the National Day Parade reiterates the national narrative of
Singapore and culminates in a spectacular firework display. In its
brilliance and percussive intensity, national affect is experienced in a
sensorial overload; it is, quite literally, breathtaking. But in the quiet and
the darkness left behind by those self-erasing sparks, amnesia and
uncertainty loom large once more. A similar dialectic animates House of
Memory and Riau, albeit in more reflective mode. Addressing the theme of
belonging in hybrid art forms, there is a sense in both cases that ‘home’
lies between media: inhabiting the space and time of live performance,
other places are imaged through the alternative temporalities that filmic
reproduction and editing software afford. It is a precarious position. In
Ho’s case, the audio-visual track provided by the film culminates in an
extended sequence of explosion footage; Zai seems more comfortable
behind the camera than participating in the daily life of his adoptive
family. Neither artist represents home as such, for if they are ‘at home’

anywhere, it is in the act of representing, and in marking the limitations

and losses this inevitably entails.
Conclusion
Analysing cultural practices and meanings within a transnational framework
is explicitly a two-sided process. As a metric, the transnational privileges
certain scales of activity and modes of mobility, as well as the national
identifications and institutions against which it is nominally defined. At
the same time, each new ‘object’ of study brings with it the potential to
nuance or challenge what we understand by transnationalism itself, and
this is acutely the case where affective practices and aesthetic experiences
are in play.
In this chapter, we have sought to give due recognition to that double-
sidedness, by focusing on a novel example of a transnational formation,
and exploring how it is both expressed and produced by a range of events
and practices we have gathered under the term ‘performance.’ Specifically,
we have brought a transnational studies approach to bear upon the self-
imagining of a nation state, Singapore. Our argument is that for a variety
of historical, cultural, economic, political and geographic reasons, one
useful way of understanding Singapore is as a transnation state – playing
out within national borders and upon the contours of a national ideology
many of the affective tensions, intercultural encounters and political de-
and re-territorializations that characterize the ordinarily more dispersed
and diffuse condition of transnationality.
Focusing on the cultural dimension of this condition draws attention to
what we have described as the poetics of the transnational, and in the case
under discussion here, this has two related characteristics. The first is that
within a national context, transnational influences are experienced as some
kind of lack or absence. This motivates a range of compensatory behaviours,
among which performance—broadly described—figures prominently.
Ambiguities in the founding of modern Singapore were smoothed over by
a performance at the time, and continue to lend performative force to its
reiteration today; Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral explores political
and cultural emasculation as both disempowering and generative; in the
Nine Emperor Gods festival, cultural memories of migration and
displacement intersect with transnational sensibilities to encompass the
spiritual realm, as well as to foster regional networks of affiliation; and in
the work of Ho Tzu Nyen and Zai Kuning, the material and relational
absence of ‘home’ results in two aesthetic responses that give disconcerting
form to the ambivalence that loss leaves in its wake.

These four examples were chosen in response to the suggestion in

Kuo’s play that, both despite and because of the remarkable success of the
People’s Action Party in building a viable state and economy, the
Singapore condition remains ‘nameless, sexless, rootless, homeless.’ While
each of these examples is transnationally-informed, they are simultaneously
embedded within a range of other meanings and territories, be they the
temporal continuities and ruptures of Singapore’s post-colonial imaginary,
the spiritual dimension of worshipping the Nine Emperor Gods, or the
sub-regional affiliations that join Singapore to the Riau Archipelago.
Played out in and through performance, these examples are scaled to the
human body and its actions, and establish social relations that are mediated
through presentation, aesthetic display, and the reproduction of images.
Inevitably, however, these examples are far from exhaustive, and it is
important to acknowledge that they too, may obscure as much as they
reveal. Although the characters of Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral are
neither named nor gendered, equating disenfranchisement with castration
privileges the male experience in a way that is hard to pin down precisely
in the play, but clearly raises questions about where and how female
subjectivity figures, not only in the play, but in the social and political
circumstances to which it is addressed. By this token, it is telling that in
responding to the thematic focus dictated by the line in Kuo’s play, our
own analysis has mainly featured men: be they historical figures, gods, or
artists. Along similar lines, and while always wary of reproducing an over-
simplifed racial taxonomy of Singapore’s peoples, we note the absence of
ethnic Indian experience and cultural expressions from our examples.
Moreover, references both to gender and to the Indian subcontinent
combine to underscore another feature of Singapore’s transnationality that
has been glossed over here: the large population of migrant labourers who
work in construction and domestic environments, and whose contribution
to Singapore’s economic success is both substantial and under-recognised.10
Clearly, more work remains to be done in these areas; work that, in
addition to articulating a wider range of transnationally-informed identities
than we have been able to do justice to here, may also clarify whether or

