Performing Contemporary Indonesia : Celebrating Identity, Constructing Community [1 ed.] 9789004284937, 9789004282414

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Performing Contemporary Indonesia

Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Edited by Rosemarijn Hoefte (KITLV, Leiden) Henk Schulte Nordholt (KITLV, Leiden) Editorial Board Michael Laffan (Princeton University) Adrian Vickers (Sydney University) Anna Tsing (University of California Santa Cruz)

VOLUME 297

Southeast Asia Mediated Edited by Bart Barendregt (kitlv) Ariel Heryanto (Australian National University)

VOLUME 6 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vki

Performing Contemporary Indonesia Celebrating Identity, Constructing Community Edited by

Barbara Hatley with

Brett Hough

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Procession opening the Babad Kampung program, kampung Kricak. July 2008. Photo by Dwi Omblo. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Performing contemporary Indonesia : celebrating identity, constructing community / edited by Barbara Hatley with Brett Hough.   pages cm. -- (Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde ; volume 297) (Southeast Asia mediated ; volume 6)  Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-28241-4 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-28493-7 (e-book) 1. Performing arts--Social aspects--Indonesia. 2. Performing arts--Political aspects--Indonesia. 3. Theater and society--Indonesia. 4. Arts and society--Indonesia. 5. Theater and globalization--Indonesia. I. Hatley, Barbara, editor. II. Hough, Brett, editor. III. Murti, Yoshi Fajar Kresno. Babad kampung.  PN2904.2.P475 2015  791.09598--dc23     2014038857

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1572-1892 ISBN 978-90-04-28241-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-28493-7 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures x List of Contributors xi Introduction Performance in Contemporary Indonesia – Surveying the Scene 1 Barbara Hatley 1

Contemporary Performance in Central Java – Staging Identities, Constructing Communities 22 Barbara Hatley

2

‘Babad Kampung’ Celebrating History and Neighbourhood Identity in Yogyakarta 45 Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti

3

Relocating Kampung, Rethinking Community Salatiga’s ‘Festival Mata Air’ 67 Alexandra Crosby

4

Imagining Community in Contemporary Surabaya 83 Rachmah Ida

5

Shaping Spaces Video Art Communities in Indonesia 98 Edwin Jurriëns

6

Balinese Cultural Communities and Scenes 120 Brett Hough

7

The Sundanese-language Drama Festival Celebrating Local Cultural Identity in West Java 147 Neneng Lahpan and Wawan Sofwan

8

Two Stages for Performance in Aceh From State Conflict to Syariah Politics 167 Reza Idria

vi 9

Contents 

Representing Indonesia in Australia through Performance Communities, Collaborations, Identities 182 Aline Scott-Maxwell

10 Indo-European Pasar Malam, Identity and Performance in the Netherlands 203 Fridus Steijlen 11 Audiences and Arts Spaces in Jakarta Post-1998 221 Alia Swastika 12

Notes from the 2009 Symposium on Performance in Indonesia 237 Ugoran Prasad

13

Concluding Comments Identity, Community and the Marketplace in Contemporary Indonesian Performance 253 Ariel Heryanto, Chua Beng Huat and Denise Varney Index 261

Acknowledgements Many people and institutions have provided valued assistance during the long process leading up to the publication of this volume. The initial impetus for the project was a workshop Cultural Performance in Post New Order Indonesia: New Structures, Scenes, Meanings which took place in Yogyakarta in June 2010, held within the framework of the NetherlandsAustralia Research Collaboration grant scheme and funded principally by that scheme. The Australia-Indonesia Institute and the Australian Academy of the Humanities provided supplementary support. To these three institutions and to Sanata Dharma University, for generously hosting the workshop, and to our colleagues there who worked so hard to make it happen, we express deep thanks. Assistance with organisation of the workshop by the Asian Languages and Studies Program at the University of Tasmania was also vital to its success. Many thanks also to the participants in the workshop. To Bart Barendregt, our collaborator in the Netherlands, who coordinated the section of the workshop focusing on media and cultural studies, and to all the paper givers – Bernard Arps, Bart Barendregt, Emma Baulch, Alexandra Crosby, Halim HD, Barbara Hatley, Katinka van Heeren, Brett Hough, Chris Hudson, Rachmah Ida, Reza Idria, Nuraini Juliastuti, Edwin Jurriëns, Khoo Gaik Cheng, Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti, Meta Knol, Ugoran Prasad, Aline Scott-Maxwell, Tya Setiawati, Lono Simatupang, Wawan Sofwan, Fridus Steijlen, Suryadi Sunuri, Alia Swastika and Amrih Widodo. Sal Murgiyanto introduced the workshop with a presentation about new developments in the performing arts and discussed institutions and research in the field of theatre. Ariel Heryanto, Jennifer Lindsay and St Sunardi commented on the workshop papers in the framework of social and political developments in Indonesia while Chua Beng Huat and Denise Varney added international, global perspectives. Along with academic discussion, the workshop also provided opportunity for direct experience of Indonesian performance. At an evening event at the Kedai Kebun Forum art space and restaurant, contemporary dalang Slamet Gundono from Solo, Kadek Suardana, theatre director and cultural activist from Bali and Firman Djamil, visual and performance artist from South Sulawesi, demonstrated their work and talked about their practice in its contemporary social context. An open-air concert on Sanata Dharma campus celebrated the closing of the workshop, with musical performances by the Jogya Hip Hop Foundation and the post punk group Armada Racun, dance by Jathilan Gaul and Sahita and excerpts from the play Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu

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Omah! by Teater TeMMu. The next day workshop participants shared their ideas and findings with local artists, researchers, students, journalists and members of the public. Dr Yudiaryanto of the Institute of the Arts, ISI, in Yogyakarta discussed research at ISI, Bart Barendregt and Denise Varney talked about their work and a lively, enthusiastic general discussion followed. Many thanks to all who contributed to this very full and enjoyable workshop program! A series of very sad events, however, colour memories of the workshop. Mari Nabeshima, a scholar and skilled performer of Balinese music, wife of Kadek Suardana, was already ill when she arrived in Yogya to participate in the workshop; after returning to Bali she was hospitalised with dengue fever and four days later passed away. We express our admiration for Mari’s strength and determination in attending the workshop, in spite of her illness, and our support of the Arti Foundation in commemorating Mari’s contributions to Balinese culture by establishing the Nabeshima Creative Space in Denpasar. Tragically, Kadek Suardana himself died of pancreatic cancer in October 2013, then Slamet Gundono passed away from liver problems on 4 January 2014. To the memory of these three artists and devotees of Indonesian culture this book is dedicated. After the excitement of the workshop had passed began the demanding process of preparing two publications, an Indonesian and an English language edited volume based on the workshop presentations. Since there were too many papers for inclusion in one volume, it was decided the book should focus on live performance, while the papers on other topics would be published elsewhere. The writers on the topics to be included in the book were asked to revise and re-revise their chapters in accordance with agreed themes and in consultation with the editors; then came the long and arduous task of translation of English language chapters into Indonesian and vice versa for the two volumes, and careful checking and revision of the resulting texts. To all the writers who patiently and cheerfully participated in this process, and responded to editorial questions over many months, sincere thanks. Special thanks to our editorial collaborator Brett Hough, and also to Keith Foulcher for translation, editing suggestions, indexing, and overall collegial support. The costs of translation were covered by the original Netherlands-Australia Research Collaboration grant, with some additional support from the ARC grant-funded project ‘Theatre in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Culture in a Modern Global Context’ in which the editor and several chapter writers were participants. The vast bulk of the editing, however, was done out of sheer good will and service to scholarship!

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An Indonesian language edited book, Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia Pasca Orde Baru ‘Indonesian Performance after the New Order’, corresponding to the present volume, has been produced by Sanata Dharma Press. For the huge amount of time and hard work contributed by colleagues at Sanata Dharma University to the preparation of the manuscript for publication we are deeply grateful. To Dr Gregorius Subanar, Dr St Sunardi, Dr Katrin Bandel and especially Mrs Yustina Devi Ardhiani, heartfelt thanks. Many thanks to Bart Barendregt for his encouragement to publish this volume through the Southeast Asia Mediated series, and to Bart and Ariel Heryanto, as co- editors of the series, for their support. Thanks also to the editors at Brill for their valued assistance. At last the long process of publication has reached fruition! In such a dynamic field as contemporary performance, delays in publication can be very challenging; in response chapter authors have added updated material where possible and checked descriptions of general trends. On behalf of all the contributors to the volume we hope readers find it enlightening, stimulating and useful.

List of Figures 1.1

The exuberant, celebratory final scene of Semar Meteng devised and directed by Slamet Gundono. National Gallery, Jakarta, June 2009 34 1.2 Semar figures backstage, Semar Meteng. National Gallery, Jakarta, June 2009 34 1.3 Figures in ancient dance postures and projection of Indonesian archipelago shadowing contemporary bodies, Waktu Batu 111, Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta, September 2004 37 1.4 Garasi theatre stages a village wedding, with dangdut singer entertaining guests. Tubuh Ketiga, Yogyakarta, 2011 39 1.5 Land developer, in dog mask, with departing residents carrying the gravestone of their leader in Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah! Teater TeMMu. Yogyakarta, 2009 42 2.1 Map of Yogyakarta kampung 50 2.2 Opening parade of the Babad Kampung program, kampung Minggiran, August 2008 54 2.3 Procession opening the Babad Kampung program, kampung Kricak, July 2008 55 2.4 Local actors in army uniforms in Tembang Kricak, Babad Kampung program, Yogyakarta Arts Festival, July 2008 60 3.1 Performance Plastic Man, Festival Mata Air, kampung Senjoyo, Salatiga, 2006 69 3.2 Group performance Rubbish Cheerleader, Festival Mata Air, kampung Kalitaman, Salatiga, 2007 70 7.1 Members of the winning group, 10th Festival Drama Bahasa Sunda, Bandung, February 2008 155 7.2 Actors from the group Teater Bolon backstage, 10th Festival Drama Bahasa Sunda, Bandung, February, 2008 156 10.1 Art, craft and food stalls at Pasar Malam Besar, The Hague, 2004 211 10.2 Musical performance at Pasar Malam Besar, The Hague, 2004 211

List of Contributors Alexandra Crosby is a writer, researcher and designer. She was involved in a collaborative Australian-Indonesian arts project which produced an anthology entitled gang re:publik, Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures’ (2008). In 2013 she completed a PhD thesis in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, focusing on the culture of activist arts communities in Java. She now lectures in Interdisciplinary Design Studies, also at the University of Technology, Sydney. Chua Beng Huat is concurrently Provost Professor and Head of Sociology and Research Leader, Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is also Chairman, Board of Trustees, TemenggongArtists-in-Residence, a non-profit visual arts institution. In the area of Cultural Studies, his publications include Life is Not Complete without Shopping (nus Press, 2003) and Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture (Hong Kong University Press, 2012); as editor, Elections as Popular Culture in Asia (Routledge, 2004) and, as co-editor, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge, 2007) and East Asia Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (Hong Kong University Press, 2007). He is founding co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Barbara Hatley is Professor Emeritus in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Tasmania and Adjunct Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, at Monash University. The main focus of her research and writing is Indonesian theatre, modern literature and gender studies. Her book Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change (nus Press, 2008) explores the expression of identity and modernity in performances in Java/ Indonesia from the 1970s until today. Ariel Heryanto is an Associate Professor at The Australian National University. He is the author of Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture (nus Press, 2014), editor of Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of and chapter-writer in Pop Culture

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Formations Across East Asia (Jimoondang, 2010). He is also author of State Terrorism and Political Identity In Indonesia: Fatally Belonging (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor of and chapter contributor to Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia (Routledge, 2003). Brett Hough is currently an independent scholar. He was a lecturer in Anthropology and Indonesian Studies at Monash University until the end of 2011. His doctoral research was on the institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of the performing arts in Bali from the early 1960s through to the late 1990s, focusing on the College of Indonesian Arts (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) in Denpasar. He has an ongoing connection to the arti Foundation and continuing interest in the performing arts in Bali. Other research interests include violence, conflict and conflict resolution in Bali along with a developing interest and involvement in permaculture and environmental sustainability. Rachmah Ida is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Post-Graduate Study of Media and Communication at Airlangga University in Surabaya. Her publications up till now have focused on media and culture, particularly media and popular culture, gender and Islam, within a general framework of study of media and society in Indonesia. Reza Idria is a lecturer and researcher in the fields of Acehnese anthropology, history and culture at the State Islamic Institute (iain) Ar-Raniry in Banda Aceh. In 2013 he received a Harvard Award to undertake doctoral study in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where he is currently based. He was one of the founding members of Komunitas Tikar Pandan, www.tikarpandan.org. Edwin Jurriëns is a lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Language in the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne and a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is the author of From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia (kitlv, 2009) and Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java (kitlv, 2004). He also co-edited the volume Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (Rodopi, 2007).

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Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti is a graduate in architecture from Atmajaya University in Yogyakarta who has long been involved in organizing, documenting and advocating for urban kampung spaces. From 2000–2008 he worked at the Yayasan Pondok Rakyat (People’s Housing Foundation) in Yogyakarta and from 2009 onwards has been the coordinator of research and program development at the Indonesian Visual Archives (ivaa). He also works independently as an architect with a process-based form of architecture called ugahari architecture, and has been involved in a number of collaborative projects building houses, community spaces and public buildings. He is the author of Art and Social Issues (2011) and The Pating Tlecek Architecture Space (2012). Neneng Yanti K. Lahpan is a lecturer in the Music Department at the Institute of the Arts in Bandung. With a background in literature, she has been developing her interests in performance, in particular theatre and local music, since 2003. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters based on her research, for example “Topeng Kaleng: Art Surrounded by Industry” (2008), “Calung Dangdut: the Interface between Traditional Art and Pop Culture” (2009), and “Ath-Thawaf: from Cianjuran style traditional Poetry to Sundanese Religious Pop Music” (2009). Currently she is undertaking a PhD in Anthropology at Monash University on the topic “Islamic Performance as a Site of Negotiation between Islam and Sundanese Culture in West Java.” Ugoran Prasad is a fiction writer, dramaturg, and performance researcher. Since the early 2000s he has been involved in a number of performance projects and theatre infrastructure building activities at Teater Garasi. As program manager for mspi (Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts) from 2008–2011, he initiated the Symposium on Performance in Indonesia: A New Mapping (2009). He recently completed study in the Erasmus Mundus ma program in International Performance Research (University of Warwick and University of Amsterdam). He is currently undertaking a doctoral degree in theatre at the Graduate Centre, The City University of New York. Aline Scott-Maxwell is an ethnomusicologist, teacher and performer of Javanese gamelan music, and specialist Indonesian studies librarian. She is Senior Asian Studies Librarian in the Monash University Library. She was awarded her PhD

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from Monash University with a thesis on “The Dynamics of the Yogyakarta Gamelan Music Tradition”. Her main areas of research and publication are Australia’s historical and present-day musical engagement with Asia and Australian migrant musics, including Indonesian music. She was co-general editor of a major reference work: Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia (Currency House, 2003). Wawan Sofwan is an performer and director who has been active in theatre since 1984. In 1986 he joined the long-established group Studiklub Teater Bandung and in 1994 formed his own group Mainteater. He is also a specialist in monologue: monologues which he has performed include Oknum, Dam, and Indonesia Menggugat (Indonesia Accuses), the defence speech of prewar nationalist political figure and later first president of Indonesia, Soekarno. In 2007 he directed Nyai Ontosoroh an adaptation by Faiza Marzuki, of the novel Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) by Pramudya Ananta Tur. In 2011 he directed Monolog Inggit ( Inggit’s Monologue) which focused on the life history of the first wife of Soekarno. Wawan has often performed theatre overseas, including in Germany, Australia and Malaysia. Fridus Steijlen graduated in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, and obtained a PhD from the same university with a thesis concerning Moluccan nationalism in the Netherlands. He worked as a researcher with Erasmus University, Rotterdam, then became coordinator of an oral history project concerning Indonesia with kltv. Fridus is preparing for publication a book about IndoDutch organizations in the Netherlands. He is also the coordinator of a project “Recording the Future” which is creating an audiovisual archive of everyday life in Indonesia. Alia Swastika a graduate of the Communication Department, Gadjah Mada University, is an art curator, manager and researcher. From 2000–2004 she was manager of the Cemeti Art House in Yogyakarta, and since 2008 has been a curator at the Ark gallery in Jakarta. Alia has been involved in various exchange and residential programs, for example with UfaFabrik in Berlin (2005), The Asia Society, New York (2006), ArtHub, Shanghai (2007) and the National Art Gallery, Singapore (2010). Her curatorial projects include “The Past: The Forgotten Time” (Amsterdam, Jakarta, Semarang, Shanghai, Singapore, 2007–2008), “Manifesto: The New Aesthetic of Seven Indonesian Artists” (Institute of

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Contemporary Arts, Singapore, 2010), and her 2012 work as co-artistic director of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, along with five curators from other Asian countries. Denise Varney is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. She has research interests in Australian, German and Feminist theatres. She is the author with Rachel Fensham of The Dolls’ Revolution: Australian Theatre and Cultural Imagination (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005), contributing editor of Theatre in the Berlin Republic (Peter Lang, 2008) and the author of Radical Visions: The Impact of the Sixties on Australia Drama (Rodopi, 2011). In 2013, Denise, together with Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson and Barbara Hatley, published a book entitled Theatre and Performance in the Asia Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Palgrave, 2013), an outcome of a collaborative research project funded by the Australian Research Council.

Introduction

Performance in Contemporary Indonesia – Surveying the Scene Barbara Hatley

This book explores the format and meanings of performance – theatre, along with music, dance and video arts – created and staged today in Indonesia. Performance events have long been central to the life of Indonesian societies in displaying power, affirming social relations and celebrating shared values, while also providing space for social and political critique. To what extent are they continuing to perform these roles in the early years of the twenty-first century? How do they illuminate and contribute to their social contexts? How has the transition from the centralized, authoritarian Suharto regime to a more decentralized, open political system, as global information and cultural influence flows in through the liberalized mass media, impacted upon the domain of performance? In late June 2010 a group of academics, cultural activists and theatre practitioners gathered together in Yogyakarta, on the campus of Sanata Dharma University, to explore these issues. This volume reflects the ideas they presented and discussed.