10
In a report for the NGO TWC2 (Transient Workers Count Too), Noorashikin
Abdul Rahman notes that consistent figures on migrant labour are hard to come by
in Singapore, in part because of political sensitivities over the number of jobs held
by foreigners. However, she parses the available information from a number of
sources to suggest that ‘one in three persons gainfully employed in Singapore at
the end of 2007 was a foreigner,’ and that in 2006, 646 000 of the 756 000 foreign
employees were work-permit holders engaged in unskilled or low-skilled jobs
(2008: 1-2).

not performance itself plays a distorting role in determinations about what

is given form and visibility within the transnational imaginary. On the
other hand, having signalled possible limitations to the analysis at hand,
we end by highlighting its larger potential. Singapore is a distinctive
political, cultural and territorial entity, but it is not a singularity. Its
differences from other nation states are of degree, not essence. As such,
although cultural representations and inventions of the transnation state
may be less explicitly framed elsewhere, this does not mean they are
absent. Perhaps the constitutive lack in the national imaginary is felt less
keenly, the performances made in compensation a little more muted by
comparison. But however finely interwoven with the fabric of the world,
these traces of loss are there to be sensed, if not seen, and acted upon, if
not represented.
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New York: Routledge

DEDICATION TO MARI NABESHIMA

(1972-2010)
While this book was in preparation a dear friend—and an extraordinary

example of an artist working with transnational Southeast Asian performance
—died suddenly and unexpectedly of dengue shock syndrome in her
adopted home of Denpasar, Bali at the age of thirty-eight.
Born in Tokyo in 1972, Mari and her younger sister Maho studied
piano from childhood. Both became accomplished musicians. While Maho
went to the USA to continue her studies, Mari went to Bali, where she met
her future husband, composer and director Kadek Suardana, during a
research interview about gamelan for a Japanese publication. Japanese
artists and scholars have long had a fascination with Balinese culture, but
until the 1980s tended to view Bali from a distance, with paternalistic
traces originating in the brief period when Japan occupied much of
Southeast Asia. Mari was part of a new generation of Japanese artists,
scholars and activists who immersed themselves in local cultural
expression, subtly yet actively participating in Balinese communities.
Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s Mari intensively studied
gender wayang with master musician I Wayang Loceng from Sukawati.
Loceng considered her to be one of the few non-Balinese to have truly
mastered the repertoire and held her up as the benchmark for other
students to emulate. Mari also conducted research for her PhD from
Tokyo’s Geijutsu Daigaku University of Fine Arts and Music, focusing on
the meaning and vocal style of kakawin, which is used extensively in
Balinese ritual contexts. She was awarded her degree in 2006, receiving
high praise for the depth and originality of her thesis.
Eventually she made Bali her home with Kadek, whom she married in
2002. Theirs was a truly creative partnership. Kadek, a co-founder of the
ARTI Foundation and renowned composer and choreographer, considers
her an essential part of the foundation’s success. She supported ARTI’s
acclaimed intercultural production of Gambuh Macbeth (1999)—
combining the conservation and expansion of the classical courtly
Balinese dance-drama with the Shakespearean play. This was performed at
festivals around the world. Kadek maintains that Mari was crucial to
ARTI’s professional reputation and artistic credibility; she arranged many
of the foundation’s international tours. She was also instrumental in the
192 Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance
composition and production of Ritus Legong (2002) and Tajen (‘Cockfight’)

I (2002) and II (2006). She also composed music for ARTI’s most recent
major production: Sri Tanjung (2009). Mari was graceful and funny, and
stronger than her fragile appearance suggested. Not so long ago, she
nursed her father through the final stages of cancer in Tokyo, while still
somehow managing her family home and ARTI in Denpasar with Kadek.
Sometimes a little shy in public, Mari in fact held clear opinions and
could communicate skilfully with people from around the world. We
would often joke, half-seriously over bowls of Jakarta noodles, about the
thrills and spills of living and working in Indonesia as a foreigner, and
about what she laughingly called ‘the Balinese condition.’ In her gently
deft and diligent way, she helped to create some of the most imaginative
and successful cross-cultural events staged in Indonesia. Most recently,
Mari and Kadek had the original idea of inviting a non-Balinese ensemble
to the annual gong kebyar gamelan contest performances at the Bali Arts
Festival (PKB). New York’s Gamelan Dharma Swara, led by Andy Clay
McGraw (one of the authors in this volume), was the first ensemble to do
this. As Andy later noted, Mari was about the only person he could
imagine being able to negotiate funding out of Bali’s department of culture
to finance such an endeavour. Mari was preparing to join Dharma Swara
in performance when she fell ill. And just days before she died, she was
playing flute and keyboards with the Balinese fusion music group Abiyoga
at the PKB, doing what she loved to do.
This book is dedicated to Mari not only because this editor had hoped
initially to co-author a chapter for this volume with her, based on her
experience of Japanese gamelan players in Indonesia and the resultant
gamelan craze in Japan, but also because she subtly exemplified the way
that strands of experience from disparate cultural traditions from distant
parts of the world can come together within an individual artist and give
birth to wonderful and unique creative endeavours, partnerships and
productions. The people of banjar Taensiat along with the players of
ARTI, as well as Andy McGraw and some of Mari’s Japanese friends
played angklung, gender and beleganjur for the series of funerary
ceremonies that would release her spirit from its earthly bonds. The fact
that her local community and friends from around the country turned out
in full to support these ceremonies is testimony to how she had become a
deeply respected and loved part of her adopted culture. She was a truly
beautiful human being who is sorely missed by all who knew her. We
wish her peace on her journey.
—Laura Noszlopy, London 2010

Dedication to Mari Nabeshima 193
Mari Nabeshima performing at the PKB on 26 June 2010. She passed away 4 July
2010. (Photograph by Made Widnyana Sudibya, courtesy of Maria Ekaristi.)

ADDITIONAL TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

ON SOUTHEAST ASIAN PERFORMANCE
The number of scholarly writings, documentary films and websites

concerned with Southeast Asian performance from a transnational
perspective is ever-growing. The list below of predominantly English-
language resources is intended as a starting point for the interested student
to supplement this volume, rather than a comprehensive reckoning.
Books and articles

Becker, Judith. 1983. ‘One Perspective on Gamelan in America,’ Asian
Music 15(1): 81-9
Behrend, Tim. 1999. ‘The Millennial Esc(h)atology of Heri Dono: ‘Semar
Farts’ First in Auckland, New Zealand,’ Indonesia and the Malay
World 27(79): 208-224
Braginsky, Vladimir I. and Anna Suvorova. 2008. ‘A New Wave of Indian
Inspiration: Translations from Urdu in Malay Traditional Literature
and Theatre,’ Indonesia and the Malay World 34(104): 115-153
Brinner, Benjamin. 1995. Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese
Gamelan and the Theory of Musical Competence and Interaction.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo. 2005. ‘Woman and the Changing World on
Alternative Global Stage: Sixth Women Playwrights International
Conference, Manila, 14–20 November 2003,’ Asian Theatre Journal
22(2): 324-333.
Cadar, Usopay Hamdag. 1996. ‘Maranao Kolintang Music and Its Journey
in America,’ Asian Music 27(2): 131-148
Coast, John. 1953. Dancers of Bali. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Cohen, Matthew Isaac. 2010. Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on
International Stages, 1905-1952. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Cohen, Matthew Isaac, Alessandra Lopez y Royo and Laura Noszlopy,
eds. 2007. Special Issue on Indonesian Performing Arts Across
Norders. Indonesia and the Malay World 35(101)
Conquergood, Dwight. 1988. ‘Health Theatre in a Hmong Refugee Camp:
Performance, Communication, and Culture,’ TDR 32(3): 174-208
Cooke, Mervyn. 1998. ‘The East in the West’: Evocations of the Gamelan
in Western Music. In Jonathan Bellman, ed. The Exotic in Western
Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press. pp. 258-280
Diamond, Catherine. 2001. ‘Wayang listrik: Dalang Larry Reed’s Shadow
Bridge between Bali and San Francisco,’ Theatre Research
International 26(3): 257-276
—. 2009. ‘Delicate Balance: Negotiating Isolation and Globalization in the
Burmese Performing Arts,’ TDR 53(1): 93-128
Fensham, Rachel and Peter Eckersall, eds. 1999. Dis/orientations:
Cultural Praxis in Theatre: Asia, Pacific, Australia. Clayton,
Australia: Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University
Foley, Kathy. 2001. ‘The Metonymy of Art: Vietnamese Water Puppetry
as a Representation of Modern Vietnam,’ TDR 45(4): 129-141
George, David. 1989. ‘The Tempest in Bali,’ Performing Arts Journal
11(3): 84-107
Ghosh, Amitav. 1998. Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. Delhi:
Ravi Dayal
Gibbs, Jason. 2003. ‘The West’s Songs, Our Songs: The Introduction of
Western Popular Song in Vietnam before 1940,’ Asian Music 35(1):
57-83
—. 2008. ‘How Does Hanoi Rock? The Way to Rock and Roll in
Vietnam,’ Asian Music 39(1): 5-25
Gonzalves, Theodore S. 2009. The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in
the Filipino/American Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press
Grehan, Helena. 2001. ‘Theatreworks’ Desdemona,’ TDR 45(3): 113-125
Hamera, Judith. 2002. ‘An Answerability of Memory: “Saving” Khmer
Classical Dance,’ TDR 46(4): 65-85
Hough, Brett and Barbara Hatley, eds. 1995. Intercultural Exchange
between Australia and Indonesia. Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia
Institute, Monash University
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia. 1989. ‘Indonesian Image Enhancement,’
Anthropology Today 5(6): 3-5
Irving, D.R.M. 2010. Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern
Manila. New York: Oxford University Press
Jenkins, Ron. 1979. ‘Becoming a Clown in Bali,’ TDR 23(2): 49-56
Kartomi, Margaret. 1998. ‘The Pan-East/Southeast Asian and National
Indonesian Song Bengawan Solo and Its Javanese Composer,’
Yearbook for Traditional Music 30: 85-101
Keppy, Peter. 2008. ‘Keroncong, Concours and Crooners: Home Grown
Entertainment in Twentieth-Century Batavia,’ in Peter Boomgaard,