The Background – Performance in New Order Times

Performing arts and other forms of cultural expression have been regarded as central to Indonesian political life since the founding of the nation. Jennifer Lindsay notes that key government figures attended cultural congresses in the early years of Independence.1 She likewise documents the many cultural missions, comprised of dancers and musicians, sent overseas by President Sukarno’s government in the 1950s and early 1960s, as an expression of “national confidence and pride,” (Lindsay 2012b, 195). Creating a progressive national culture for the new Indonesian nation was the common focus during these years, and artists, writers, intellectuals, political organizations and state officials all competed in the struggle to promote their respective visions of the nation and its culture. 1 When the First Cultural Congress was held in August 1948, amidst the chaotic political conditions of that time, just a month before the outbreak of the Madiun uprising, President Sukarno, Vice President Hatta and Armed Forces head General Sudirman all attended both the opening and closing ceremonies of the event, while the Minister for Education and Culture participated throughout (Lindsay 2012a, 6).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_002

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When President Suharto’s New Order government took power after 1965, however, and instituted a nation-wide program of top-down economic and social development, cultural activity became the site of centralized control and cultivation by the state. Regional forms, representing the cultural worlds of the rural-based majority population of Indonesia, were nurtured, developed and ‘upgraded’. Government bodies organized festivals and competitions and instructed performers about propaganda messages to be included in their shows; grand performance events were staged to mark official occasions. Such forms were seen to instil values supportive of development such as selfreliance, dedication, simplicity and orderliness,2 and to give safe, a-political expression to regionality within the framework of the unified nation, in keeping with the regime’s construct of idealized Indonesian citizenship. Unruly, unseemly, elements of performances out of keeping with these lofty social roles were suppressed and eliminated.3 Modern cultural expression in Indonesian language, cultivated largely among the educated, urban-based population, was not subject to such government intervention, but faced strict political censorship, and complex permit requirements for performances and other public events. Response to these conditions differed according to performance genres and particular local conditions. Practitioners of traditional, regional performing arts, dependent on state sponsorship, generally avoided direct expression of dissent (Yampolsky 1995, 711), but at times drew on ambiguous multivalent stage conventions and subversive clown humour to express social critique. Modern plays in Indonesian language conveyed social criticism more directly. From its beginnings, teater, modern theatre, like other forms of modern, national culture, had at times conveyed alternate perspectives to state ideology.4 In the New Order period, with the imposition of strict control of the mass media and repression of critical opinion, modern theatre took on an explicitly resistant role, as theatre practitioners allied themselves with students, social activists and other disaffected social group to promote a vision of the Indonesian nation contesting that imposed by the state. While censorship was strict, subtle resistance to state ideology could be conveyed on stage, often 2 These values amongst others are cited in a passage from the 1988 Guidelines of State Policy quoted by Philip Yampolsky (1995, 710). 3 Amrih Widodo provides a very interesting illustration of this process at work in his analysis of the impact of government policy on tayuban dancing in the Blora region (Widodo 1995). 4 Michael Bodden suggests that, reflecting ideological differences among the political elite, “modern national culture often took an antagonistic stance towards the state and its political leadership” (Bodden 2010, 3).

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through satirical reinterpretations of traditional symbols of control. Govern­ ment banning of particular productions arguably enhanced public awareness of the importance of modern theatre as a medium conveying critical opinions that could not be voiced through other channels. Developments in Indonesian performance over the long period of control of the Suharto regime are much-discussed in academic studies. Edited volumes on New Order politics and society as well as works focusing specifically on culture contain chapters analysing theatre;5 anthropological accounts from across the regions analyse transformations in local performance over this period;6 many writers discuss the popular appeal, cultural politics and engagement with modern media of specific genres, particularly the hugely successful wayang kulit and wayang golek, shadow puppet and doll puppet theatres.7 A major focus of these studies is state cultural policies and practices and their impact on traditional, regional performance activities. A related theme is the response of such performance to commercialisation and technological change fostered by New Order development and modernisation. The artistic and political dimensions of modern theatre in Indonesian language are likewise widely-documented. Along with analyses and translations of the works of leading playwright-directors such as Rendra, Arifin Noer, Putu Wijaya and Riantiarno,8 two recent monographs have theorised the overall dynamics of Indonesian modern theatre in its longstanding, problematic relationship to the state – see Michael Bodden’s Resistance on the National Stage (2010) and Evan Winet’s Indonesian Post-Colonial Theatre (2010). Numerous book chapters and articles focus on the varying dramatic approaches and strategies of social and political critique of particular groups.9 5 Two general studies of New Order politics and society containing chapters on cultural expression including theatre are Arief Budiman (1990) and Hal Hill (1994); Virginia Hooker (1993) includes a chapter on theatre among other forms of New Order cultural expression. 6 See, for example, Acciaioli (1985), Geertz (1990), Rodgers (1979, 1983), Yampolsky (1995). 7 Some examples are Mrazek (1999, 2000, 2002), Weintraub (2004), Sears (1986, 1996). 8 Max Lane’s translation and analysis of Rendra’s The Struggle of the Naga Tribe (1979) is probably the best known; see also Rafferty (1980) and McGlynn and Hatley (1992). 9 See, for example, the chapter on Indonesia in Eugene van Erven’s study of the theatre of liberation in Asia (van Erven 1992), discussion of modern theatre in my own book on performance in Yogyakarta (Hatley 2008) and earlier articles (Hatley 1990, 1993), Mary Zurbuchen’s analysis of state development policies as represented in the witty political satires of the group Teater Koma (Zurbuchen 1990), Alan Feinstein’s interpretation of the lower-class Javanese language plays of the group Gapit as “a bold challenge to the State’s cultural and political ideology” (Feinstein 1995, 617), and Tony Day’s connection of Gapit’s performances with contemporary state practices and traditional Javanese cultural representations of male violence (Day 1999).

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Performance in Indonesia in the New Order period clearly played complex socio-political roles, both reinforcing and critiquing state ideology, illustrating the workings of state cultural strategies as well as processes of societal resistance, and engaging with technological change. Such factors made it a compelling site for analysis of the dynamics of New Order life.

The Contemporary Context – New Freedoms, Complexities, Challenges

Today performances take place in Indonesia under greatly changed social and political conditions. The demise of the Suharto regime in 1998 has been followed by the implementation of electoral democracy, the removal of restrictions on political parties and activities and a flourishing independent media. The introduction of a regional autonomy political system, described as “one of the most radical decentralization programs attempted anywhere in the world” (Aspinall and Fealy 2003, 3) has seen devolution of a wide range of powers from a highly centralized, authoritarian regime to district level parliaments and governments. In this context cultivation of and funding for the arts is determined at the local level. There is no central authoritarian state prescribing ideological values, constructing national identity, and promoting their expression through cultural forms. Instead regional autonomy produces a focus on local cultural distinctiveness, fostered through festivals, parades and arts events. Similarly there is no single, powerful repressive force for critical theatre to resist and demonize, nor a broad-based opposition movement for artists to work with. Instead, diverse local interests vie for political power, and a plethora of social identities – ethnic, religious, territorial, sexual – are asserted and contested. Performance activities, free of the political restrictions of the Suharto years, are vibrant and diverse. But conditions vary across the regions, and a new form of repression threatens, not from the centralized state apparatus but from within society, particularly from hardline groups claiming the right to defend Islamic religious values against perceived offence.10 Theatre practitioners 10

Jennifer Lindsay (2008) notes that while in most areas the old permit system for performances no longer applies, in the city of Bandung police sometimes demand permits, and in Aceh permits must be obtained from both the police and syariah Islamic law authorities. She also reports the restrictive implications for arts activities of many regional regulations (peraturan daerah or perda) introduced at the behest of Islamic political parties, and attacks by Islamic groups on exhibitions and performances considered erotic and offensive.

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respond by celebrating alternate pluralist values through their performances, while engaging dynamically with new global media such as digital recording, mobile phones and the internet. The huge changes in Indonesian politics and society since the end of the New Order regime in 1998 have been analyzed and assessed in numerous scholarly studies – in monographs and collections of articles focusing on the restructuring of state institutions, the functioning of political parties, the operation of the regional autonomy system, construction of local identities, the flourishing of the internet and mass media.11 The resulting picture is complex, fragmented, often contradictory. There is a shared sense of disillusionment with current political developments, consensus that decentralization does not necessarily bring local democratization (Heryanto and Hadiz 2005, 262), nor “a shift from a strong state to a strong civil society” (Schulte Nordholdt and van Klinken 2007, 1). Regional autonomy politics is seen to be marked by constant power struggles among local elites and levels of government (Hadiz 2003; Sakai 2002) and greater opportunity for corruption and mismanagement of funds (Heryanto and Hadiz 2005, 262). Yet at the grassroots level there are also positive reports of empowering activities by citizens’ councils, locally-based political parties and farmers’ ngos (Antlöv 2003, Wiloso, 2004, Winarto 2002). The construction and celebration of local identity encouraged by decentralization is seen as socially energizing in some contexts (Indiyanto 2004, 231–232) but destructively divisive in others, and often the concern of urban-based elites rather than local residents (Erb, Beni and Anggal 2005; Schulte Nordholdt and van Klinken 2007, 28–29). Amidst these complex trends one thriving field is that of mass media and popular culture. Removal of censorship and press licensing in 1999 produced a boom in new television and radio stations, and in the climate of new openness global culture has flooded in. Developments in popular culture, in film, television and popular music, shaped in varying ways by this context, are well-documented in academic literature. Among other publications, edited volumes on Indonesian and Malaysian popular culture (Heryanto 2008, Weintraub 2009) and one on film (Michalik and Coppens 2009), have appeared in recent years, along with monographs on electronic media and performance and community radio (Jürriens 2004, 2009). Popular forms such as television and pop music 11

See, for example, Mietzner and Aspinall (2010) and Bünte and Ufen (2009) on political structures and democratic processes, Aspinall and Fealy (2003), Sakai (2002) and Erb, Sulistiyanto and Faucher (2005) on regional autonomy processes and local responses, and Sen and Hill (2000) and Hill and Sen (2005) on the mass media and the internet in contemporary Indonesia.

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are looked to for expression of the sense of identity of their audiences, and reflection of current social trends. The title of Ariel Heryanto’s edited volume Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-Authoritarian Politics, indicates the explicit connections drawn between the book’s content and the contemporary political context. Chapters in Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia edited by Andrew Weintraub explore the interplay of Islamic identity and global popular culture in the two countries, enhancing understanding of the diverse and dynamic ways in which Islam, as a rising force in the region, is expressed in the lives of its adherents. Theatre and other live performance has not, however, attracted such scholarly attention in the post-Suharto years, either in specifically-focused volumes, or in contributions to more general studies of current Indonesian politics and society. Performance is generally discussed only in isolated or passing references – in concluding sections of works focusing primarily on the New Order period,12 in a brief overview of general developments in the arts (Lindsay 2008), in short articles on individual performances and events,13 in an edited volume examining performative aspects of election campaigns (Kartomi 2005). The major reason is surely the complexity and diversity of current political processes – the difficulty of assessing change in a context where reform programs may have uneven, sometimes negative effects and regional autonomy is experienced very differently across the regions. In contrast to New Order times, there is no clear pattern of political and social organization which shapes expression in the performing arts, with which performances engage and debate. Instead performance activities take place in diverse contexts, responding to particular local conditions. Cultural analysts look to pop culture, accessed through the mass media by vast audiences across the nation, for indication of broad social and cultural developments. Live performances, however, staged by diverse local groups in widely varying social contexts, seem to be judged as unlikely to offer such generalizing insights. Yet arguably by investigating what is happening in performances we may gain insights into how general social processes are playing out at the local level. The structures and networks through which performances are sponsored and organized are shaped by local political and social relations. Stage presentations, expressing the concerns and interests of performers, aimed at engaging 12

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For example in Jan Mrazek’s edited collection of articles on wayang (2002), Evan Winet’s book on postcolonial theatre (Winet 2010) and my own book on performance in Yogyakarta (Hatley 2008). For example Lauren Bain’s discussions of post New Order theatre (2000, 2003) and (2005), and Halim HD’s article on arts activities in Makassar (2000) in Inside Indonesia.

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audiences, provide illustration of shared social attitudes. Shifts in the nature and function of performances over time indicate wider patterns of change and how local populations are responding.14 And live performance and popular culture by no means represent distinct, separate fields of artistic activity in any case, but borrow, blend and interact.

Addressing the Questions – The Yogyakarta Workshop

At the workshop in Yogyakarta, supported by the Australian-Netherlands Research Collaboration, participants from Australia, the Neth­erlands and Indonesia came together to present and share knowledge of contemporary Indonesian performance in its diverse forms. Some were seasoned analysts of Indonesian performance and cultural expression, others younger scholars: many of the Indonesian participants were practising artists and cultural activists as well as researchers. They discussed their observations and experience of performance in different regions of Indonesia, and made comparisons with neighbouring Malaysia. They spoke about film, popular music and video arts as well as theatre, presented in sites ranging from Jakarta arts venues to crowded kampung (urban neighbourhoods) and village festivals. Workshop sessions focused on community level performances, new cultural spaces and forms, popular music, visual media, developments in Indonesian performance in different regions and in two key diasporic sites, Australia and the Netherlands. Through these diverse genres and performance sites ran a common theme – the role of performance in expressing the identities of specific social groups, while also engaging with technological change and global cultural influence. In the field of popular music, nasyid Islamic boy bands, fusing elements of ‘pop, politics and piety’ are seen to address the challenge faced by their youthful, middle-class fans – “how to be a Malay Muslim and yet to be modern.”15 Pop melayu, Malay popular music, meanwhile, projects an image of lower class masculinity and appeals to fans through the ‘rags to riches’ stories of its star 14

15

A recent edited volume on language and discourse in post-Suharto Indonesia provides a very interesting example of this approach. In documenting the differing impact for various regions and groups of today’s increased freedom and openness in language use, Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia (Foulcher, Moriyama and Budiman 2012) shows how analyses of developments in a specific cultural field can enrich understanding of broader social trends. The quote is from Bart Barendregt’s paper presented at the workshop “Pop, Politics and Piety in the Digital Age” later published as Barendregt (2011).

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performers.16 In film, the new freedom of expression which followed the demise of the Suharto regime in Indonesia has allowed a flourishing of films about previously forbidden topics, such as Chinese identity and alternate sexualities. Interestingly, workshop speakers contrasted the individually-focused themes of recent Indonesian films with the more socially-targeted, anti-racist works of independent film-makers in Malaysia. Under ongoing conditions of state repression, these Malaysian film-makers direct their energies to promoting a shared inclusive, pluralist political stance, while their Indonesian counterparts take advantage of new social freedoms to explore issues of individual identity.17 Theatre and other live performance flourish, particularly in Java, in the context of a variety of events – festivals of regional arts, regional-language theatre competitions, alternate environmental happenings – constructing and celebrating local identity. Theatre groups stage locally-focused stories, often in site-specific locations; young people perform eclectic fusions of local, regional dance and music with global styles and technologies. Self-styled ‘communities’ of performers and practitioners of new media such as video arts seek to build connections with wider communities such as residential neighbourhoods. Workshop sessions discussed connections between these activities and contemporary political and social conditions – increased freedom of public expression, democratizing ideology, the focus on local cultural distinctiveness fostered by regional autonomy officials. As well as general, shared trends, workshop presentations identified divergent performance practices, shaped by conditions in different regions and social settings. Examples from Bali, West Java, West Sumatra and Aceh highlighted the distinct ways in which regional autonomy is being experienced in these regions. An evening event where performance artists from Java, Bali and South Sulawesi presented and discussed their work extended and enriched this sense of regional variation.18 A report on a government-funded project promoting community-level performances in three provinces compared the 16 17

18

As discussed in Emma Baulch’s presentation at the workshop, later published as Baulch (2013). The two presentations on film in which these issues were explored were Katinka van Heeren’s “Hot dogs and spring rolls: contemporary Indonesian film and alternate social identities’” and Gaik Cheng Khoo’s paper “The politics of Reformasi: independent filmmakers re-imagine citizenship in Malaysian Gods and project 15 Malaysia” later published as Khoo (2013). The three artists were the Javanese experimental dalang and musician Slamet Gundono, Balinese theatre director and composer Kadek Suardana and visual and performance artist Firman Djamil from Makassar.

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way local performance activities were shaped by differing social conditions in these different settings.19 Varying interpretations of Islamic identity were shown to have strikingly different outcomes. In an illustration of musical hybridity, the grass roots world music group Sampak GusUran, from the Central Javanese north coast town of Pati, combines local Islamic-flavoured music with other Indonesian and global styles, to address both religious and social activist themes.20 Such pluralist blending of Islam with other cultural forms stands in sharp contrast with the assertion of religious essentialism, and the resulting impact on performance, seen elsewhere, particularly in the province of Aceh. Presentations on performance activities among Indonesians and people of Indonesian descent resident overseas, on theatre audiences in the capital, Jakarta, and on performers’ evaluation of their own activities, further expanded the scope of the workshop program. The many and diverse topics of the presentations made the workshop a rich and exciting event. But for various reasons, particularly thematic coherence and volume size, not all of the contributions are included in this book. Instead 19

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The performance project Inisiatif Komunitas Kreatif (Creative Community Initiatives), carried out by the Kelola Foundation as a government initiative with World Bank funding, was intended to strengthen local cultural capacity by encouraging proposals for performance activities. Dr Lono Simatupang, who acted as an advisor for the project, reported that in East Nusatenggara Province the ethnic diversity of the local population created difficulties in selecting among the competing performance forms of the Timorese, Sumbanese and Florenese communities. In West Sumatra the current emphasis on revival of cultural tradition directed attention to long-established forms, privileging senior, experienced performers while marginalizing young people. In Central Java tensions arose at times over aspects of traditional art forms deemed offensive to Islam. In a fascinating analysis of the activities of Sampak GusUran, Amrih Widodo described their hybrid style, combining gamelan, Javanese orchestral music, with Western instruments, Arabic singing with rap, and explained how they attracted national attention in Indonesia, despite their rural isolation, by first gaining international recognition on the internet. He also outlined their involvement in social movements, such as the protests by local farmers in Pati resisting the construction of a cement factory. The group’s name can be seen to embody the blended strands of their identity. ‘Sampak’ indicates a spontaneous, intimate mode of performance; ‘Gus’ connotes the term tubagus, a noble title used for the son of a religious teacher; ‘uran’ derives from uro-uro, a term from Javanese musical tradition meaning a song sung for pleasure. ‘Gusuran’ itself means marginalization, being marginalized, very often the experience of being evicted from one’s house and land. Thus their name indicates the group’s aim of combining Islamic and traditional Javanese cultural reference and creating a spontaneous atmosphere, while at the same time voicing the concerns of those who are marginalized.