Additional Transnational Perspectives on Southeast Asian Performance 197

Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds. Linking Destinies:
Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History. Leiden: KITLV Press. pp.
141-158
Latrell, Craig T. 2000. ‘After Appropriation,’ TDR 44(4): 44-55
—. 2008. ‘Exotic Dancing: Performing Tribal and Regional Identities in
East Malaysia’s Cultural Villages,’ TDR 52(4): 41-63
Lavelle, Lisa. 2006. Amerta Movement of Java 1986-1997: An Asian
Movement Improvisation. Lund: Centre for Languages and literature,
Lund University
Lendra, I Wayan. 1991. ‘Bali and Grotowski: Some Parallels in the
Training Process,’ TDR 35(1): 113-139
Lim, Eng-Beng. 2005. ‘Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of
Performing Gay in Singapore,’ Theatre Journal 57(3): 383-405.
Lindsay, Jennifer. 2003. ‘Performing Across the Sound Barrier,’ in
Jennifer Lindsay and Tan Ying Ying, eds. Babel or Behemoth:
Language Trends in Asia. Singapore: Asia Research Institute. pp. 133-
159
Lindsay, Jennifer. ed. 2006. Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in
Performance in Asia. Singapore: Singapore University Press
Lindsay, Jennifer. 2007. ‘Intercultural Expectations: I La Galigo in
Singapore,’ TDR 51(2): 60-75
Macauley, Alastair. 1995. ‘What is Classicism? International Critics Look
at Javanese Bedhaya,’ in David Gere, ed. Looking Out: Perspectives
on Dance and Criticism in a Multicultural World. New York:
Schirmer. pp. 141-164
McDermott, Vincent. 1986. ‘Gamelan and New Music,’ Musical
Quarterly 72(1): 16-27
McIntosh, Jonathan. 2010. ‘Dancing to a Disco Beat? Children,
Teenagers, and the Localizing of Popular Music in Bali,’ Asian Music
41(1): 1-35
MacLachlan, Heather. 2008. ‘Innovation in the Guise of Tradition: Music
among the Chin Population of Indianopolis, USA,’ Asian Music 39(2):
167-185
Murgiyanto, Sal. 1976. The Influence of American Modern Dance on the
Contemporary Dance of Indonesia. Unpublished MA thesis,
University of Colorado
Ng, Benjamin Wai-ming. 2002-2003. ‘Japanese Popular Music in
Singapore and the Hybridization of Asian Music,’ Asian Music 34(1):
1-18

Ng, Stephanie. 2005. ‘Performing the “Filipino” at the Crossroads:

Filipino Bands in Five-Star Hotels throughout Asia,’ Modern Drama
48(2): 272-296
Ong Keng Sen. 2001. ‘Encounters,’ TDR 45(3): 126-133
Perlman, Marc. 1994. ‘American Gamelan in the Garden of Eden:
Intonation in a Cross-Cultural Encounter,’ Musical Quarterly 78(3):
510-555
Peterson, William 2009. ‘The Singapore Arts Festival at Thirty: Going
Global, Glocal, Grobal,’ Asian Theatre Journal 26(1): 111-134
Picard, Michel. 1996. Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture.
Translated by Diana Darling. Singapore: Archipelago Press
Rafferty, Ellen, ed. 1989. Putu Wijaya in Performance: A Script and Study
of Indonesian Theatre. Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian
Studies, University of Wisconsin
Sarkissian, Margaret. 2000. D'Albuquerque's Children: Performing
Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. 2008. ‘Cambodia's Seasons of Migration,’ Dance
Research Journal 40(2): 56-73
Snow, Stephen. 1986. ‘Intercultural Performance: The Balinese-American
Model,’ Asian Theatre Journal 3(2): 204-232
Solís, Ted, ed. 2004. Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and
Representation in World Music Ensembles. Berkeley: University of
California Press
Stange, Paul. 1994. ‘Silences in Solonese Dance Production,’ Southeast
Asian Journal of Social Science 22: 210-229
Tan Sooi Beng. 1993. Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of
Popular Malay Opera. Singapore: Oxford University Press
Taymor, Julie. 1979. ‘Teater Loh, Indonesia, 1977-8,’ TDR 23(2): 63-76
Trimillos, Ricardo. 1986. ‘Music and Ethnic Identity: Strategies among
Overseas Filipino Youth,’ Yearbook for Traditional Music 18: 9820
Watkins, Lee. 2009. ‘Minstrelsy and Mimesis in the South China Sea:
Filipino Migrant Musicians, Chinese Hosts, and the Disciplining of
Relations in Hong Kong,’ Asian Music 40(2): 72-99
Wee, C. J. Wan-Ling. 2003. ‘Creating High Culture in the Globalized
“Cultural Desert” of Singapore,’ TDR 47(4): 84-97
—. 2004. ‘Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean
Eunuch, and the Asian Lear,’ Critical Inquiry 30(4): 771-799

Additional Transnational Perspectives on Southeast Asian Performance 199

Weiss, Sarah. 2008. ‘Permeable Boundaries: Hybridity, Music, and the
Reception of Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo,’ Ethnomusicology 52(2):
203-238
Wise, Amanda. 2006. Exile and Return among the East Timorese.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press
Wong, David T. W. 2009. Music of the Chinese in Sabah: The Keyboard
Culture. Kota Kinabalu: Opus Publications
Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music.
London: Routledge
Films and videos

Bishop, John, dir. 2008. Seasons of Migration: Sophiline Cheam Shapiro
Bass, Anne, dir. 2010. Dancing Across Borders
Catlin, Amy and Nazir Jairazbhoy, dirs. 1997. Hmong Musicians in
America: Interactions with Three Generations of Hmong-Americans,
1978-1996
Fuentes, Marlon E., dir. 1995. Bontoc Eulogy
Gardner, Janet, dir. 1999. Dancing Through Death: The Monkey, Magic
and Madness of Cambodia
Gotot Prakosa, dir. 1986. Vancouver-Borobodur
Heijnen, Hans, dir. 1991. Rockin’ Ramona
Lindsay, Jennifer, dir. 2010. Presenting Indonesia: Cultural Missions
Abroad 1952-1965
Mayer, Jim, Lynn Adler and John Rogers, dirs. 1991. Kembali—To Return
Quirino, Richie and Collis Davis, dirs. 2006. Pinoy Jazz: The Story of Jazz
in the Philippines
Zai Kuning, dir. 2005. Riau
Websites and online videos

American Gamelan Institute (http://www.gamelan.org)
ARTA - l’Association de Recherche des Traditions de l’Acteur
(http://www.artacartoucherie.com)
ARTI Foundation, Denpasar, Bali (http://www.artifoundation.org/)
Arts Network Asia (http://www.artsnetworkasia.org)
Asia Pacific Performance Exchange (http://www.wac.ucla.edu/cip/
residency/asia-pacific-performance-exchange)
Asia Society (http://asiasociety.org)
Association de Recherches des Traditions de l'Acteur
(http://www.artacartoucherie.com)

Cok Sawitri (http://coksawitrisidemen.blogspot.com)

Didikninithowok’s Channel
(http://www.youtube.com/user/didikninithowok)
Interview with Ea Sola @ Grand Theatre Groningen
(http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7622414105714220548#)
Kartini Music (http://kartini-music.com)
Nine Emperor Gods website (Malaysia)
(http://www.nine-emperorgods.org)
Phare Ponleu Selpak (http://www.phareps.org)
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. Tradition and Innovation in Cambodian Dance: A
Curriculum Unit for Post-Secondary Level Educators.
(http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southeastasia/outreach/resources/danc
eunitcomplete.pdf)
Swinging of the Palanquins from the Nine Emperor Gods festival
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaoFi1b5xy8&feature=channel)
tanzconnexions
(http://www.goethe.de/ins/id/lp/prj/tac/udp/enindex.htm)
Theatre du Soleil (http://www.theatre-du-soleil.fr)
Theatreworks (Singapore) (http://www.theatreworks.org.sg)

CONTRIBUTORS
Matthew Isaac Cohen is an American-born anthropologist and historian

of performance who lectures in theatre studies at Royal Holloway,
University of London and has in the past taught at Yale University, Leiden
University, the University of Glasgow and the University of Malaya. He
has lived on-and-off in Indonesia for about seven years, studying and
researching performing arts. He has studied wayang kulit puppetry at
Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta and with village puppeteers in Central
and West Java, holds a certificate in puppetry from Ganasidi, Indonesia’s
national puppetry association, and performs and delivers workshops on
wayang kulit internationally. Among his publications are Demon
Abduction: A Wayang Ritual Drama from West Java (Lontar, 1998), The
Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903
(Ohio UP and KITLV Press, 2006), The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian
Drama, Volume 1: Plays for the Popular Stage (Lontar, 2010) and
Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International States, 1905-1952
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). In 2009, he received the royal title of Ki
Ngabehi from the royal court of Kacirebonan (Cirebon, West Java) for
services to Cirebonese culture and traditional puppetry.
Rivka Syd Eisner received her PhD from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). Her dissertation, ‘Re-staging Revolution
and Remembering toward Change: National Liberation Front Women
Perform Prospective Memory in Vietnam,’ was awarded the National
Communication Association’s Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation
Award in 2009. Recent and upcoming publications include ‘Remembering
Revolutionary Masquerade: Performing Insurgency, Ambivalent Identity,
and the Taboo Pleasures of Colonial (Tres)passing in Wartime Vietnam’
in Performance Research (2010) and ‘Remembering Toward Loss:
Performing And So There Are Pieces,’ in Remembering Oral History
Performance (2005). From 2008-9 she worked as a postdoctoral fellow
at the National University of Singapore. Eisner is currently Co-chair of the
Emerging Scholars Committee for Performance Studies international and
a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History and Area Studies at
Aarhus University, Denmark.
Felicia Hughes-Freeland has researched dance in Indonesia for thirty