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this volume focuses mainly on live, locally-based performance, while a number of the analyses of electronically-mediated popular culture have been published elsewhere.21 A variety of performance genres and activities, approached from different perspectives and viewed within the framework of particular social contexts, are discussed in the following chapters. Inevitably the resulting picture of performance in post-New Order Indonesia is only partial. It provides snapshots of specific performance practices rather than a panoramic overview, and there are major gaps and imbalances in the coverage of regions and genres. Yet hopefully by illuminating part of the picture, this volume will prompt others to build on it further. In the following section I review the content of individual chapters, showing how they engage with and amplify the workshop themes, then suggest some ways in which this picture could be extended.

Locality and Community, in Its Many Varieties

The opening chapter offers an overview of current developments, focusing on the cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta in Central Java. It argues that performance in Central Java, the site of rich, traditional forms, cultivated in royal courts and central to community celebrations, also illustrates particularly clearly the phenomenon referred to earlier – the shift from a polarity of domination by the state and expression of resistance by politically critical groups during the New Order period to a much more diverse, locally-focused situation today. Common features of contemporary performance include recurring festivals and street parades, featuring hybrid local–global forms, emphasis on the local in the content and settings of performances, and emphasis on ‘communities’ of performers and local residents. Such developments connect with contemporary social conditions in reflecting the new freedom of expression after the restrictions of the Suharto years, but perhaps also new anxieties and uncertainties in a context of constant social change and flooding globalization. The chapter ends with the views of three prominent performer/directors, speaking about their work and their mission to respond artistically and socially to the opportunities, dangers and challenges facing contemporary Indonesia. The next three chapters focus in varying ways, in different settings, on performance in kampung urban neighbourhoods. Chapter 2 provides a striking example of the telling of local stories and active involvement in performance by ‘communities’. In the 2008 ‘Babad Kampung’ (Neighbourhood Histories) project, nine neighbourhoods in Yogyakarta were invited to research their 21

See for example Barendregt (2011), Khoo (2013) and Baulch (2013).

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histories and present the resulting stories on stage. In presenting local histories from the residents’ perspective, Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti argues, babad kampung performances contributed to deconstructing the centralized, highlycontrolled New Order understanding of history. They also helped redefine the often negative image of the kampung, and strengthened its negotiating power with city authorities. The process of overcoming the conflicts which sometimes arose in the preparation and staging of performances helped strengthen the dynamic, flexible modes of neighbourly interaction which Kresno Murti sees as the major ‘capital’ of kampung communities as they face a new challenge, the essentializing, romanticizing, construction of the kampung by urban elites, as a commodity for sale in the global marketplace. In Chapter 3 Alexandra Crosby takes up the issue of ‘flexible’ meanings of the term kampung and the related concept of ‘community’ in her discussion of activist arts festivals in Salatiga. She argues that events like Festival Mata Air, grounded in the physical geography of Salatiga kampung neighbourhoods and mobilizing local performers, but also bringing in outside activists and artists, invoking international environmental discourse, and connecting with global information flows, generate new notions of place and community. Conflicts over the holding of the 2008 festival are seen to challenge the notion of a kampung as a static ‘community’ with a fixed identity, prompting use of the alternate term ‘affinity space’ for the collective entity which then relocated to another kampung, creating “a mobile sense of place.” Rachmah Ida in Chapter 4 describes two projects constructing community in different ways through mediated performance and art in Surabaya. The television program Cangkrukan (gathering), recreates the iconic symbol of kampung neighbourship, the gardu (guardhouse), as a site for discussion of local social issues among kampung residents and guests in the studio and viewers at home. Involving ordinary citizens as performers and using local Surabaya language, the program gives viewers the opportunity to air their views and experience a sense of constructed community with virtual neighbours across the city. The Surabaya AV Nerds community, meanwhile, produces a sense of collective identity for a group with specific, shared artistic and intellectual interests. Chapter 5 moves away from the specific location of the kampung, but again focuses on video arts communities. Edwin Jurriëns explains how a key motivation for young Indonesian video artists to form communities and work together collectively is to create an alternative to the modern arts establishment and confront some of its organizing principles, such as individualism and the commodification of cultural works and spaces. This general framework encompasses various approaches, some directly political, some more artistically

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engaged. Jurriëns suggests that video and new media arts, in their accessibility, imagination and social commitment, “create environments for discussing, criticizing and sometimes also providing solutions to key issues of Indonesia’s democratic future.”

Other Modes of Performance, Other Experiences of the Regional Autonomy Era

In Chapter 6, reviewing performance in contemporary Bali, Brett Hough argues that the ending of the New Order regime has not led to substantial changes in Balinese performing arts nor their contexts of production. Performing groups still play essential roles in temple ceremonies and other community events; political developments in the regional autonomy period have reinforced concerns for the preservation of essential Hindu Balinese tradition. The tourism industry likewise promotes the continued maintenance of traditional arts presented to tourists as ‘authentic’ Balinese cultural expression. There has been no evident emergence of groups of arts practitioners styling themselves as ‘communities’ in different ways from long-established practice. Yet within this conservative context, certain groups and individuals find creative ways to draw dynamically on ‘tradition’ while engaging with new social contexts and issues. West Java provides a revealing comparison with Bali. In both provinces there is a close correspondence between region and ethnicity, with the Sundanese people constituting the overwhelming majority of the population of West Java, like the Balinese in Bali. But whereas Bali’s unique Hindu-Balinese culture and religion has long been acknowledged and celebrated nationally in its distinctiveness, the Sundanese have felt their culture overshadowed by that of the numerically predominant Javanese and the influence of the nearby national capital, Jakarta. Regional autonomy has brought opportunity to redress this situation; the provincial government promotes Sundanese language and its teaching in schools, and Sundanese language and culture flourish in literature and the mass media.22 Festivals of Sundanese-language drama illustrate such activity in the domain of performance. Bandung actor/director, Wawan Sofwan, addressed this topic at the workshop, then Neneng Yanti Khozanatu Lahpan, a lecturer and researcher from stsi Bandung, developed it further into the analysis presented in Chapter 7. The authors describe how the 22

Mikihiro Moriyama (2012) outlines these developments in his chapter on Sundanese language in the edited volume on language and discourse in post-Suharto Indonesia mentioned earlier.

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festivals successfully address a major issue for those promoting the Sundanese language and culture revival – how to stimulate young people to identify with their regional language and its culture. Yet ironically government funding for these events is sparse. Reza Idria’s analysis of performance in Aceh in Chapter 8 commences with starkly contrasting images of two contemporary stages. On one, theatre activists attempt to bring people together to rebuild identity and community after the trauma of war and the tsunami natural disaster. The other is a public caning, administering punishment to a couple deemed to have offended against religious law, displaying the strict moral and religious control imposed in Aceh after syariah Islamic law was instituted within framework of the special status of the province in 2005. Reza describes Acehnese performance as shaped by the history of ongoing warfare in the region, from the Dutch colonial war to the conflict between the Acehnese independence movement and the Indonesian state which ended with joint agreement on this special status in the regional autonomy system. The current situation has not resulted in dynamic developments in performance like those occurring in other regions in the regional autonomy era, but instead in ongoing repression, as military curfew and censorship are replaced by the moral and religious controls of syariah Islam.

Performance, Indonesian Identity and Community in Diasporic Sites

The chapters by Aline Scott-Maxwell and Fridus Steijlen provide an illuminating addition to the main focus of the volume on contemporary performance within Indonesia. They trace the history of Indonesia-related performance in Australia and the Netherlands respectively, and describe significant new ­developments occurring in the current period. Scott-Maxwell shows how gamelan orchestra groups and intercultural projects led by Australia-based Indonesian and mixed-descent Australian-Indonesian artists constitute dynamic Australian-Indonesian ‘communities’. While gamelan playing, reproducing ‘authentic’ Indonesian practice, may reconnect Indonesians with their Indonesianness, Indonesia-inflected intercultural performances give expression to hybrid migrant, multicultural identities. By contrast, the vibrant pop culture scene which has arisen recently among Indonesian students temporarily resident in Australia reflects the vision and sense of identity of these post-98 generation mobile, globally-connected young people. For them Australia provides a shared spatial setting for experiences with their own group rather than a site of deeper local engagement.

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Fridus Steijlen describes the role of performance for post-war migrants from Indonesia to the Netherlands whose experiences differed markedly from those of the small numbers of Indonesians coming to Australia. While most mixed race Indo-Europeans or Indos, seen as returning ‘home’ to the colonial heartland, integrated immediately into Dutch society as was expected of them, pasar malam social and performance events provided ongoing expression of their distinctive ‘Indisch’ (mixed Indonesian-European) identity. Shifts in pasar malam performances over time reflected developments within the Eurasian community as well as periods of tension and rapprochement with Indonesian government authorities. The ending of the Suharto regime brought expanded relations with Indonesia, but then a major challenge, as the Indonesian embassy in the Netherlands, in collaboration with several regional Indonesian governments, set up a rival pasar malam event, to promote Indonesian culture along with tourism and commercial links. Together the two chapters focusing on ‘diasporic’ Indonesian performance reveal the vital importance of such activities for Indonesians and people of Indonesian-descent in overseas sites, the complex ways they continue to be shaped by social and political developments within Indonesia, and their contributions to shifting, dynamic contemporary understandings of ‘Indonesianness’. Just as political developments in the regional autonomy era in Indonesia have focused new attention on and energized performance activity in the Indonesian regions, so Indonesia-related performance activity in the transnational ‘margins’ further widens the frame and complicates the dynamics of Indonesian contemporary performance.

Practitioners’ Perspectives, and Views of and from the Audience

Chapters 11 and 12 present reflections on contemporary Indonesian performance by two analysts who are also active participants in the arts scene – visual arts curator and cultural researcher Alia Swastika and Ugoran Prasad, an actor and writer from the theatre group Garasi, currently undertaking doctoral studies in theatre. Alia Swastika’s chapter shifts the focus from performers to audiences, focusing on the capital, Jakarta. She explains how the geography of the city, as well as the history of development of particular arts spaces, and the rapid growth of the middle class as cultural consumers, shapes the composition of audience groups. She describes the features of three different arts venues and their audiences. Quoting comments by audience members, she describes how online sites where they state their views and interact with artists allow them to

Introduction

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contribute more actively than in the past to the construction of performances. She outlines the characteristics of these audience groups – youthful, middle class, with wide-ranging performance tastes, familiar with global pop culture, skilled in the use of modern technology, consumer-oriented rather than politically-committed, but very open to new ideas and experiences. Ugoran Prasad describes a 2009 symposium on performance held in Yogyakarta involving activists, scholars and journalists as well as visual artists, theatre practitioners and musicians. Where other chapters in the volume provide academic analyses of performance activities, the focus of this chapter is discussions taking place among arts practitioners themselves. Participants defined ‘performance’ very broadly and addressed issues such as the relationship of performance to religion, politics, history, sexuality and the body. Many common themes and challenges emerged. Participants in diverse fields of performance are committed to celebrating pluralism and tolerance and strengthening civil society. Yet they relate mainly to their own constituencies rather than reaching out into the wider society, and collaborate only in emergency situations such as the 2006 Anti-Pornography Law campaign. Nevertheless the symposium event itself can be seen to have had a positive impact on this situation in stimulating follow-up collaborative activities among participants.

Observers’ Comments

The final chapter of the book has been compiled from transcripts of oral presentations by three specialists in the fields of cultural and performance studies who participated in the workshop and provided critical commentary on the topics discussed. Their attention focused particularly on understandings of the terms ‘community’ and ‘local identity’ in contemporary performance practice. Ariel Heryanto interprets the word ‘community’ in this context in terms of a vision of a democratic utopia, an imagined, idealized, wished-for state. Chua Beng Huat, meanwhile, views community more positively, describing it as a vital basis of resistance to global capitalism, following the demise of socialism. For Heryanto celebration of the local has essentialist implications while Chua sees it as a strategy, focusing on what people in a particular place have in common and can build upon. Denise Varney sees in the adoption of global cultural symbols and creation of fluid, hybrid cultural forms a sense of floating identity, a ‘liquid modernity’. She suggests that new media, dance and performances, devised ‘democratically’ by the actors themselves, express these new liquid identities more appropriately than the old model of a written play,

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and asks what form of dramatic literature is likely to emerge to capture the legacy of this current era.

Concluding Thoughts

Taken together, the chapters in this book portray contemporary Indonesian performance as a diverse and complex field. Theatre practitioners attempting to connect with and contribute to society in a different way from performance practice in New Order times experience a variety of opportunities and challenges. Festivals and other events sponsored by regional government officials to promote local culture stimulate performance activities and strengthen local pride. But relations with state authorities can be fraught and contradictory. In spite of vociferous regional government promotion of Sundanese cultural revival, the Sundanese theatre festival discussed in Chapter 7 struggles for support. And in Aceh, amidst the complex entanglement of religion and politics, the gap between official rhetoric and reality is wider still. The capitalist marketplace is likewise a source of opportunities and dangers – recording contracts and media appearances extending the outreach of local performance groups; commodification of a romanticized image of kampung culture by urban elites. The different case studies enhance understanding of contemporary Indonesian societal developments and of performance as a site of popular response. We see how artists and activist groups deal with the challenges involved. But the picture is necessarily far from comprehensive. More information is needed on differences across the regions, particularly from areas of mixed ethnicity, about the experiences of groups who, unlike the Javanese, Balinese and Sundanese, do not form a majority in their local area. Other studies of audiences are needed, in sites beyond Jakarta, for a better understanding of the way performances engage with their social environment, to explore concrete processes of connection with ‘community’. Amidst the diversity of the contemporary performance scene, a striking common feature is the energy and enthusiasm of practitioners and their commitment to contributing to their local community and wider society. As the power of the nation fades, both as an imposed official construct and as an alternate, resistant vision, regionality and locality predominate in public discourse and global influence thrives. In the domain of performance, meanwhile, celebration of the local and embrace of the global is accompanied by a concern for social inclusiveness and diversity. The potential of this commitment to bring artists together in a common cause was illustrated by their involvement

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in street demonstrations and special performance events resisting introduction of the Anti-Pornography Law in 2006, as suggested in chapter 12 of this volume.23 In 2014 performers and other artists mobilized again, in a giant concert in Jakarta and all kinds of local contributions to the democratic movement in support of presidential candidate Jokowi.24 On the whole in recent years performing groups have worked independently, cultivating their own terrain. But in celebrating their own identities they acknowledge and value the activities of others like them, involved in a broad general effort to create a better, more inclusive Indonesian society. References Acciaioli, Greg. 1985. “Culture as Art: From Practice to Spectacle in Indonesia.” Canberra Anthropology 8(1–2): 148–172. Allen, Pam. 2007. “Challenging Diversity? Indonesia’s Anti-Pornography Law.” Asian Studies Review 31(June): 101–115. Antlöv, Hans. 2003. “Not Enough Politics! Power, Participation and the New Democratic Polity in Indonesia.” In Local Power and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, 72–86. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Aspinall, Edward and Greg Fealy. 2003. “Introduction: Decentralisation, Democra­ tisation and the Rise of the Local.” In Local Power and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, 1–11. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Bain, Lauren. 2000. “Confused: Some Directions in Post-New Order Theatre.” Inside Indonesia 64(October–December). Accessed 27 January 2014. http://www .insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/confused. ——  2003. “ngo Theatre in the Post New Order.” Inside Indonesia 76(October– December). Accessed 29 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly -articles/ngo-theatre-in-the-post-new-order. ——  2005. “Writing Back.” Inside Indonesia 83(July–September). Accessed 29 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/writing-back.

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For discussion of this law and its repressive implications for live performance, other art forms and the mass media, as well as particular ethnic groups and for women, see Allen (2007) and Lindsay (2010). On the concert ‘Salam Dua Jari’ (Two Finger Salute) see http://www.thejakartapost.com/ news/2014/07/02/artists-hold-concert-support-jokowi-kalla.html and http://asiapacific .anu.edu.au/newmandala/2014/07/06/jokowis-big-concert/ accessed 25 July 2014.

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Barendregt, Bart. 2011. “Pop, Politics and Piety in the Digital Age.” In Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Andrew Weintraub, 235–256. London and New York: Routledge. Baulch, Emma. 2013. “Longing Band Play at Beautiful Hope.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3): 289–302. Bodden, Michael. 2010. Resistance on the National Stage: Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Budiman, Arief, ed. 1990. State and Civil Society in Indonesia. Clayton: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Bünte, Marco and Andreas Ufen, eds. 2008. Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia. London and New York: Routledge. Day, Tony. 1999. “Language and Roles, Culture and Violence: Teater Gapit’s Rol (1983) and the Question of ‘Interculturalism’ in Contemporary Indonesia.” In Dis/ Orientations, Cultural Praxis in Theatre: Asia, Pacific, Australia, eds. Rachel Fensham and Peter Eckersall, 117–136. Clayton: Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University. Erb, Maribeth, Romanus Beni and Wilhelmus Yustinus Anggal. 2005. “Creating Cultural Identity in an Era of Regional Autonomy: Reinventing Manggarai?” In Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia, eds. Maribeth Erb, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto and Carole Faucher, 141–169. London and New York: Routledge. Feinstein, Alan. 1995. “Modern Javanese Theatre and the Politics of Culture. A Case Study of Teater Gapit.” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- und volkenkunde 151(IV): 617–638. Foulcher, Keith, Mikihiro Moriyama and Manneke Budiman, eds. 2012. Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1990. “‘Popular Art’ and the Javanese Tradition” Indonesia 50 (October): 77–90. Hadiz, H.D. 2003. “Power and Politics in North Sumatra: The Uncompleted Reformasi.” In Local Power and Politics in Indonesia, eds. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, 119–131, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Halim, H.D. 2000. “Letter from Makassar – Artists Rebuild Community Identity.” Inside Indonesia 64(October–December). Accessed 29 January 2014. http://www .insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/letter-from-makassar. Hatley, Barbara. 1990. “Theatre as Cultural Resistance in New Order Indonesian Theatre.” In State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. Arief Budiman, 321–347, Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. ——  1993. “Constructions of ‘Tradition’ in New Order Indonesian Theatre.” In Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia, ed. Virginia Matheson Hooker, 48–69, Singapore: Oxford University Press.

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——  2008. Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change. Singapore: Association of Asian Studies and nus Press. Heryanto, Ariel. 2008. Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-authoritarian Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Heryanto, Ariel and Vedi Hadiz. 2005. “Post-authoritarian Indonesia: A Comparative Southeast Asian Perspective.” Critical Asian Studies 37(2): 251–275. Hill, David and Krishna Sen. 2005. The Internet in Indonesia’s New Democracy. Oxon, England: RoutledgeCurzon. Hill, Hal, ed. 1994. Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Transfor­ mation. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hooker, Virginia Matheson, ed. 1993. Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Indiyanto, Agus. 2004. “‘Coping with Crisis’: A Field Report from Koto Gadang, West Sumatra.” In Indonesia in Transition: Rethinking ‘Civil Society’, ‘Region’ and ‘Crisis’, eds. Hanneman Samuel and Henk Schulte Nordholdt, 221–234, Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Jurriëns, Edwin. 2004. Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java. Leiden: kitlv Press. ——  2009. From Monologue to Dialogue: Radio and Reform in Indonesia. Leiden: kitlv Press. Kartomi, Margaret, ed. 2005. The Year of Voting Frequently: Politics and Artists in Indonesia’s 2004 Elections. Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University Press. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. 2013. “The Politics of Reformasi: Independent Filmmakers Re-imagine Citizenship in Malaysian Gods and Project 15 Malaysia.” In Malaisie Contemporaine, ed. Sophie Lemière, Ecoll. Monographies Nationales, irasec-Les Indes Savantes. Lane, Max. 1979. The Struggle of the Naga Tribe. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lindsay, Jennifer. 2008. “A New Artistic Order?” Inside Indonesia 93(August–October). Accessed 29 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/a-new -artistic-order. ——  2010. “Media and Morality: Pornography Post Suharto.” In Politics and the Media in Twenty-First Century Indonesia: Decade of Democracy, ed. Krishna Sen and David Hill, 172–195, London, New York: Routledge. ——  2012a. “Heirs to World Culture 1950–1965: An Introduction.” In Heirs to World Culture; Being Indonesian 1950–1965, ed. Jennifer Lindsay and Maya Liem, 1–27. Leiden: kitlv. ——  2012b. “Performing Indonesia Abroad.” In Heirs to World Culture; Being Indonesian 1950–1965, eds. Jennifer Lindsay and Maya Liem, 191–220. Leiden: kitlv. McGlynn, John and Barbara Hatley, eds. 1992. Time Bomb and Cockroach Opera. Jakarta: Lontar Press.

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Michalik, Yvonne and Laura Coppens, eds. 2009. Asian Hot Shots: Indonesian Cinema. Marburg: Schüren Verlag. Mietzner, Marcus and Edward Aspinall, eds. 2010. Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions and Society. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Moriyama, Mikihiro. 2012. “Regional Languages and Decentralisation in Post-New Order Indonesia.” In Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post-New Order Indonesia, eds. Keith Foulcher, Mikihiro Moriyama and Manneke Budiman, 82–100. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Mrazek, Jan. 1999. “Javanese Wayang Kulit in the Times of Comedy: Clown Scenes, Innovation and the Performance’s Being in the Present World Part 1.” Indonesia 68(October): 38–128. ——  2000. “Javanese Wayang Kulit in the Times of Comedy: Clown Scenes, Innovation and the Performance’s Being in the Present World Part 2.” Indonesia 69(April): 107–172. Mrazek, Jan, ed. 2002. Puppet Theater in Contemporary Indonesia. Michigan: University of Michigan. Rafferty, Ellen, ed. 1980. Putu Wijaya in Performance: A Script and Study of Indonesian Theatre. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Rodgers, Susan. 1979. “A Modern Batak Horja: Innovation in Sipirok Adat Ritual.” Indonesia 27(April): 103–128. ——  1983. “Political Oratory in a Modernizing Southern Batak Homeland.” In Beyond Samosir: Recent Studies of the Batak Peoples of Sumatra, ed. Rita S. Kipp and R. Kipp, 21–52. Athens, Ohio: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, Papers in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series 62. Sakai, Minako. 2002. Beyond Jakarta: Regional Autonomy and Local Society in Indonesia. Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing. Schulte Nordholdt, Henk and Gerry van Klinken . 2007. “Introduction.” In Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, ed. Henk Schulte Nordholdt, and Gerry van Klinken, 1–29. Leiden: kitlv Press. Sears, Laurie. 1986. Text and Performance in Javanese Shadow Theatre: Changing Authorities in an Oral Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin. ——  1996. Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales. Duke University Press. Sen, Krishna and David Hill . 2000. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Van Erven, Eugene. 1992. The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia. usa: Indiana University Press. Weintraub, Andrew. 2004. Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java. Ohio: Ohio University Press.

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Weintraub, Andrew, ed. 2009. Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. Routledge: London and New York. Widodo, Amrih. 1995 “The Stages of the State: Arts of the People and Rites of Hegemonization.” Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 29(1&2): 1–35. Wiloso, Parmerdi G. 2004. “Civil Society in Central Java: 1998–2004.” In Indonesia in Transition: Rethinking ‘Civil Society’, ‘Region’ and ‘Crisis’, ed. Hanneman Samuel and Henk Schulte Nordholdt, 89–106. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Winarto, Yulfita. 2002. “From Farmers to Farmers, the Seeds of Empowerment: The Farmers’ Self-Governance in Central Lampung.” In Beyond Jakarta: Regional Autonomy and Local Societies in Indonesia, ed. Minako Sakai, 270–290.Belair, SA: Crawford Publishing House. Winet, Evan. 2010. Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre: Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Yampolsky, Philip. 1995. “Forces for Change in the Regional Performing Arts of Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- und volkenkunde 151(IV): 700–725. Zurbuchen, Mary. 1990. “Images of Culture and National Development in Indonesia ‘The Cockroach Opera’.” Asian Theatre Journal 7(2): 127–149.

chapter 1

Contemporary Performance in Central Java – Staging Identities, Constructing Communities Barbara Hatley

Performance in Central Java, in particular the court cities of Yogyakarta and Solo, where I have been following theatre developments over the years,1 illustrates especially clearly the phenomenon referred to in the introduction to this volume – the shift from a polarity of state domination and resistance during the long New Order years to a more diverse, dispersed and locally-focused contemporary performance scene. The rich court traditions, village performance genres and more recently-developed popular theatre cultivated in Yogya and Solo provided plentiful material for government bodies to display their power and authority and inculcate models of ideal Indonesian citizenship. Meanwhile the same rich store of dramatic material could be interpreted satirically to critique state ideology and policy, in particular by the modern theatre groups supported by the big, politicized student population of Yogyakarta. Given the importance of performance as a medium of political expression and contest during New Order times, the big changes in politics and society which have occurred since the regime ended in 1998 seem likely to have had a significant impact on this social role. Describing contemporary performance, and making some suggestions about how it reflects on and connects with its new social and political environment, is the focus of this chapter. Resistance to the state through critical engagement with Javanese performance tradition provided a shared idiom among modern theatre groups during the Suharto era, and attracted enthusiastic support from politically-critical audience members. The movement had begun with Rendra and his Bengkel theatre group in Yogyakarta in the 1970s. Rendra’s epic dramas about flawed, self-seeking kings resonated evocatively with the angry disillusionment with the New Order regime expressed in the campus protests of 1977–1978. When Rendra was banned from performing for 8 years, the group Teater Dinasti took on the mantle of Teater Bengkel in Yogya, and continued to stage historical dramas satirizing powerholders. In the late 1980s the group Gandrik came to the fore, introducing a new theatrical style influenced by folk theatre models, involving contemporary settings, straightforward dialogue, critical humour 1 For reflections on performance in Yogyakarta since the 1970s see Hatley (2008).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_003

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and simple musical accompaniment. Other groups such as Teater Arena developed this style into teater rakyat, a populist theatre approach used with villagers and ngo workers in programs of social transformation. In Solo the group Gapit performed plays in Javanese language set in lower class neighbourhoods where residents have been dispossessed and bypassed by New Order development. As political disaffection widened in the last months of the regime, the resistant role of theatre and its links with societal opposition strengthened further. Performers staged street theatre in protest marches, the actor Butet Kertarejasa gave speeches imitating Suharto, and theatre groups warmed up the crowd for the appearance of the Yogya sultan at the biggest show of all, the one million strong rally for peaceful reform held on the 20 May 1998, the day before Suharto resigned. After the euphoria of Reformasi, however, as the new political conditions and structures of the regional autonomy era became entrenched, the former social connections of theatre dissipated. Some of the major groups from the 1980s and 1990s still perform occasionally, with the ongoing aim of critiquing contemporary political conditions. Gandrik has staged productions about the hypocrisy of the 2008 Anti-Pornography law and exposing the absurdities of ubiquitous corruption; Gapit has reformed under a new name, Lungid, mostly re-presenting classic Gapit plays. Their productions still attract enthusiastic audience support. Yet the sense of ‘organic’ connection with contemporary conditions, the links with oppositionist social groups and role of voicing suppressed political critique are no longer present. Meanwhile a new kind of performance scene has developed, engaging the energies of young people and capturing media attention – diverse, celebratory and participatory, locallybased yet shaped by global cultures and widely publicized through the new electronic media. There seems to be a clear resonance between these theatrical practices and their social/ political context – connection with the shift of administrative control to the local level under regional autonomy, prioritizing local issues; with democratising ideology and its emphasis on public participation; with the flourishing of global influences and networks in the post-1998 expansion of the media. This chapter identifies some common features of contemporary performance and the discourse surrounding it − how practitioners define the aims of their work and commentators describe it. On this basis some suggestions are made about how performance seems to be reflecting popular responses to the changed social-political environment and what kind of contributions it makes. Then three performer/creator/directors, key participants in the contemporary performance scene, talk about their work and give a sense of the issues they see as important.

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Celebration and Display – Festivals, ‘Karnaval’

Recent years in Yogya and Solo have been marked by an almost constant stream of ‘festival’ – performance events celebrating a particular occurrence, place or performance genre. In Yogya festivals of theatre monologue, gamelan, ketoprak, jazz and many other genres augment the annual arts festival, the Festival Kesenian Yogya; others celebrate key events for the city as whole or the anniversaries of particular organizations, and highlight the significance of natural sites and social environments – rivers, markets, local rural communities. Parades or ‘karnaval’, mobilizing hundreds of performers and thousands of viewers as they process through city streets, concentrate the festive mood through spectacular display. Performances marking special events, played out in public space are by no means a new development in Indonesia. Parades for Independence Day and other major national anniversaries, displays of local dances and invented rituals commemorating anniversaries of the founding of regional cities – all this was very much part of life in New Order times. Distinctly different today, however, is the huge number, frequency and diversity of such events, and the focus on popular involvement. Performance in these contexts combines the concretely local with a hybridity and fluidity of style. In rural areas, in big gatherings held on sports fields and other open areas, groups of young people, trained by a resident performer or a practitioner from the city, stage local performance genres. The organizers of such events, often government officials but also church organizations and independent ngos,2 see these activities as a way of giving young people a sense of pride in and commitment to their own culture. Their speeches often mention the vital importance of maintaining local culture in the face of all-consuming globalization. The performances themselves, meanwhile, involve an exuberant blending of local genres with global influences. Jathilan hobby horse dance pageants encompassing hip-hop and break dance moves and monster figures reminiscent of horror movies display and celebrate the local, and at the same time connect with the wider world of international popular culture. 2 Some examples are a festival of traditional arts organized by the Catholic youth organization of the Kulon Progo district (Kesenian Tradisional Orang Muda Katolik Rayon Kulonprogo), held on a sports field in the subdistrict of Lendah on Sunday 4 July 2010, and similar events sponsored by the head of the subdistrict of Manggisrenggo in Klaten in 2009 and 2010. Thanks for this information to Bondan Nusantara, ketoprak director, writer and cultural activist, who acted as advisor and artistic director at these events.

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In big city parades the cultural blending is still more eclectic, as members of all kinds of performance groups and socio-cultural institutions strut their stuff. The Yogya Java Karnaval, staged along the iconic main street of Yogyakarta, Malioboro, each October from 2008–2011 to celebrate the founding of the city, provides a graphic example.3 In 2009 this event involved court retainers, students from arts academies and universities, performance groups and community organizations; on display were giant wayang shadow puppets signifying the centrality of wayang to Yogya’s cultural heritage, a huge effigy of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom, symbolising the city’s educational pre-eminence, as well as Chinese lion dancers, strutting transvestites and teenage hip-hoppers cele­brating its contemporary pluralism. In a spectacular contribution to the glocalized jathilan phenomenon mentioned above, acrobatic young men with spiked, coloured hair, white masks and striped leggings somersaulted, performed handstands and rode hobby horses across the stage, while a voiceover rap song in Javanese exulted the wonders of Javanese culture and jathilan. Official speeches enthusiastically endorsed the parade’s repre­ sentation of Yogyakarta culture as diverse and dynamic and a site of harmonious, pluralistic interaction. The mayor of the city expressed the hope that the parade would become an ‘icon’ of Yogya as a tourist centre, and give expression to the “pride and love” of local citizens for their constantly changing, developing city. The Sultan and governor of the Special District of Yogyakarta4 described the arts as a site of interaction between traditional, local and modern global cultures. He spoke of performers as “protectors of the conscience of society,” suggesting that their shows give citizens both a sense of cultural identity grounded in tradition and a model for flexibility and acceptance of change. 3 Other Javanese cities likewise construct and celebrate their identity through parades and performance spectacles in city streets. In Solo, long-established court rituals such as Sekaten and Garebeg feature prominently, along with an annual karnaval celebrating the city’s founding. In Surabaya, parades and festivals commemorate the history of the city as a site of resistance in the struggle for Independence. In Yogakarta since 2012 neighbourhood festivities have replaced the Yogya Java Karnaval in marking the city’s anniversary - see http://travel .kompas.com/read/2013/08/23/1319333/Agenda.Jogja.Java.Carnival.2013.Ditiadakan accessed 19.9.2014 - while grand parades for other purposes proceed apace. 4 The original charter for the establishment of the Special Region of Yogyakarta, consisting of the city and four surrounding districts, provided that the positions of governor and vicegovernor should be held by the reigning sultan and the head of the junior royal house of Yogyakarta, the Paku Alaman. The current sultan thus also holds the position of governor. Planned changes to this charter, including the conditions of the governor’s position, were the subject of vigorous public debate and protest in recent years before the decision was made to retain the status quo.

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Space and Place

The attention to place illustrated in festivals and parades, the imbuing with life and spectacle a river bank, village field or iconic city street, connects with a more general investment in space and place in contemporary performance activities. A variety of new arts spaces have opened up in recent years, in different areas of Yogya and Solo and in villages on their fringes, in addition to established performance centres. In Yogya the Kedai Kebun forum provides visual arts and performance spaces alongside its busy restaurant; the Padhepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardjo stages regular performance events on the site of its performing arts school; the Garasi theatre group opens its studio space to other performers; likewise in Solo, puppeteers, dancers and theatre figures hold regular events in their homes. Such facilities expand the opportunities for performers to present their work and interact with other arts practitioners, and build interest in and access to the arts among a wider segment of the population, particularly young people. Beyond such designated arts spaces, art and performance can provide a medium to enliven or to explore the perceived significance of a particular location. Mural paintings on city walls and impromptu onsite performances perform the first function; in a more targeted project, actors from the Garasi theatre group and members of Kunci Cultural Studies Center in late 2009 undertook ‘research’ in the square south of the Yogyakarta palace, the alunalun Selatan. Site of supposedly magical, blessing-conferring banyan trees, the square is a hugely popular late-night hangout spot for young people. The actors and activists observed the crowds, interviewed those present about their experiences, then staged performance fragments based on this research, inviting and recording audience reactions. For many groups the key motive for performing outside the confines of theatre buildings is the interaction it affords, bringing performances to people in their own environments, in the spaces of everyday life, overcoming the separation between theatre and social life. The group Papermoon have taken their giant puppets to railway stations and on trains, and to markets to talk to sellers about their difficulties selling their wares. The actors of Gardanella theatre have played out everyday life dramas to fellow passengers on city buses and once ‘sold’ stories to visitors to shopping malls, in exchange for these people’s stories. The theatre festival Festival Teater Jogya (ftj), in 2009, proclaimed as its motto Berkunjung ke Rumah Sendiri ‘Visiting one’s own Home’, bringing theatre back to its community base. Performances staged in the yards of kampung and village homes, in a neighbourhood meeting hall and a market, are seen to overcome the problem of hiring expensive theatre buildings and to

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stimulate aesthetic and cultural exchange between village and city, among theatre workers, between communities. These different communities all have their own stories, myths and social themes, writes theatre critic Indra Trenggono; their narratives urgently need to be revived “before they are crushed by the free market under the guise of globalization” (Trenggono 2009).5

Local Narratives

Stories of local experience – identity issues, relationships, actual situations and events – feature prominently as play themes. Garasi theatre actor Very Handayani, for example, has created a monologue Sum: Cerita dari Rantau (Sum, the Story of a Journey), based on her interviews with young women from various parts of Java who have travelled overseas as migrant workers. In his 2009 production Anak Bajang (Young Child), her fellow Garasi member Gunawan Maryanto explored the phenomenon of an East Javanese village boy who suddenly developed powers of healing, attracting thousands of people seeking cures for their ailments and problems. Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah! (Ma, there are Dogs coming into the House!), tells the story of a struggle between local residents and rapacious developers in the Yogya kampung of Minggiran, home neighbourhood of the play’s writer and director, Andy SW, and the actors performing the story. Recollection of the formerly suppressed history of the aftermath of the 1965 anti-communist killings has been the focus of a number of performances such as Teater Gadjah Mada’s Jaran Sungsang (Unnaturally Born) and Papermoon Noda Lelaki Dalam Mona (Male Stain on Mona) and Mwathirika.6 Local communities have been encouraged to perform their own stories in festival contexts, beginning with the 2008 Babad Kampung project described in Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti’s contribution to this volume, and continuing in the Pasar Kangen festival organized by the Yogyakarta Arts Centre and similar activities in Solo.7 5 Dyan Anggraini, head at that time of the Taman Budaya cultural centre, one of the two sponsoring organizations of the festival, is quoted expressing the related hope that the event will “eliminate the divisions of difference which can’t be avoided in the era of globalization” (Yogya News 18. 7. 2010). 6 Mwathirika means ‘victim’ in Swahili. For accounts of the origin and format of the production Mwathirika, and of demonstrations against its performance as part of the conference ‘Indonesia & The World 1959–1969: a Critical Decade’ at the Goethe Institute in Jakarta in January 2011, see the blogspot accessed 13 May 2013. 7 As part of the 2009 and 2010 Pasar Kangen event, held in the grounds of the cultural centre and involving sale of traditional food and handicrafts and staging of traditional

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Community Connection

Staging local stories and performing in everyday social spaces reflects a widespread concern among performance practitioners with constructing and connecting with communities. Many groups adopt the term komunitas ‘community’, indicating a body of people with a shared sense of identity, grounded in their passion for and commitment to their art. Actors, dancers, mimers, musicians, along with new media artists like the video-arts practitioners discussed by Rachmah Ida in Chapter 4 and Edwin Jürriens in Chapter 5 in this volume, gather face-to-face in sanggar studios and communicate constantly through the internet. Regular audience members at events in theatre spaces such as Salihara in Jakarta form their own networks and online communities, as described in Chapter 12 by Alia Swastika. ‘Community’ in its alternate sense of residents of a particular neighbourhood mobilizes theatre groups in outreach activities. Some stage performances for village and kampung audiences, to bring local people together in shared enjoyment and solidarity. Teater Gidag-Gidig in Solo started taking its simple, humorous, ketoprak-style shows,8 into neighbourhoods around the city after the violent ethnic and class-based riots that swept Solo in 1998, just before Suharto resigned. The group had long performed shows of this type at Independence Day, as entertainment for residents in the kampung where the group rehearsed. Now, after the riots, at a time of heightened inter-group tension and suspicion, performances gathering neighbourhood residents together in shared entertainment could play a vital bonding role. Yet fear of communal disturbance stopped people from organizing such public events. So GidagGidig made arrangements to perform in several neighbourhoods where members of the group had personal connections and where their ‘message’ of community harmony was vitally needed. Since then the group has performed frequently at Independence Day at various location in and around the city. Theatre practitioners also encourage and facilitate direct participation in performance activities by community members. Many work with children and young people. In Yogya, the group Anak Wayang Indonesia, founded in 1998, now has bases in several kampung neighbourhoods where young people gather performances, a number of Yogya kampung were invited to present a performance representing their community, along with an exhibition of art and crafts. For more on the Pasar Kangen and its aims see Widiyarso (2010). 8 The term used by the group is kethoprak pendhapan, ketoprak as it used to be presented in open pavilions (pendapa) in villages and kampung, rather than a fully-developed show staged in a theatre building.