years. She has a BA in English from Cambridge University, and a PhD in
Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies. She
has published widely on performance, ritual, media, gender, Indonesian
society and culture, and anthropological theory. Her books include
Embodied Communities: Dance Traditions and Change in Java (Berghahn,
2008) and its Indonesian translation, Komunitas Yeng Mewujud (UGM
Press, 2009); Ritual, Performance, Media (Routledge, 1998); and Recasting
Ritual (Routledge, 1998). She trained in documentary filmmaking at the
National Film and Television School, and two of her ethnographic films,
The Dancer and the Dance (1988) and Tayuban: Dancing the Spirit in
Java (1996), are distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland. Her current research projects include ritual
performance, performance, heritage and ownership in Southeast Asia, and
women filmmakers in post-Suharto Indonesia. She is Reader in
Anthropology at Swansea University.
Alvin Lim is a doctoral student on the Theatre Studies Programme at the

National University of Singapore. He is also Assistant Director and
Translation Co-editor of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive
(http://a-s-i-a-web.org/). His current research focuses on syncretised
religious practices, particularly with reference to spirit mediums, their
rituals, and their relationships with gods and spirits. Other research
interests include transnational cinema and continental western philosophy.
Andrew McGraw is an ethnomusicologist, composer, performer and

Assistant Professor in the Music Department at the University of
Richmond. He has published extensively on traditional and experimental
music in Southeast Asia in various volumes including: Ethnomusicology,
Asian Music, Asian Cinema, The Yearbook for Traditional Music,
Empirical Musicology and Indonesia and the Malay World, among others.
He received his PhD in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in 2005.
As a student and performer of Indonesian musics he has studied with the
leading traditional performers of Bali and Central Java during five years of
research in Indonesia with funding from the Indonesian government
(Dharmasiswa), the Fulbright-Hayes program, Arts International, the
Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and grants from the
University of Richmond. He directs Indonesian ensembles in New York
City and Richmond, Virginia. He is currently working on a monograph
about Balinese experimental music as a fellow at the Society for the
Humanities at Cornell University.

Contributors 203
Laura Noszlopy is an anthropologist and writer specializing in contemporary

Indonesian society, performance and cultural politics, as well as youth and
street arts. She has published widely in all these fields and has also worked
for several years as a writer, editor and translator in Jakarta and Bali. She
was formerly editor of Latitudes magazine, is on the editorial panel of
Inside Indonesia, and assists with the management of Indonesia and the
Malay World. Having received her PhD from the University of East
Anglia in 2002, she currently holds the position of Honorary Research
Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is working
on the biography of John Coast, an English impresario with a long
entanglement in Southeast Asia. She also has an on-going research project
on masculinity, tradition and public space, which focuses on competitive
arts forms produced and performed by youth groups in urban Bali. These
projects have been funded by the British Academy, Association of South-
East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research.
Eric Prenowitz obtained his PhD from the Centre d’Études Féminines at
the University of Paris 8, under the direction of Hélène Cixous. He
currently teaches Cultural Studies at the School of Fine Art, History of Art
& Cultural Studies of the University of Leeds. He has published widely on
the work of Cixous and Jacques Derrida. He has spent a good deal of time
at the Théâtre du Soleil over the years doing various odd jobs, including a
number of translations into English. He has recently published ‘Rêvécrire:
“le don du rêve,”’ in Hélène Cixous: Croire Rêver, Arts de pensée,
Campagne Première, 2010; and ‘Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and
Hélène Cixous on the Phone,’ Discourse, Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2,
2008.
Paul Rae is Assistant Professor on the Theatre Studies Programme at the

National University of Singapore, and co-artistic director (with Kaylene
Tan) of spell#7 performance (www.spell7.net). He is the author of Theatre
& Human Rights (Palgrave, 2009), and has published articles in TDR,
Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Theatre
Research International. Recent and forthcoming book chapters appear in
The Rise of Performance Studies (Palgrave, 2011), Translation in Asia (St
Jerome, 2010), Contesting Performance (Palgrave, 2010), Performance
and the Contemporary City (Palgrave, 2010) and Performance, Embodiment
and Cultural Memory (Cambridge Scholars, 2009).