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regularly to rehearse music, singing, games and theatre skits, building a youth arts community. In another model of community engagement, theatre groups open up their studio spaces to residents of the surrounding neighbourhood and offer them performance training. The largest and longest-established of community-based contemporary theatre groups, ccl, the Cultural Community of Ledeng,9 located in Bandung has existed since the 1980s but its activities have greatly intensified since 1998. The leader, Imam Soleh, suggests that the regular performances in the group’s large outdoor space, in which many local youth participate, allow community members to both appreciate and create theatre; ccl members in turn learn from their neighbours the attitudes and expressions of ordinary people, and draw on them in their performances. In Solo, the contemporary dalang Slamet Gundono10 combines wayang with dance, film and an eclectic range of musical forms to re-interpret traditional legends for the present day; he also collaborates frequently on experimental works with other artists. His home-based studio serves as a rehearsal space for his group Komunitas Wayang Suket,11 and as a gathering place for neighbours to practice gamelan and traditional Javanese dance. Concerned with sustaining and revitalizing regional cultural forms, Gundono supports traditional arts activities in rural areas and organizes at his studio events such as dongeng story telling competitions to encourage parents to tell stories to their children as in the past. Once he took his whole neighbourhood to the glamorous, multistoreyed Solo mall where they staged a fragment of wayang dance drama. The aim was to help residents overcome their intimidation by elite spaces and people, and to give middle-class shoppers a taste of the vibrancy of urban lower-class performance traditions and social interaction. 9

10

11

The initials ccl were initially derived from Celah-Celah Langit (Gaps in the Sky) the founding name of the group. However they have been reinterpreted to make reference to the group’s base in the Ledeng area of Bandung. Slamet Gundono passed away tragically at the beginning of 2014; the following description refers to his activities at the time of writing. Through his creative works and social activism, Gundono contributed to Indonesian cultural life in vital ways deserving ongoing attention and analysis. The name refers to wayang suket, grass puppets traditionally made and played with by village children in imitation of standard leather puppets. Gundono explains that he first used such puppets when he was asked to perform wayang while living outside Java, in Riau, without access to standard puppets. Attracted by their suggestion of rural simplicity and communal, populist values, Gundono went on to adopt wayang suket as his trademark medium and emblem of his group. He also uses standard puppets, sometimes combining the two forms.

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The studio of Teater Ruang, in a neighbouring area of Solo, likewise accommodates rehearsals and performances of the group’s abstract, highly physical experimental plays, and is used as a space for children from the surrounding neighbourhood to learn traditional Javanese arts and for visiting artists to perform. Working with together with Slamet Gundono and others, Teater Ruang has several times organized an event held in the rice fields on the edge of Solo comprising gamelan music, poetry, theatre, discussions, orations and a wayang kulit performance, termed Tanggul Keprihatinan Budaya, literally ‘embankment of cultural concern’. The reference is to the physical location of the event, near an embankment protecting the ricefields, where Teater Ruang’s studio is located, and also to its function in protecting embattled, threatened cultural forms. For Joko Bibit Santoso, the group’s leader, sees contemporary Indonesian culture being swamped by the globalized mass media, while government and other social leaders pay no attention. Teater Ruang also promotes and organizes similar activities in other areas, sometimes under difficult social conditions.12 Photos of such practices are uploaded constantly on to the group’s Facebook page; in the ensuing dialogue with commentators Joko Bibit describes them as gerilya budaya “cultural guerilla war” aimed at subverting the hold of the global media, and urges others to join in.

Summarizing the Trends

A central element in much contemporary performance activity is clearly celebration of new-found freedoms after the restrictions of the Suharto years. Performers and audience members enjoy opportunities to reclaim public space, to tell and hear their own stories and construct their own identities. Often this occurs through an eclectic blending of local traditions and global cultural styles. Perceived similarities and easy conjunctures between local forms and global styles, such as jathilan and hip-hop, Javanese language and rap music, arguably boosts the attraction of the local among young people. Local sites and stories take on a new importance through their valorization in performance activities. Democratizing ideology presumably helps inspire the new participatory emphasis in contemporary performance, the breaking 12

For example, in August 2012 group members helped organize a ‘people’s ceremony’ (upacara rakyat) to celebrate Indonesian Independence Day in Gunung Kendeng, in the district of Pati, with local residents who are involved in an ongoing campaign of resistance to the building of a cement factory in the area. (See Ismanto and Widi 2012).

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down of boundaries between stage and audience and the building of links between performers and community groups. Yet at the same time, amidst the celebration, there are some expressions of anxiety. Local cultural forms, locations and stories are seen as valuable not only in their own right but as sites of concrete presence in the face of liquifying change. Organizers of parades and festivals stress the need to support local forms facing the impact of global cultural influences. Theatre analysts stress the need to revive local narratives before they are obliterated by the market and the media. Some practitioners express a sense of mission to preserve local performance traditions as embodying important social values which would otherwise be lost. Many artists and cultural activists express disillusionment with the role of government and with the political party system. They are happy to work with government bodies on performance projects and to make use of the structures of democratic government to gain attention and funding for their activities,13 but feel little sense of attachment to any political group or cause. In this context commitment to ‘community’ assumes central importance. Many ‘community’-focused performance practices are described in this volume – Yogya neighbourhoods playing out their own histories, a Surabaya tv program linking viewers with virtual neighbours throughout the city, diasporic arts groups expressing differing identifications with Indonesia. But use of the term is also challenged. Alexandra Crosby in Chapter 3 draws on international theories of community to question the notion of its fixed relationship to place. Cultural activist Halim hd, speaking at the workshop on which this volume is based, described komunitas, community, as just one of a series of fashionable terms, now applied so widely that it could “apparently…be used for anything.”14 Commentators Ariel Heryanto and Chua Beng Huat debate the issue further in Chapter 13. In the preceding discussion two main understandings of ‘community’ were described, groups of performers and regular audience members, unified by a shared sense of identity and commitment to their art, and local neighbourhood groups. In both cases, one might suggest, community connections are 13

14

An impressive example is the funding received from local government by ketoprak theatre performers in the district of Bantul. Through representations to local parliament in 2005 by their representative body Forum Komunikasi Ketoprak Bantul (Ketoprak Communication Forum of Bantul) they received an annual allocation of funds for a program of festivals, workshops and school activities. See Hatley (2008, 287). In his presentation entitled “Community’ in its Various Meanings.” (“Komunitas dalam Macam-Macam Pengertian”).

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cultivated in part out of a need for performance practitioners to construct social moorings appropriate to contemporary times. Whereas in the past political commitment inspired artistic practice, and provided a common bond with audience members, today’s performers need to focus their energies differently. Arguably their performances aim to engage with audience groups personally and socially as local citizens. At times senior theatre figures express critical views of contemporary Indonesian performance. Following a meeting of theatre groups in Yogya, the well-known theatre critic and poet Afrizal Malna suggested, for example, that contemporary Indonesia theatre is ‘dead’, having lost its former connection to society and ordinary people, absorbed with technological innovation and consumerist values. But theatre practitioners Muhammad Abe and Andy SW argue in response that today’s performances, focusing on stories of identity, relationships, local social experiences and historical memories, attempt to create new forms of social awareness among audiences and offer “more subtle and complex perspectives than the confrontation with the state that characterized activist Indonesian theatre in the past” (Andy and Abe 2010). Clearly current plays do address social problems, such as poverty and social and political injustice. Environmental degradation features prominently, both in individual productions and at festivals like those described in Chapter 3. Yet very often the critical message is accompanied or framed by a sense of celebration. A picture of unalleviated disaster or angry protest would conceivably be out of keeping with the sense of reinforcement of self and group identity which today’s performances seek to provide for their audiences. Celebration of identity was a vital part also of the performances of the New Order period, but consisted in a stance of shared political resistance, even if sometimes only hazily conceived. In the context of today’s diverse, dispersed local identities, performances may be in danger of being seen as narrow, selfabsorbed celebrations of the local for its own sake. Performing groups participating in big state-supported parades arguably risk co-optation into a self-congratulatory, mythologized representation of the city or region – in examples such as the Yogya Java Karnaval described earlier, perhaps a constructed, exoticized ‘brand Yogya’. To attempt a direct assessment of these problematic issues would require detailed knowledge and analysis beyond the scope of this Chapter. Instead, in the final pages, attention shifts to the perspectives of several key participants in the contemporary performance scene, three actor/directors of differing background and contrasting performing styles. While my discussions with them were not specifically focussed on issues of community, identity and performance, their stories and observations provide very relevant commentary.

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Slamet Gundono15

Slamet Gundono, the dalang extraordinaire and leader of Komunitas Wayang Suket mentioned above, was born in Tegal, on the north coast of Java, into a family of dalang. Through study at an Islamic boarding school, pesantren, then arts institutes in Jakarta and Solo, Gundono gained training in Islamic coastal traditions, central Javanese wayang and in contemporary experimental arts. He draws on all these forms and displays his diverse skills in innovative experimental productions performed widely within Indonesia and at international arts events. He frequently undertakes collaborations with other artists, from Indonesia and abroad. In June 2009 I had the chance to talk to Gundono during the preparations for his performance Semar Meteng (Pregnant Semar) staged at the opening of an exhibition ‘Semarak 30 Semar’ (30 Splendid Semars) by ceramic artist F. Widayanto at the National Gallery in Jakarta. Thirty figures representing different manifestations of the obese wayang god/clown Semar made up the exhibition: the performance likewise involved 30 Semar characters, all immensely overweight like Gundono himself. The story begins with a demand by Semar’s wife that he ‘reproduce’ more quickly: given current economic pressures she cannot support the family for the 100 years traditionally required to bring forth a new leader. After initial confusion and threatened trickery from a shyster operator, Semar succeeds in the task, and the 30 Semar look-alikes fill the stage. They parade and dance exuberantly and remain waving to the audience, being photographed, after the performance ends. The mood is one of joyous celebration of excess (Figures 1.1. and 1.2). In conversation Gundono explained that it has been Semar’s role through the ages to nurture, to ‘give birth to’ new leaders.16 Nowadays leaders can be produced more quickly. New technologies allow the compression of time, the speeding up of tasks. All-night meditation can be done in alternate ways, by studying, using the internet. People can learn new information and skills at a distance via the internet, and connect with friends on Facebook. Gundono stated that he did not think cultural traditions would be lost in this context, but they would need to be continuously reinterpreted and 15 16

Once again, Slamet’s sudden death in early 2014 brought an end to his performance productions, but the legacy of his artistic creativity and social vision continues. Semar’s nurturing qualities are embodied in the symbolism of his body – the combined childlike innocence and elderly wisdom signified by his tuft of hair, the life-giving power of the breasts and stomach, the protection of the huge buttocks.

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Figure 1.1  The exuberant, celebratory final scene of Semar Meteng devised and directed by Slamet Gundono. National Gallery, Jakarta, June 2009 Photo: Barbara Hatley

Figure 1.2  Semar figures backstage, Semar Meteng. National Gallery, Jakarta, June 2009 Photo: Barbara Hatley

reinvented to stay alive. There is no such thing as ‘authentic’ tradition, in any case. If young people experience Javanese cultural traditions along with many others and mix them together that’s fine. Life is not about preserving tradition but survival. He supports traditional, local arts because of their unique value, and draws on them in own creative works. He sees his role as one of reviving in order to survive. On building arts communities, he said he derives so much

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personal enjoyment from creating art that he tries to provide opportunities for others to do so. Like the performance he had just produced, directed and starred in, Gundono’s comments conveyed a sense of celebration, of enthusiastic embrace of the opportunities of new spaces, sponsors and technologies to practice local art forms in novel ways and communicate with the wider world. But by early October 2009, Facebook, email and phone text messages began to announce a very different kind of performance event being planned by Slamet Gundono, Joko Bibit and friends. The first Tanggul Keprihatinan Budaya event, comprising gamelan music, poetry, theatre, discussions, orations and a joint wayang kulit performance by Gundono and two other dalang, would be held in the rice fields on the edge of the city of Solo from 26–30 October, to express a shared concern about the dire state of ‘our culture’. Gundono wrote on his Facebook page in October 2009 of the shocking news of terrorism, wars, economic collapse and other disasters bombarding people’s brains so they no longer know how to respond, with no shared cultural standpoint.17 At the same time intellectual and cultural groups are each busy with own projects, holding performances, seminars and discussions. “As if, up till now, we’ve felt there was a culture which was growing well and would live on.”18 In fact, however, in the wider society there is a lack of public space and public responsibility; individual interests predominate. Swamped by cultural influences people struggle to define their identity, while fanaticism among some groups threatens social unity. In this context, cultural communities, artists, intellectuals, journalists and religious figures from around Indonesia are invited to gather together with their Solo counterparts. “Let’s see if we can still re-read and reinterpret our culture in a humble, selfless way.”19 Should one see a sharp contradiction between the two performance events and Gundono’s accompanying comments? Or are both positions valid readings of contemporary cultural conditions from different perspectives? In speaking and performing both positions at different times, Slamet Gundono might be seen as giving expression to the complexity of the contemporary 17

18 19

Otak manusia dibombardir untuk menelan apa saja, namun sering tak mampu memilih, dan yang paling memprihatinkan nyaris kita kehilangan sikap dan sudut pandang kebudayaan bersama dalam berbagai persoalan yang kita cerna.  accessed 13 May 2013. “Seolah, kita selama ini sudah merasa ada kebudayaan yang tetap tumbuh nyaman dan tetap lestari.” (Personal email communication, 29 October 2009). “Coba melihat kembali apakah masih ada spirit tanpa pamrih untuk membaca kembali kebudayaan kita.” (Personal email communication, 29 October 2009).

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Indonesian cultural climate, the celebration and anxiety referred to earlier, encompassing many currents within his wide-reaching, eclectic talents and his larger-than-life frame.

Yudi Tajudin and Teater Garasi

Yudi Tajudin is a very different kind of artist, with a contrasting personal background and history from Slamet Gundono. Yet their readings of contemporary Indonesian society and the place of performance arguably show interesting similarities. Yudi is not Javanese, nor trained in Javanese arts: he grew up in Jakarta and moved to Yogya to study, first at high school, then at Gadjah Mada University. He got very involved in theatre while still at school, participating in the productions of various groups, and at university in political-cultural discussion and student activism. In 1993 with two fellow students he founded the theatre group Garasi, which in 1999 moved to its present location with Yudi as ongoing leader/director. Teater Garasi plays an important ‘community’ role for Yogya theatre activities, providing a space for performances by other groups, conducting actor training, publishing a regular newsletter, SkAnA, about performance events in Yogya, and maintaining a documentation centre. Meanwhile Garasi’s ambitious, sophisticated, avant garde productions are well known and highly acclaimed, and Yudi is in much demand as a director and artistic collaborator. Waktu Batu (Stone Time), which the group staged in three productions, between 2002 and 2005, was inspired by the crisis in Javanese identity which occurred after the ending of the Javanese-dominated Suharto regime. The plays evoke and play upon several age-old Javanese myths, showing them as interconnected, blended, and merged with experiences of the present day (Figure 1.3). For Yudi, both the prior research conducted for the project and the overall experience confirmed the ongoing hybridity of Javanese identity – Javaneseness not as an essential entity but a creative, dynamic syncretism. Garasi’s next big production Je.Ja.l.an (The Streets), staged in 2008 and 2009, is set not in Javanese mythic time but very much in the here and now, amidst the chaotically varied sights and often violent interactions of contemporary Indonesian streets. Buskers and itinerant sellers compete for attention, neighbours play badminton and struggle with security guards, an Islamic terrorist figure with swathed head confronts a haji in a skull cap; dangdut performers sing and dance. The story is told of a soy bean cake (tempe) seller who suicided when his business collapsed due to a sudden rise in the global price of

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Figure 1.3  Figures in ancient dance postures and projection of Indonesian archipelago shadowing contemporary bodies, Waktu Batu 111, Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta, September 2004 Photo: Muhamad Amin

soybeans. All this follows an opening scene where the narrator speaks of the hectic pace of contemporary life, while figures race past one another on the street. He asks the big question – kita mau kemana? “Where are we going?” From the research for this production, conducted on the streets of Jakarta and Yogya, Yudi reports gaining a visceral sense of Indonesia’s current condition of plural, competing identities, jostling together on ‘the street’. Two threatening alternative futures loom – being swamped by globalization, or assuming an essentialist identity, most likely that of orthodox Islam, which many people would find oppressive. What is needed is a new basis on which the different ethnic and cultural groups which make up Indonesia can continue to co-exist. In 2009 Yudi spoke of a planned new project, a play about the pre-war nationalist leader Syahrir and his concept of nationalism, which is pluralist rather than essentialist and understands the connectedeness of things. For various technical and organizational reasons the Syahrir play has not eventuated. Instead in 2010 Garasi proceeded with a third production in the Waktu Batu/Je.jal.an series – Tubuh Ketiga (The Third Body), taking up the concept developed by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha of a space between, a post-colonial identity beyond essentialisms, neither Western

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nor indigenous, a ‘third space’ (Bhabha 1994, 36–39). Within this frame­ work,   Indonesia’s hybrid, plural mixture of cultures and bombardment by outside influences is something to be accepted and worked with rather than lamented. “What is important is creativity and an open attitude” writes Yudi,20 to get on with life rather than worry about identity issues. The example of Indramayu, an area close to the capital, Jakarta, both urban and rural, traditional and modern, serves as an iconic embodiment of this principle. And the exuberant, hybrid local entertainment genre tarling dangdut, a fusion of guitar music with the popular music and dance form dangdut, sets the dominant atmosphere. Audience members enter a theatre set up as a real life space, that of a village wedding (Figure 1.4). They are greeted as honoured guests, and plied with drinks and snacks. A decorative arch over the couch where the bridal couple will sit bears the sign Selamat Menempuh Hidup Baru dalam Era Globalisasi ‘Best Wishes on Embarking on Your New Life in the Era of Globalization’. In the course of the performance, Garasi actors relate and act out stories gathered during a field stay in Indramayu. Some narratives, like that of the woman who has worked for five years in Saudi Arabia to cover the costs of her son’s circumcision celebrations and will return imminently for a further five years to earn enough for his wedding, express hardship and struggle. But the overall mood is upbeat. As part of the celebrations, the actor Sri Qadaratin, in the role of dang­ dut singer, moves into the audience, gyrating provocatively and inviting men to dance with her. Tubuh Ketiga embraces the exuberant, participatory style of much contemporary performance. Yet celebration of contemporary Indonesia in its hybridity and plurality, its lack of constraint by narrow essentialisms, is seemingly not the end of the story. Yudi and other Garasi members spoke after the staging of this production of a planned new work in the series entitled Sehabis Suara, ‘When the voice is gone’. When the party is over, what next? In the current environment, where a cacophony of voices and forces bombard the individual, when the state lacks authority and there is no outside body ordering the myriad complexities of social reality, what happens inside each person in facing this reality alone?21 In March 2014, a 30 minute drama and dance performance 20 21

“Isu pentingnya adalah kreativitas dan sikap terbuka.” (Personal email communication, August 2011). In Yudi’s words “karena negara seperti tak lagi punya kuasa, maka setiap orang seperti musti menghadapi dunia yang semakin terjejalin dan terjejaring ini sendirian. Lantas, apa yang terjadi/apa yang berlangsung ‘di dalam’ diri seseorang, siapapun itu.” (Personal email communication, August 2011).

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Figure 1.4  Garasi theatre stages a village wedding, with dangdut singer entertaining guests. Tubuh Ketiga Yogyakarta, 2011 Photo: Muhamad Amin

Sehabis Suara #1, staged by Garasi in Jakarta, provided some initial reflections on this question, with the promise of more to come.22 Why does Yudi as a theatre artist feel that he needs to engage with the ‘big questions’ facing contemporary Indonesia, issues of the nation? Because he believes that Indonesian actors and directors can’t just ‘do art’. They have to be involved in civil education, civic society movements, especially at this crisis time for Indonesia. In investigating the big social and political issues facing Indonesia, Yudi has drawn on Javanese culture because he lives and works in Java. Yet he does not feel personally attached to any cultural tradition. While describing himself rather ruefully as “rootless,” he sees positive benefits in this condition. He gets engrossed in all traditions he encounters, and learns much from them all. Both Slamet Gundono, steeped in Javanese cultural forms and ways of thought, and Yudi with his self-proclaimed ‘rootlessness’, endorse the dynamic, 22

The occasion for the performance was Garasi’s receipt of a Prince Claus award from the Netherlands Government for the group’s progressive, contemporary contributions to culture and development. See http://teatergarasi.org/?page_id=661 and http://hot.detik .com/read/2014/03/28/130155/2539557/1059/lakon-minim-dialog-sehabissuara, accessed 20 July 2014.

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syncretic quality of Javanese culture, condemn essentialism and ‘fanaticism’ and see the artist as responsible for addressing major social issues.

Andy SW

Compared to Gundono and Yudi, two established luminaries of the Yogya-Solo theatre scene, Andy SW is as yet a junior player, but a very active and enterprising one, whose activities and views provide interesting comparative perspectives on issues of identity, locality and community in contemporary performance. Andy comes from the Yogya kampung of Minggiran. He describes himself as having grown up in three areas, in Minggiran in the larger neighbourhood of Mijen, in his mother’s house in the village of Jogonalan in Bantul regency, south of the city (his parents separated when he was still a baby) and partly on the streets.23 He took up theatre and poetry-writing at high school, studied Japanese at a tertiary language academy (with no particular aim, a friend chose the course for him), then got involved in theatre again, joining a pantomime group. In 2004, together with friends, Andy formed the group Bengkel Mime Theatre, which since then has staged numerous productions on social themes – Super Yanto (Yanto, the Super Hero) about global warming, Suspect: Datangmu Terlalu Cepat (Watch Out: You’re Coming Too Soon) about overly rapid modernization and urbanization, Aku Malas Pulang di Rumah (I Don’t Like Going Home) about a salesman whose wife and child are so obsessed by advertisements on television that they turn the living room into a supermarket and the kitchen into a fashion show. In 2005 Andy founded another group, Teater TeMMu, based in his own neighbourhood, after being asked to produce a performance to represent the local subdistrict in a theatre festival. All the performers had to be locals, so he chose members of a children’s theatre group he had been running and neighbours who seemed likely to have some talent. The group won several prizes, and staged another production in 2006, Lelakon Urip Dilakoni Kanthi Waras dan Trengginas (Living Life Wisely and Shrewdly). 23

Andy reported in a 2009 interview with the author from which most of the information presented here is taken, that he didn’t get on with his father and spent more time with neighbours, then at the age of six rode off on his bike to find his mother. He moved in with her and her new family in Madukismo and did his primary schooling there. But he came back to his father’s house when he was in junior high school, living partly with his father, partly on the streets. His senior high school years were spent moving between his two homes and the streets.

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Yet Andy suffered periods of stress, anxiety and personal uncertainty. He had part-time teaching jobs at a high school and the language academy but gave them up in 2006, deciding he wasn’t suited for teaching, and took up selling donuts. When the donut business collapsed in 2007 he lived from friend to friend, making money by busking and giving ojek (motor cycle taxi) rides. Bengkel Mime Theatre continued to perform, received a grant, and established a permanent sanggar. In 2008 Andy worked in the babad kampung program of the Yogyakarta Arts Festival, discussed in Chapter 2 of this volume. At the end of the year he fled Yogya in another bout of stress, but in early 2009 regrouped the members of Teater TeMMu to perform Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah! the play about rapacious developers referred to earlier in the chapter. Andy reports that there had been a long-term, real-life struggle over land in Minggiran, resulting in the displacement of many kampung families and the erection of a housing complex. In the play, written by Andy in everyday Javanese, six residents remain after developers, pictured as ‘dogs’, led by a sleazy figure in a safari suit and dog mask, have killed, co-opted or driven away the others. After the death of a revered old kampung official, who had some protective influence with the dogs, the six lose the fight and are forced to leave their homes. But the mood is upbeat rather than despairing as they move on confidently, taking the old man’s gravestone with them (Figure 1.5). Territory is not the only thing, what’s most important is to keep alive the spirit of the leader, the essence of local culture. Indeed the overall style of the play is humorous. The big crowd of local people, including his father, laughed as they watched when it was staged in front of a house in their neighbourhood, even though they understood, clearly or hazily, what it was referring to. Other theatres might need to be directly confrontational, Andy says, but saya tidak harus verbal tentang memberontak, melawan, tidak harus sekonyol itu “I don’t have to talk literally about rebellion, resistance, I don’t have to be as foolhardy as that.” The production was small scale, very local, but got good press coverage. It was staged again as part of the Festival Teater Yogya 2009, as one of several productions located in kampung settings. In 2006 Andy wrote a lively, engaging account of the formation and first two productions of the group of “students, traders, building workers, unemployed people, craftsmen, pupils, teachers, thugs, artists” comprising Teater TeMMu.24 In 2009 he reported enthusiastically in conversation on the group’s inclusivity, lack of constraint by aesthetic rules and aim of bringing alive (menyemangati) kampung life, providing people with alternate entertainment to television 24

In an article in the theatre newsletter SkAnA to which he often contributes (Andy 2006–2007).

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Figure 1.5  Land developer, in dog mask, with departing residents carrying the gravestone of their leader in Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah! Teater TeMMu. Yogyakarta, 2009 Photo: Teater TeMMu

melodramas. Now, however, he speaks in past tense of his dreams for the transformative role of kampung theatre, as a creative medium for young people, site for recalling and learning from local history and for bringing together government and ordinary residents in joint activities. Those were the “dreams of a restless young man in the midst of his kampung,” he writes wrily, “my ideals when I still lived in the kampung which has now become elite housing.”25 Andy talks of now concentrating his energies in other directions, building new communities. His major focus is his work with Bengkel Mime Theatre, along with mime workshops with young people and a variety of other artistic activities. Compared to Slamet Gundono, grounded in a wealth of Javanese cultural traditions, and Yudi, shaped by and moving easily in an urban intellectual world, Andy’s life and work might be said to embody the conditions of the contemporary kampung, in all its discontinuities and disruptions, its uncertainties facing modern pressures, yet also its warmth and sense of freedom, its cheery, stoic sense of survival. Like the characters in his play who pick up the gravestone of their leader and take it with them, as Andy’s youthful 25

“mimpi anak muda yang gelisah di tengah kampung halamannya”…“cita-cita waktu saya masih tinggal di kampung halaman yang kini sudah menjadi perumahan elite.” (Personal email communication, August 2011).

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image of kampung theatre and his own place within it has faded he has focused his energies and enthusiasm elsewhere.

Concluding Thoughts

All three figures with their contrasting backgrounds and artistic approaches engage with the celebratory idiom and focus on the local typical of performance in regional autonomy times, while displaying clear concern for and commitment to their society. Many practitioners working in the diverse idioms described earlier in the chapter espouse the same commitment to artistically creative works which also encourage positive qualities in society: pluralism, tolerance, optimism, and community solidarity. No longer are social problems attributed, as under the New Order, to faults in one big, evil System, to be exposed and resisted. Now they are portrayed as aspects of local life, to be combated or understood and coped with as appropriate. The very absence of an overarching nationalist discourse and movement of political resistance may add to the sense of responsibility of performing artists to engage with problems, imagine solutions, dream new dreams. The likely efficacy of their approaches is surely open to question, given the problems confronting contemporary Indonesian society reported constantly in the media and analyzed in academic studies – corruption, institutional weakness, religious intolerance, rampant global capitalism.26 How the activities of performers, along with those of other groups working locally to defend civil society values, develop in the future will depend on what happens in Indonesian society more broadly. For performance remains very closely integrated into its social and political context, albeit in different ways from previous decades. References Andy, SW. 2006–2007. “Teater TeMMu: Kelahiran dan Perjalanan Teater Kampung” skAnA volume 2 November 2006–March 2007. Andy, SW. and Abe Muhamad. 2010. “Theatre of Life” Inside Indonesia 101(Jul–Sept). Accessed 24 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/theatre -of-life. 26

For varied reflections on political and social conditions in the post-Suharto, regional autonomy period, see Aspinall and Mietzner (2010), Erb, Sulistiyanto and Faucher eds. (2005), Bünte and Ufen (2009) and other works cited in the Introduction to this volume.

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Aspinall, Edward and Marcus Mietzner eds. 2010 Problems of Democratization in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions and Society, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bünte, Marco and Andreas Ufen. 2009. Democratization in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Oxon, usa and Canada, Routledge. Erb, Maribeth, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto and Carole Faucher eds. 2005. Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia. London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Hatley, Barbara. 2008. Javanese Performers on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Ismanto, A. and H. Widi 2012. “Merah Putih Dikibarkan di Lereng Pegunungan Kendeng”. Kompas, 17 August. Trenggono, Indra. 2009. “Teater Berkunjung di Rumah Sendiri” Kompas Minggu 9 August. Widiyarso, Joko. 2010. “Pasar Kangen Jogja (pkj) 2010 Resmi Dibuka” GudegNet 26 June 2010. Accessed 24 January 2014. http://gudeg.net/id/news/2010/06/5717/Pasar -Kangen-Jogja-(PKJ)-2010-Resmi-Dibuka.html.

chapter 2

‘Babad Kampung’

Celebrating History and Neighbourhood Identity in Yogyakarta Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti

Since the end of the New Order regime in Indonesia in 1998, there has been wide variation in the way different social groups have responded to the challenge of re-examining sources of knowledge about the past and the narration of past events. The writing of Indonesian history according to the dictates of New Order orthodoxy has undergone a sustained process of response, reinterpretation and even rejection, resulting in the publication of large numbers of new books on historical themes (Schulte Nordholt, Purwanto and Saptari 2008, 20). Many aspects of the New Order’s version of the past have been subjected to questioning and redefinition, not only through the publication of books, but also through the development of new community-based spaces and media technologies. For 32 years, the New Order exercised tight control over opportunities for discussion and debate on the construction of the past among competing social groups. It successfully limited and contained the sources that legitimated the narration of the past, and instituted a centralist, militarist and eschatological method for the writing of Indonesian history.1 The hegemony exercised by the state in this area produced a uniform view of the past that tended to focus on the logic of developmentalism, integrating competing sources of knowledge and ways of narrating the past into a single national narrative of the Indonesian nation and its people. In this chapter, I discuss an experiment with the writing of history that was carried out by kampung2 neighbourhoods in Yogyakarta in the climate of ‘openness’ that followed the fall of the New Order in 1998. This experiment is a revealing example of the way social groups create their own histories. It presents opportunities for examining the continuing influence of New Order orthodoxy on the way kampung people view history, but it also invites consideration of the extent to which these communities position themselves between official state narratives and their everyday knowledge and practices. 1 Among other ways, state control over the legitimation of the past was maintained through the state’s hold over the writing of history texts used in schools (Schulte Nordholt, Purwanto and Saptari 2008, 11–17). 2 The complex interpretations and associations of the term ‘kampung’, basically ‘urban neighbourhood’, are discussed below.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_004

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The particular focus of the discussion is a project entitled ‘Babad Kampung’ (Neighbourhood Histories), part of the twentieth Yogyakarta Festival of Arts in 2008.3 As a window on the dynamics of present-day kampung communities, the Babad Kampung project illustrates the ways in which the past is being contested and negotiated in the post-1998 climate. It shows the kampung communities of Yogyakarta engaged in a process of reviewing, writing and performing their own individual local histories. The diversity and complexity of Indonesian social geography in the post-Suharto period often leads to a simplification and narrowing of vision that produces reactionary responses to political and social dynamics. For example, the practice and discourse of decentralization that arose in response to the centralization of power under Suharto and the New Order may take a reactionary form underpinned by a narrow fundamentalism. Henley and Davidson (2010, 2) observe that “the great experiment with reform has in fact produced a re-discovery – or a re-creation – of regulations and identities sourced from the former practices of particular kampung, ethnic groups and sultanates.” Across Indonesia, various groups and communities seem to have revived traditional bonds of ethnicity, district and region as a form of response and reaction to post-New Order developments. On another level, the movement for decentralization or localization is not only a negation of the former regime’s power, but in many ways it is also a reaction to the dynamics of globalization, the disappearance of the local into the vortex of the global. It is becoming increasingly clear that post-New Order Indonesia is witnessing the incorporation of local communities into the market transactions made possible by global transnationalism, in which the Indonesian state is one of many actors.4 As an event performed in the post-New Order context, the Babad Kampung project reveals the identity of the kampung as a term, as a place and as a location, presented on the urban stage within the networks of global traffic and the shared working practices of the urban population. It represented a move towards the ‘decentralization’ or localization of specific local histories within the mainstream framework of Indonesian history according to the New Order model. In another sense, it was an expression of local identity – in terms of both place and community – in the context of globalization. The project was programmed in the 2008 Yogyakarta Festival of Arts as a major event, showcasing the festival theme of ‘The Past is Always New’ and signalling a decisive break with previous festivals in its managerial structure (such as its organizational 3 The writer, Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti, acted as coordinator of the Babad Kampung project. 4 Compare the interesting analysis of the role of the state as a hired strongman in the global context overseeing social life within its borders in Wibowo (2010, 23–81).

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design, its stakeholders and funding mechanisms), its work program and even the way it illustrated a changed vision and mission in the organization of the festival as a whole.5 This discussion does not address these changes directly, focussing instead on the Babad Kampung program as an innovation that involved kampung communities in this prestigious annual event. The project not only reflected changes in the organization of the festival, but also changes that were taking place in society at that time. In performing themselves, the kampung communities taking part were helping to construct an identity for the city of Yogyakarta as a whole.