Ashley Thompson has a BA in History and Literature from Harvard, an

MA in Indian Studies from the University of Paris 3, and a PhD in
Women’s Studies from the University of Paris 8. She lectures in the
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies of the University
of Leeds and is a specialist in Cambodian Cultural History, with a
sustained research focus on classical and pre-modern arts and literatures
complemented by more punctual work on the contemporary period. The
Cambodian case is informed by forays into the larger Asian context, with a
view to theorising Asian politico-cultural formations. Her work also
explores avenues for comparison of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ metaphysical
traditions, and the limits of the comparative endeavour. Her research is
informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and revolves around
questions of memory, political and cultural transition, sexual difference
and subjectivity. Objects of analysis include Hindu and Buddhist
sculpture, cult or ritual practices and texts, as well as other forms of fine
and performing arts. She is currently completing a monograph entitled
Engendering the Buddhist State: Reconstructions of Cambodian History.
Hypatia Vourloumis received her PhD in Performance Studies from New

York University. She is a lecturer at the International Centre of Hellenic
and Mediterranean Studies and Drury University Centre in Greece. She is
also the editor of an anthology on contemporary Balinese performance
(forthcoming, Udayana University Press) and is currently working on a
book on postcolonial Indonesian linguistic and cultural production. Her
essay ‘Doing Things with Words: Postcoloniality, Paralanguage,
Performance’ will shortly appear in a volume on new performance studies
published by Duke University Press.

INDEX
affinity intercultures, 17, 63 decolonization, 11-12

amusement parks, 10 Denpasar Moon, 15
Artaud, Antonin, 8, 50, 115, 126-9 Derrida, Jacques, 87-9, 110-11, 125-8
ASEAN, 13 Descendents of the Eunuch Admiral,
Asia Pacific Performance Exchange, 17, 163, 165, 171-6, 187-8
14 diaspora, 18, 81, 135-9
Asian Composers League, 60 Didik Nini Thowok (a.k.a. Didik
authenticity, 11-12, 59, 62-3, 115, Hadiprayitno), 15-18, 25-43
182 Ea Sola, 16, 18, 133-60
avant-garde, 43, 47-50, 56-74, 98, embodiment, 16, 110-11, 125-8,
118 133, 135, 139-41, 154-6, 188
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 134-5, 154, 159 Emmert, Rick, 36-8
Bali Arts Festival, 15, 70-2 exoticism, 8-9, 12-14, 58, 67, 115,
bangsawan, 9, 12 118, 151; see also postcolonial
Barba, Eugenio, 39, 56-7 exotic, Orientalism
bedhaya, 29-38, 40 experimental world musics, 61-3
Bedhaya Hagoromo, 25, 29-43 Fabian, Johannes, 4,
Brecht, Bertolt, 143, 158 feminism, 112-14, 118-20, 128, 159
borders and boundaries, 2, 164, 187 festivals, 11, 13-14, 26, 63, 67, 82,
Blue Moon, The, 7 95, 144-5; see also Bali Arts
Butler, Judith, 110-12, 124-8 Festival, Nine Emperor Gods
Cage, John, 47, 54, 56, 64, 68 Festival
Cixous, Hélène, 16, 79-80, 89-93, flow, 2, 10, 14, 25, 41-2, 163-4
98-9, 103, 109, 114 Flying Circus Project, The, 14
Coast, John, 11 gamelan, 6, 8, 12-13, 37-8, 47-74
Cok Sawitri, 17, 107-29 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 65, 115
contact zone, 5-6, 18, 173 gender, 16-17, 108-14, 119, 125;
cosmopolitanism, 6, 12, 18, 25, 57- see also cross-gender and
8, 63, 173, 176 transgender
creativity, 28, 33, 39, 65, 74 gong kebyar, 52-3, 65-6
creolisation, 40 Hall, Stuart, 142
cross-gender and transgender, 15- Ho Tzu Nyen, 182-4, 187
16, 19, 34, 119, 171-6; see also hybridity, 2, 6-7, 40, 53, 63
gender hyphenated identity, 18, 141
cultural complexity, 17 interculturalism, 17, 39-41, 56, 60,
cultural diplomacy, 11, 13, 58 82
cultural imperialism, 13-14, 41-2, internationalism, 11, 66, 73
58-9, 66 joget gamelan, 6
cultural intimacy, 5 Joseph, May, 119-20
Dardanella, 9 kethoprak, 25, 27
Dea, Alex, 36-9, 43 King and I, The, 12
Kok Thlok, 93, 96-7 Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 166-71,