The Kampung Writes History

Babad Kampung was a history ‘writing’ project that took the form of kampung-based festivities and performances.6 From its inception, the project was explicitly designed as a medium for collective and communally-based experimentation. It was both a celebration of kampung histories deeply rooted in the movement of urban communities across time and a positioning of its participants in those histories. With the kampung as its starting point, and having as its theme ‘the kampung’s past is the city’s future’, the project became a form of advocacy, repositioning the kampung as a vibrant, productive and creative urban reality. This was significant, because in the previous histories of urban development, the kampung is often positioned as an illustration of the urban squalor and ugliness that development has to overcome. 5 The Yogyakarta Festival of Arts (fky) is an annual festival of more than twenty years’ standing, organized by the Cultural Affairs Section of the Yogyakarta Provincial Government. Usually a team of organizers is appointed for four years, but a number of resignations in the lead-up to the nineteenth festival resulted in several new appointments being made for the nineteenth and twentieth festivals. During these two years, relations with the Cultural Affairs Section of the Provincial Government became more flexible, because the new appointees were from a variety of backgrounds; they included artists, arts events organizers, activists, local businesspeople, writers and researchers. Previously, the festival organization had been dominated by artists from a more uniform background with more formal administrative/bureaucratic connections to the local government. The organizers of the nineteenth and twentieth festivals introduced a number of innovations, not only in the festival’s management, themes and activities, but also in terms of a new vision for the festival in a changing city. Their vision of art was as an investment (in terms of social capital) in Yogyakarta’s future. 6 I place the word ‘writing’ in quotation marks here to indicate the variety of ways of remembering that it incorporates. The ways a community remembers its past, making it a source of knowledge in a present-day context, is a form of history writing. It does not only take written form (as a text), but is also expressed in oral, visual and performance forms.

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In both practice and discourse, the concept of the kampung in Indonesian and Yogyakartan history operates on at least two different levels.7 It plays a part in identity formation, and it also is the basis on which negotiation and advocacy on behalf of communities caught up in urban development can be undertaken.8 Whether consciously or not, the word ‘kampung’ is part of the everyday vocabulary of Indonesian speakers. The range of discourses and social contexts in which it appears is vast, and it conveys a variety of different perspectives on the realities it signifies. Usually, it refers to and identifies a type of person (orang kampung or ‘kampung people’) or a place (as in kampung njeron beteng, which signifies a community living within the walls of the city’s ancient fortress). Similarly, it can be used to refer to a place of origin, as in the expression kampung halaman. Its adjectival derivative, kampungan, refers to particular characteristics, usually negative attributes such as impolite or inappropriate behaviour. Although it is often used to define identity, there is no single reality that corresponds to kampung as a signifier. It is a highly flexible term, which can be used by any individual as a means to construct his or her own identity and the interests associated with it, or to construct an image of ‘the other’ in the contest for space in the modern city.9 The Babad Kampung project was consciously aimed at positioning the representation of Yogyakarta kampung histories in the tradition of advocacy on behalf of urban kampung communities, in the sense that it was an attempt to create negotiating space over the issue of urban development. It represented the kampung as the signifier of a dynamic cultural identity as well as a particular location, that is, ‘as a positioning, not an essence’ (Budianta 1999, 48) in discussions and practices related to the city and urban space. It was essentially a framework of activity in which kampung communities, together with 7 The discussion of the Yogyakarta kampung in this paragraph is elaborated in Kresno Murti (2010). 8 Almost 25 years ago, the discourse on the kampung of Yogyakarta broke into the national and international media as part of the advocacy undertaken by activists on behalf of the Code River communities whose homes were threatened with demolition by the city administration. See Khudori (2002). 9 In the early years of the twentieth century, the concept of the kampung emerged as part of the imagination of the modern colonial city. As ‘non-urban’ space, it defined the problems associated with urban planning in the colony, disrupting the notion of ideal urban space with a vision of a problematic and even frightening model of unhygienic indigenous housing. For this reason, it came to represent a situation which needed to be improved, controlled, and restored to ‘health’. This view has persisted to the present day, in the various imaginings of the kampung as a place lacking sanitation and mired in squalor, disorder and crime. See Kusno (2009, 62–66).

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creative artists, assembled all the resources of the informal networks they commanded, in order to bring about artistic performances by kampung people themselves. These performances were mainly based on popular art forms familiar to kampung communities, such as ketoprak (historical melodramas), dagelan (comic skits), wayang orang (classical dance drama) and Javanese-language plays. Other forms of history writing, such as photography exhibitions, written texts and documentary films were also undertaken as part of the project. All these forms of writing the past constituted a festival of kampung-based arts, and a medium for beginning the task of recording kampung history. A total of nine kampung in the city of Yogyakarta were selected for participation in the project. Apart from their suitability in terms of organizational capability, these nine kampung were seen as representations and signifiers of change in the city of Yogyakarta from one era to another. Geographically, they were scattered right across the city (see figure 2.1 below). The nine kampung were: • Dolahan-Kotagede, representing the kampung located around the former palace compound (kraton) of the Sultan of Mataram in Kotagede.10 The area is known for its relics of the Mataram sultanate, as well as the extraordinary degree of indigenous trade and industry it sustained through the synthesis of Javanese and Islamic culture in pre-colonial times. During the late colonial and early independence periods, it witnessed the growth of the modernist Islamic organization Muhammadiyah, and was a major centre of workers’ organizations and the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, pki). • Suryowijayan, representing the kampung which emerged around the nDalem, or residence, of the kraton official Suryowijoyo. The bonds between members of these kampung communities are symbolized in institutional arrangements governing the use of land around the nDalem, whereby land owned by members of the nobility or kraton officials is occupied and managed by the local inhabitants. • Minggiran, representing the old kampung in the south of the city that grew up around the edges of the Yogyakarta kraton as residential compounds for palace servants (abdi dalem). It is also the site of an Islamic boarding school (pondok pesantren) that was influential in Indonesian history. It is now undergoing rapid growth, as a result of new housing complexes that have been built within the kampung.

10

On Kotagede, see the seminal study by Mitsuo Nakamura (1983).

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Figure 2.1  Map of Yogyakarta kampung.

• Pajeksan, representing the kampung that grew in tandem with the development of the Malioboro district as the centre of business and services in Yogyakarta. • Mergangsan (Kidul), representing the old kampung originally inhabited by the families of abdi dalem and carpenters, which later became densely populated because of their proximity to the many educational institutions that were established in the area. • Tukangan, representing the kampung on the muddy banks of the Code River that grew exponentially as urban communities because of their proximity to the Lempuyangan Railway Station and the Malioboro area.

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• Kricak (Kidul), representing the old kampung on the banks of the Winongo River that developed rapidly in the early independence period under the influence of the rail and road links between Yogyakarta and Semarang. • Pandean, representing another group of kampung that emerged as organic units in the early independence period because of their location near the interurban and interregional bus terminal. • Samirono-Karangmalang, representing kampung that took shape in the 1970s, in line with the growth of shopping malls and the proliferation of educational institutions aiming to profit from Yogyakarta’s reputation as a ‘city of education’.

Experimental Work: Provoking Authority and Testing the Market

The 2008 Babad Kampung project appears to have been the first time Indonesian post-colonial urban histories were consciously created and ‘written’ by kampung communities. History writing in this context of course differs from the work of academic historians, in that it is more concerned with collective memory, the ways in which memory is preserved or forgotten, and becomes part of the everyday life of kampung communities. The emphasis is not on the nature of the product, but more on a conscious process of experimentation, the nature of the experience. As such, the methodology of the project was not bound by particular periods or time frames, but instead was focussed on (1) practices of everyday life that could be performed by kampung communities, (2) events experienced collectively and (3) the strength of collective memory of past events. On this basis, kampung narratives were collected together, assembled and worked into various types of performances. The initial stages of this exploration and reassembly of the past proved to be quite confronting for the participants. The project’s working group experienced doubts and even fears about their work, afraid that they would misrepresent kampung histories, or more precisely, create problems with what they were presenting as history. These doubts surfaced as the kampung communities talked among themselves and began the work of compiling the texts that would serve as the basis for their performances. What should be included? What might be left out? These constructed stories would be presented through a range of different performance genres, from ketoprak and wayang shadow puppet theatre to modern drama, or sung lyrics in the style of keroncong popular music, or even traditional Javanese poetry such as macapatan and geguritan. All performances would be developed and staged

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collectively, grounded in the varied experiences of the nine different kampung involved. The hesitation experienced by participants as they began the work of assembling kampung histories was produced by at least two related considerations. Firstly, there were no standard written histories that could be drawn on in support of their undertaking. Almost all records of past events in the kampung were maintained and passed from one generation to the next as ‘only’ spoken stories, making people doubt their ‘truth’ as historical sources. The influence of school-based learning and the New Order state’s version of history meant that oral traditions of this kind were not seen as valid historical records. Moreover, for the kampung communities themselves, written sources by outside observers were sometimes necessary, particularly in cases where they might serve as reference points on issues likely to arouse suppressed conflicts among different interest groups. This was the case in areas like the history of land tenure, of conflict between different lineage groups, and the memories of mass violence and murder. In these instances, reference to outside sources and their careful introduction into the process of story-telling was a way of limiting potential sources of conflict. It reduced the possibility that individuals or groups telling their own stories might be seen as disrupting the harmony of the community, even though it did contain the potential for a re-ordering of social relations through the introduction of new knowledge, a new way of working and a new experience of working together. The second source of the hesitation kampung people experienced in telling their stories of the past was the memory of the fear associated with past events. This fear, which in some cases bordered on ongoing trauma, closed off people’s ability to acknowledge the past (in some cases even to themselves). It could lead to attempts to deny the course of past events that were too painful to recall, turning them into stories of a progression from darkness into light. The tendency was often to portray the past as a time of ignorance and suffering, in contrast to a present that was seen as more enlightened, progressive and ‘modern’. It differed from the New Order’s version of linear history, in that it was unconcerned with the narrative of the superiority and heroism of the Suharto regime in rescuing Indonesia from the chaos of the late Sukarno years through its magical weapon of development. Instead, it saw kampung history as a struggle to maintain the life of the collective in the face of repression and trauma experienced due to the impact of state violence (for example, in the events of 1965, the Petrus killings of 1983 and inter-party political conflicts). The incorporation of these events into a narrative of progress was a way of reminding people about the existence of a violent state in the past and expressing the hope that it would not be reproduced, or might even be completely forgotten, in the present (see also Susanto, 2008, 89–123).

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At a later stage of the project, there came a point where the hesitation experienced by kampung people in retelling past events began to subside. This happened when the narratives took on the character of collective memories, which had the effect of affirming the kampung as a community. One kampung resident expressed it this way: Ah, this is just a story to get things started, an opening story being written down for the first time. Once it’s there, anyone has the right to question it and make improvements to it. The more people who get involved in the discussions, the more versions of the story will emerge. As they come together, the final version becomes more and more complete.11 The concept of ‘a story to get things started’ (cerita pancingan) was the key to overcoming the hesitancy kampung people felt about compiling histories of their communities. It gave many people the encouragement they needed to join in a collective undertaking that had never before been attempted, and it evoked the notion of communities setting out on a collective celebration of histories that previously had been tightly controlled by the New Order state and its agencies. As their work progressed, the project took on the character of a challenge to authority, provoking a reaction from both the state and the market. As such, the Babad Kampung project was a rare example of kampung communities beginning to explore the possibilities of escape from the restrictions placed on them by outside authorities. In its experiments with history-writing, the project defined the kampung not only as a space inhabited by marginal urban populations, but also as a place where the ‘non-urban’ was kept alive and a location where the issues surrounding urban life in the global context could begin to be addressed (See figures 2.2–2.3 for examples of Babad Kampung festive opening parades).

Bringing the Kampung’s Stories Together: mawa tata, mawa cara

The process of bringing together – and then compiling – the stories that would be performed differed from one kampung community to another.12 For these 11

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“Ah, ini kan cuma cerita pancingan, cerita awal yang baru kali ini ditulis, sehingga siapapun berhak untuk mendebat dan memperbaiki cerita itu. Semakin banyak yang mendebat, makan akan semakin banyak versi kisah terlahir keluar. Justru akan semakin lengkaplah cerita itu.” (Author’s notes, from a discussion in Kampung Pandean, 2008). I deliberately use the term ‘bringing together’, rather than simply ‘compiling’ or ‘writing’ in this context, because it better conveys the idea of a process that involves recalling the past in a way that responds to present-day needs. This process is similar to the way human

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Figure 2.2 Opening parade of the Babad Kampung program, kampung Minggiran. August 2008. Photo: Budi N.D. Darmawan

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Figure 2.3 Procession opening the Babad Kampung program, kampung Kricak, July 2008. PHOTO: Dwi Oblo

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communities, the idea of writing history, as well as the understanding of what constitutes the sources of knowledge about the past and the narration of the past, is not singular or uniform. In each case, the social life of the kampung played a part in influencing the way the community went about writing its history. The Babad Kampung writing committees made use of techniques employed in the writing of academic histories, such as research based on written texts (books, newspaper clippings and unpublished papers), various types of interview and group discussion. But the methodology behind these interviews and discussion groups was not that of academic history-writing. The stories of each of the kampung’s origins came from the oral traditions preserved in the memory of the community’s respected elders, and interviews with the holders of formal authority in the kampung, such as current and former heads of neighbourhood associations, religious authorities and those possessed of special knowledge, took the form of respectful visits to one’s social superiors or family elders (sowan). In kampung Pandean, the community even included the stories of someone once regarded as being possessed by the kampung’s guardian spirit. In all these cases, the ‘interviews’ conducted as part of the process of history-writing were not seen simply as a method of data collection that would add to the reliability of the final product. Rather, they were a way of informing key individuals about the project and ensuring that it did not provoke conflict between social groups in the kampung. In practice, the process involved in the writing and performing of history was actually a means of promoting communication within the kampung communities themselves. A good example of the way the project promoted communication within the kampung occurred in the case of Babad Kampung Samirono. In this case, the community made the experience of exploring kampung history the basis for their performance, transposing the reality of this process onto the stage. Enlivened with theatrical elements to attract the attention of their audience, the performance entitled Samirono: bukan kampung ‘kampungan’ (Samirono: no hick kampung) presented the audience with a revealing look at the workings of the writing committee as it went about exploring the kampung’s history. It told the story through the figure of a journalist, beginning with his interviews with a number of kampung elders and his visits to significant places within the kampung, then showing his involvement in the work of documenting life in the kampung and his romantic attachment to a local girl. By telling the story of the kampung and its origins through the eyes of a journalist in this way, this performance avoided getting caught up in questions of communities managed their cultural survival before the advent of literacy-based knowledge.

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historical accuracy. Clearly, it was not so much concerned with historical facts and their interpretation, as with exploring the ups and downs of everyday life in the community. It spoke in a language that was easily understood and communicated, making use of parody and highlighting issues of togetherness, memories of activities engaged in jointly by the kampung community, and symbols of life in the kampung. For the people of kampung Samirono, the performance was ultimately not about the history compiled by the project committee, but rather about involvement in the life of their community. In kampung Pandean, the project’s main production was a ketoprak performance entitled Banjaran Babad Pandean. The term ‘banjaran’, which usually occurs in the names of wayang performances, refers to an epic story about a time of prosperity and its eventual decline. In this case, the performance told a comprehensive story of the origins of kampung Pandean, compiled from a range of local sources regarded as authoritative. It brought together the different versions of this story told by the community’s religious leaders, the head of the neighbourhood association, the descendants of the kampung’s founders, and the local practitioners of Javanese cultural forms. The combination of these different versions of the story of the kampung’s origins involved the participation of an outsider, in this case not an academic historian, but a ketoprak performer from another kampung. In other kampung taking part in the project, such as Suryowijayan, Tukangan and Pajeksan, outsiders were also involved in the work of combining local versions of past events. This had the effect of harmonizing the various accounts of the past and maintaining community relations. For the kampung communities, the main issue involved in the writing of history was how to incorporate the understandings of different interest groups within the framework of community life. A different approach was adopted in kampung Dolahan-Kotagede. Here, the main concern of history-writing was how to re-instate the once familiar oral narratives of the kampung’s past. In contrast to some other kampung taking part in the project, the history of the Kotagede kampung has been the subject of a great deal of historical research and writing, from scientific reports to academic papers and mass media coverage. However in the eyes of local communities, writing of this type has little to do with the realities of life in their kampung. Instead of something that would end up on a library shelf or in an academic researcher’s filing cabinet, they set out to stage a performance based on an oral tale entitled Kisah Mbok Randha mBodhon (The Story of the Widow of mBodhon). Its aim was to remind the community of the values that had once sustained their community. Mbok Randha was a widow from a kampung called mBodhon, who had a craving for wealth and possessions. This made her forgetful of her obligation to share what she had with her neighbours.

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By performing the story, it was as though the community was reminding itself of the culture of mutual obligation that had once been part of life in the kampung of Kotagede. The experience of these three kampung (Samirono, Pandean and DolahanKotagede) indicates that for these communities, the ‘writing’ of kampung history became an exercise in interpreting history in the light of communal experience. It was not a question of the accuracy of sources, or the truth of memories of the past and historical narratives, but of managing the project in a way that enhanced the operation of present-day community life. Every action, every word spoken and every outcome envisaged depended on and took account of the existence of other people. This made the Babad Kampung project an expression of the Javanese maxim, mawa tata, mawa cara, which refers to the ongoing effort to understand the formal rules of interaction as well as the informal, enjoyable practices of communal life. Nevertheless, in Mergangsan Kidul, Minggiran and Kricak Kidul, the writing and performance of kampung history provoked some interesting tensions between different sections of the community. Significantly, in these three kampung, the Babad Kampung committee was made up of young people who had acquired their education and their understanding of history (New Order style) through schooling. With this background, they set about the task of writing history ‘scientifically’ by collecting data, carrying out interviews and recording information, as the basis for their performance scripts. Unsurprisingly, this approach threw up some new discoveries for these young people of the New Order generation, particularly in the area of conflicts that occurred in the past and were still influential at the time of the research. When they played out these stories on stage, some older community members found their frankness troubling and inappropriate, giving rise to public expression of intergenerational conflict rarely encountered under Suharto’s New Order. As their contribution to the Babad Kampung project, Mergangsan Kidul chose to stage a play entitled Belokan di sekitar kampus (Twists and turns around the campus). It was a critical look at the rapid physical changes that had taken place in the kampung as a result of the proliferation of educational institutions in the Mergangsan area. These changes were marked by the selling of land in the kampung and the erection of new student boarding houses, which led to increased population density and unplanned urban development. The title of the play referred to the twists and turns in the kampung’s roads and alleyways as previously open land was filled in and settled. By highlighting these changes, it critiqued the privatization of kampung space that was occurring in the wake of the development of new educational institutions and the promotion of Yogyakarta as a ‘city of education’.