Kuo Pao Kun, 17, 163, 165, 171-6 186
McPhee, Colin, 8, 14, 51, 53, 55 reflexivity, 104, 110, 114, 179
Massumi, Brian, 125-8 refugees, 94-5, 136, 152-3
Mead, Margaret, 115-7 Reich, Steve, 55
Minh-ha, Trinh T., 114, 124 Sadra, I Wayan, 54-5, 69
minimalism, 55 Sauman (a.k.a. Sang Nyoman
Mnouchkine, Ariane, 79, 93, 97-8, Arsawijaya), 17, 67-8
100, 103 Schechner, Richard, 39
multiculturalism, 40-1, 43, 149-50, Sejarah Melayu, 5
154 Shapiro, Sophiline Cheam, 18, 81
national identity and culture, 1-2, 8, Spivak, Gayatri, 111-22
11-12, 14-16, 19, 62-3, 109-10, Taman Setia, 10
154, 163, 169, 182, 186 Taylor, Charles, 4
neotraditionalism, 48, 65-7, 73 Théâtre du Soleil, 79-80, 84, 89, 93,
Ng Yi-Sheng, 168-9 97-8, 102-4
Nine Emperor Gods Festival, 177- Thngai Neh, 79
81 tourism, 14, 52-3, 67, 73-4, 117,
noh, 25, 29-38 180, 182
Ong Keng Sen, 18, 185 tragedy, 84, 89-90, 99
Orientalism, 8, 18, 53-4, 151, 154 transnationalism, 2, 15, 18, 81, 154,
Pavis, Patrice, 17, 39 164-6, 176-7, 181, 187-9 and
performativity, 4, 17, 108, 110, 120, passim
124-5, 163, 169-71 travel and touring, 2, 7-10, 144-6,
Phare Ponleu Selpak, 79, 93-5 150, 185
Philippine Educational Theater wayang, 4, 8, 13, 60
Association, 14, 82 Widnyana, Ida Bagus Madé, 55, 70-
postcolonial exotic, 17 2
postmodernism, 40, 49, 52, 56-8 world music, 14, 67; see also
post-traditional, 17 experimental world musics
Zai Kuning, 184-7

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Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance

Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance:

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

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2575-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2575-7

Introduction: The Transnational Dynamic in Southeast Asian

Creativity and Cross-Cultural Collaboration:

Transnational Aesthetics and Balinese Music ........................................... 47

Cambodia’s Trials: Theatre, Justice and History Unfinished .................... 79

‘My Dog Girl’: Cok Sawitri’s Agrammaticality, Affect and Balinese

‘I am Cultures’: Ea Sola’s Transnational, Transcultural Arts

Nameless, Sexless, Rootless, Homeless:

Dedication to Mari Nabeshima (1972-2010) ........................................... 191

Additional Transnational Perspectives on Southeast Asian

MATTHEW ISAAC COHEN

Written accounts of performing arts are commonly framed, explicitly or

was ‘an expanding cloud of localized, fragile, loosely interrelated petty

nineteenth-century Java but perhaps originating centuries earlier, tells how

collective identities in public performance. A probing example of this

interaction, interlocking understandings and practices... within radically

own in popular theatre genres such as bangsawan, komedi stambul and

European tours of Southeast Asian dance troupes representing

Amusement parks were common features of urban centres throughout

The decolonization and nationalization of performing arts is particularly

Wilkinson attributes a predisposition to professional foreign entertainments

instruction of ethnomusicology in American universities, and later as

In Cambodia a play may not show either Vietnam or Thailand in a

President Sukarno of Indonesia railed against Western pop music

Cambodia’s lakhon sbaek, encountered by Javanese theatre artists in

countries. Transnational creative production processes, in contrast, are

Themes and assumptions

choreographer nonetheless tends to typologize the dance cultures he

Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendents of the Eunuch

the ‘interweaving’ (Fischer-Lichte 2009) of different cultural traditions in

responsible for authoring the interpretive frameworks that allow these

Fabian, Johannes. 1999. ‘Theater and Anthropology, Theatricality and

Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Phillippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Robson, S.O. 1992. ‘Java in Malay Literature: Overbeck’s Ideas on

Didik Nini Thowok is a high-profile Indonesian choreographer and

Introducing Didik Nini Thowok

authorized biography (Janarto 2005). He is one of four Indonesian

Bedhaya Hagoromo: the dance

Figure 1: The three-by-three formation (rakit tiga)

Didik is clearly identified as the author of this dance, in contrast to

noble (adiluhung) Javanese court performance, which has now become

‘Bedhaya Hagoromo: a Japan-Indonesia collaboration’?15

Richard Emmert is one of the few certified non-Japanese performers of

Figure 2: Rick Emmert with Didik

This makes it clear that Bedhaya Hagoromo was not a straightforward

Bedhaya Hagoromo and Interculturalism

We could instead ask if Bedhaya Hagoromo is an example of what

context.23 The creation of Bedhaya Hagoromo and its performance

Brakel-Papenhijzen, Clara. 2006. ‘Jaka Tarub: A Javanese Culture Hero?’

ANDREW CLAY MCGRAW

Foreign observers and Indonesian composers often refer to Indonesian

avant-garde? What alternative visions do Balinese artists imagine for their

Bali and the Avant-Garde

The ‘pre-lapsarian nostalgic primitivism’ (Harding 2006: 22) of the

McPhee and Godowsky creatively interpreted their direct experiences of

complete control of Bali until 1908.7 Bali’s experience of direct, colonial