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In Minggiran, the project resulted in a theatrical performance on a similar theme. Rembulan madhangi kampungku (The moon lights up my kampung) critiques the disorderly physical changes taking place in the kampung, the loss of irrigated rice fields and their replacement with housing developments. In this case, the play performance was one of many activities staged in the kampung as part of the Babad Kampung project; these included a ritual meal, a kampung parade, and a performance of sung poetry in the tembang style. They all centred on the unease felt by young people in the kampung in the face of change and development. Minggiran is a uniquely interesting kampung, because it is part of life in the shadow of the Kraton of Yogyakarta, but it also maintains the traditions of its rural past. By exploring those past traditions, the young people engaged in the project were able to point to the irony of the kampung’s present condition, which is more and more congested, and pressured by the demands of urban life. From an area inhabited by kraton servants who maintained the highest values of the Javanese courts, it has become a modernday enclave without any recognizable customs and manners at all. This is a cause of sorrow and concern, but the presentation of the changed world of the kampung in Rembulan madhangi kampungku also conveyed a sense of hope for the future. In Kricak Kidul, the main performance took the form of a musical play with keroncong-style songs, entitled Tembang Kricak (Song of Kricak) (Figure 2.4). It brought together fragments of events and memories of incidents the community had experienced together, arranging them in a chronological narrative that moved from events during a time of chaos in the past to the ‘brightness’ of the present-day. It told the story of Kampung Kricak’s long journey from a time when it was a stronghold of the pki and a nest of criminals, through its administration by corrupt officials to its present status as a tourist village. It was an opportunity for the young people of Kricak to present the history of their kampung through song, a history that spoke more of sorrow than of joy.

Managing Conflict

The methodology adopted by the young people who wrote the stories of Mergangsan Kidul, Minggiran and Kricak Kidul differed from that of the Babad Kampung project in Samirono, Pandean and Dolahan-Kotagede. In the case of the latter three kampung, the exercise in history-writing was a way of affirming the social relations of present-day community life. For the former, it was the exposure of a truth that needed to be expressed directly. Both were celebrations of neighbourhood dynamics, but the reaction of each community was

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Figure 2.4 Local actors in army uniforms in Tembang Kricak, Babad Kampung program, Yogyakarta Arts Festival, July 2008. Photo: Dwi Oblo

different. In Mergangsan Kidul, Minggiran and Kricak Kidul, the presence of social criticism in the narration of kampung history by young people of the community created a degree of controversy that was absent from the process in Samirono, Pandean and Dolahan-Kotagede. However in both cases, the methodology behind the process had a common aim. It was a way of working that was ultimately intended to bring the community together, to give people of different generations the opportunity to talk to each other, to communicate, and to come to some common understanding of neighbourhood life. This marked a clear departure from the New Order period, when locally-based activities of this type were severely restricted. When conflict did surface, as in the case of Kricak Kidul, it was managed collectively. The Tembang Kricak performance made many older generation audience members uncomfortable, because it reminded them of events in the past they would have rather left alone. A number of scenes in the play were direct recreations of situations in the past they found unsettling, such as references to Kricak’s former reputation as a gambling den, a place of intoxication, and a source of recruits for mass political protests. The costumes worn by the performers often had the same effect, recalling the former role of soldiers, civil servants, students and petty criminals in kampung life. The linear plot line of the

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performance inevitably touched on themes that would have been ‘dangerous’ under the New Order, especially the tragic events of 1965 and the ‘mysterious killings’ of 1983. A number of former kampung officials resented the focus on corruption in local politics and administrative affairs. In fact many of the older generation in the audience left before the performance had finished. One week after the musical play was performed, Kampung Kricak held a community meeting to discuss the accountability report by the Babad Kampung committee and the ‘failure’ of the performance in the eyes of the older generation and the kampung officials. The atmosphere was tense, because the committee’s report was subjected to far greater scrutiny than was generally the case. For weeks, the Babad Kampung performance was a hot topic of conversation among the community, with the controversial aspects of the event continuing to play themselves out in daily life. Gradually, the tensions dissipated, as the community meeting, the daily conversations and personal approaches between the groups affected all helped to re-establish good community relations. The young people who made up the Babad Kampung committee were able to continue their work, and were still entrusted with management of the funds the kampung had received for initiatives in the arts. In fact, the intergenerational tensions which arose in Kampung Kricak Kidul as a result of the performance showed that the principles of mawa tata, mawa cara – the ongoing efforts to understand the rules of interaction and informal practices of communal life – that were observed in the writing of the kampung’s history, continue to play themselves out in everyday life. Tensions, or even conflict, between different groups in the kampung can always be settled in dynamic and dialectical ways, as long as the state in its various manifestations refrains from intervening. This absence of state intervention is what distinguishes the circumstances surrounding the Babad Kampung project from procedures in the past, when Suharto’s New Order was in power.

The Work of Performance: Bringing the Processes and Practices of Neighbourhood Life to the Stage

The Babad Kampung involved thousands of Yogyakarta residents in a celebration of neighbourhood life. The nine kampung communities taking part in the project came together in a city-wide pageant celebrating their origins, but they also staged their own local parades on the themes of their individual kampung histories. They held events like pasar tiban, spontaneous informal markets, ceremonial rituals, community meetings, consultations with government officials, press conferences and other public displays, all of

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which served to activate social, economic and political networks both at the local level and on a city-wide scale. The Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono X, along with the city’s governor, the mayor, and representatives of all levels of the urban administration formed part of the audience at Babad Kampung performances. Interest groups outside the kampung approached these celebrations in terms of their own concerns. Statements about the project issued by government officials, political leaders and city administrators reflected their individual political interests, while representatives of educational institutions, the tourism industry and the arts saw the project in terms of the conservation of tradition – often through romantic lenses. During the course of the project, in July and August 2008, a total of 248 reports on the twentieth Yogyakarta Arts Festival appeared in the local and national media, many of them including reference to the Babad Kampung performances.13 For the kampung themselves, the work involved in staging these performances was nothing new. For decades they had followed the practice of organizing ritual commemorations for important national days such as Indonesian Independence Day on 17 August and Youth Pledge Day on 28 October, not only as a response to official directives, but also because these events have an important social function in the lives of their communities. This long-established practice plays an important role in safeguarding and managing neighbourhood life, because it allows members of the community to understand and appreciate each other’s capabilities. For example, people come to know who are the most capable organizers of public events, who should be invited to community meetings, who is best able to handle matters connected with the arts, and so on. This level of awareness among members of the kampung communities enables them to respond effectively to outside influences. It provides a channel for innovation and change and ensures the continuing vitality of community life. The celebratory character of events like the work involved in staging the Babad Kampung performances differs from the meaning of celebration in the vocabulary of the elite. Figuratively, it is the work of discovering new words and finding a language through which to express them. In the case of the Babad Kampung project, it was a matter of taking words like ‘writing’, ‘history’, ‘performance’ and ‘arts’, and turning them into a language for communication and interaction between members of the kampung communities. Just as in the case of words like ‘ketoprak’, ‘wayang’, ‘theatre’, ‘dangdut’ and ‘keroncong’, the terms that refer to the cultural media devised through the Babad Kampung 13

This information is based on documentation compiled by the festival’s organizing committee.

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project cannot be separated from the people who practise them. They are not just forms of entertainment, but structures for social interaction in the societies where they have evolved. As abstractions of practices of performativity, they can be transformed into marketable products, but they can also function as frameworks through which ordinary people can imagine ways of ‘standing firm in the face of the persona and threat of modernity’ (Susanto 1997, 53). These structures are formed through the practices of everyday life and the construction of complex and particular audiences. They bring people and communities together, celebrating what they have in common. They construct identities, and create a language for their expression. As language, a celebration in the kampung will always provoke a lot of imagination, a lot of ideas, a lot of talk and a range of different types of activity. In each kampung, the expressions and experiences will be different. In this respect, the Babad Kampung project brought out the realities inherent in the practices of everyday life. It rearranged and reconstructed the bases of communal life in a variety of different forms and styles, performing everyday histories as they evolve in line with increasingly globalized patterns of urban development. For the communities themselves, the ‘stage’ was the work involved in the process itself, not the space where the performances were presented. As such, whatever the form and style of the performance, the language of their expression was always contextualized within the kampung and framed by neighbourhood life. The ways in which the urban kampung and its community life are understood in the post-New Order period represent a significant departure from the way they were seen at the height of the New Order’s power in the 1980s and 90s. At that time, the kampung was a unit of control, divided into territorial administrative units (Rukun Warga [rw] and Rukun Tetangga [rt]) and defined by the presence of government institutions such as pkk, Dasawisma and Karang Taruna.14 This administrative structure, which originated under the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in the Second World War (Sullivan 1992, 44), was reinforced in 1989 when the Rukun Kampung (rk) unit became the Rukun Warga (rw), under direct control of the sub-district ward (kelurahan). The kelurahan was the spearhead and fundamental basis of Golkar – the government’s political party – at the local level. The kampung thus became an integral element of the New Order state’s political structure (Guinness 2004, 103). By 14 The pkk, Pendidikan Kesejahteraan Keluarga, literally ‘Education in Family Welfare’ was a program aimed at educating women about family health and welfare, the Dasawisma was a grouping of 10–20 household heads with responsibility for providing support for the family welfare program, and the Karang Taruna was a neighbourhood youth organization.

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contrast, the Babad Kampung performances in these nine Yogyakarta kampung illustrated the dynamism of these local communities in the post-New Order climate. With the removal of the New Order’s structures of control, the focus was on neighbourhood life – in social, economic and cultural terms – as the reservoir of the nation’s human capital. Constantly on the move, the neighbourhood has come to be seen as the public face of the Indonesian city, the framework within which the urban population interacts and communicates. Under the New Order, it was systematically infiltrated by the structures of political intervention and control, but in practice, the loyalty these structures exacted proved to be a fragile commodity. When they were removed, the urban kampung became a dynamic living space and a flexible environment in which communities manage their own survival. The working practices of the Babad Kampung project illustrate the type of interpersonal and inter-group interaction and communication that is the essential basis of neighbourhood life. Performance, both in its literal meaning and in the sense of the provision of a space where dynamic common identities can be created, provides a focus for negotiating the changes that have occurred in urban kampung communities since the end of the New Order regime. It represents a new approach to understanding the variation within and between communities, and maintains the channels of conversation and communication between the individuals and groups that comprise the communities themselves. It is especially important following on from the New Order’s prolonged assault on socio-political structures of communication and in the face of the global constriction of social space brought about by the growth of information technology and inter-regional mobility.

Closing Remarks

When Indonesia was hit by the Asian financial crisis of 1998, many analysts observed that it was precisely in these circumstances that the urban kampung showed its capacity for survival. Deprived of government funds for the development of infrastructure, the kampung’s ability to engage in self-help initiatives actually increased in the wake of the crisis. With the state looking increasingly powerless and the bureaucracy stagnant, the moves towards decentralization caused urban administrations to look to the kampung as the main focus of urban development. In practice, runaway inflation was affecting the buying power of the urban poor, and unemployment was increasing. In Yogyakarta, pressures on living space and the practice of land speculation were growing. Large-scale selling off of irrigated rice fields for housing

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development and business districts went unchecked, and conflicts arose over land clearances and rapid privatization, such as those that occurred in Kampung Tungkak, Kampung Gajah Wong and Kampung Minggiran. Other disputes erupted over access to urban space, such as the controversy surrounding the banning of street musicians from the city’s central market, Pasar Beringharjo. The same pressures were evident in the debates over Yogyakarta’s special status as a province with particular authority over the management of its land and cultural assets (including its system of governance). These debates have raged on a national level right up to the present day. By contrast, in 2005, Yogyakarta received national recognition as the only Indonesian city that had managed the issue of urban slum dwellings without recourse to land clearances. It was also recognized as a ‘City of Tolerance’, not only at the national level but also internationally. In the same year, the Mayor of Yogyakarta adopted the campaign slogan Pembangunan kota berbasis kampung (City development based on the kampung) as the focus of his candidature in the municipal elections. This trend has continued. In 2010, the kampung became a key term in the discourse surrounding urban development in Yogyakarta, exactly 25 years after the city government threatened to raze the kampung along the banks of the Code River. The Babad Kampung project was positioned between the positive representation of the kampung in the discourse on urban development and increasingly harsh realities of everyday life in kampung communities. The appropriation of the term ‘kampung’ by powerholders and the owners of capital was a sign that the discourse on the kampung had entered the market. It was part of an attempt to promote an image of the city that focused on the uniqueness of place, the evocation of character and the materialization of tradition. It was an expression of local identity that could be marketed on a global scale, bypassing the everyday realities of neighbourhood life to emphasize its political and romantic connotations. The Babad Kampung project addressed this appropriation through its concept of kampung communities ‘writing’ their own histories. It pitted these communities against the attempts by powerholders and the owners of capital to define the kampung as a static entity positioned in relation to the city through a series of dichotomies, such as colonizer and colonized, centre and periphery, modern and traditional, ideal and flawed, and so on. It also challenged the romantic perspective that cast the kampung as a representation of everything that was alive, authentic, traditional and spontaneous, in contrast to the city as a representation of the loss of indigenous tradition and vitality amid the onslaught of modernity. These dichotomies always assign the ability to determine meaning to the interests of power, which then popularizes them through the workings of the market.

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The Babad Kampung project adopted a different approach, actuating the dynamics of social, economic and cultural relations at the level of the neighbourhood. In its work of identity formation, it provided an important framework for urban development into the future. In this sense, it conceptualized the kampung not as a noun, but as a continual practice, a verb describing the process of evolving cultural identities, ‘a positioning, not an essence’ (Budianta 1999, 48). It offered the participating communities an opportunity to adopt a critical stance towards their politicization and romanticization in the discourse on urban development, and it illustrated the important position of the kampung in the tension between the market pressures of globalization and the narrow demands of local-level essentialism. References Budianta, Melani. 1999. “Representasi Kaum Pinggiran dan Kapitalisme.” Kalam 14(48): 27–53. Davidson, Jamie, David Henley and Sandra Moniaga eds. 2010. Adat dalam Politik Indonesia. Jakarta: Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia and kitlv-Jakarta. Guinness, Patrick. 2004. “Indigenous Culture and Culture of Violence” Jurnal Kampung, 95–115. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Pondok. Rakyat. Khudori, Darwis. 2002. Menuju Kampung Pemerdekaan. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Pondok Rakyat. Kresno Murti, Yoshi. 2010. “‘Babad Kampung’ From Yogyakarta: Unfinished Story of Contesting Identities and Creating Negotiation Space on The History of Urban Development.” Accessed 17 February 2010 http://ypr.or.id/id/oleh-oleh/babad -kampung-dari-yogyakarta-cerita-yang-belum-selesai.html. Kusno, Abidin. 2009. Ruang Publik, Identitas dan Memori Kolektif Jakarta Pasca Suharto. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Ombak. Nakamura, Mitsuo. 1983. Bulan Sabit Muncul dari Balik Pohon Beringin. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press. Schulte Nordholt, Henk, Bambang Purwanto and Ratna Saptari. 2008. Perspektif Baru Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, kitlv Jakarta, and Pustaka Larasan. Sullivan, John. 1992. Back Alley Neighbourhood: Kampung as Urban Community in Yogyakarta. Clayton: Monash University. Susanto, Budi SJ. 1997. Kethoprak. The Politics of The Past in the Present Day Java. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Kanisius. —— 2008. Membaca Poskolonialitas. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Kanisius. Wibowo, I. 2010. Negara Centeng: Negara dan Saudagar di Era Globalisasi. Yogyakarta: Penerbit Kanisius.

chapter 3

Relocating Kampung, Rethinking Community Salatiga’s ‘Festival Mata Air’ Alexandra Crosby As part of the collective effort of this volume to understand the cultural spaces in Indonesia after the end of the New Order, this chapter argues that smallscale arts festivals are key sites generating changing notions of place and community in contemporary Java. I take as my subject an annual activist festival that began in 2007, ‘Festival Mata Air’ (fma, Festival of Water) and its interactions with three Salatiga kampung neighbourhoods. Along with other festivals that emerged around the same time, such as the Forest Art Festival in Randublatung, fma generates a fresh culture of protest, opens up the kampung as a space of public engagement and provides artists and performers with a viable alternative to curator-driven exhibitions and events. My analysis shows the potential that exists for dynamic local identities to interact meaningfully with the global, expanding the social imaginary of the kampung. During a festival, activists deconstruct the very idea of the kampung, by working with the community within the kampung rather than the kampung as an official entity, and by creating an ‘affinity space’, which can also be thought of as an activist kampung.

Tapping the Springs of Salatiga

If a city can be said to have an identity, Salatiga’s is undeniably linked to water. It is dotted with hundreds of fresh water springs connected by canals, rivers and creeks that provide water for much of the lower altitude regions of Central Java. The Dutch-built Jelok power station has long been the main provider of electrical power for Salatiga. Jelok gets its water from the Tuntang river, which flows out of Rawa Pening lake, which in turn receives its water from Telemoyo Mountain. Salatiga residents, until recently, have prided themselves on excellent tap water that runs down from the mountains behind it throughout the year.1 But battles to exploit or protect water sources have also become part of the shifting identities 1 Tap water in cities in Indonesia is rarely potable. See Kurniasih (2008).

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of many Salatiga communities. The most recent of these communities, and the one examined in this paper, is Tanam Untuk Kehidupan (tuk). tuk formed in 2005 when the artist Rudy Ardianto and his family returned to Salatiga after living in Australia for ten years. The word tuk means ‘water source’ in Javanese, and the phrase tanam untuk kehidupan in Indonesian translates as ‘planting for life’. By early 2007, when Festival Mata Air began, there were about twenty artists, activists and scientists from all over Salatiga who were active in tuk. Festival Mata Air began in July 2006 when tuk negotiated to borrow a disused council building in the centre of Salatiga to use as their headquarters for an ambitious program of events over the next few months, culminating in a three-day art, music and education event themed around water. tuk secured sponsorship from the cigarette company Djarum and funding from local government. The festival has since become an annual event in Salatiga, growing steadily in size and adapting in form. Senjoyo was the site of the first (2006) and fourth (2009) festivals. The spring at Senjoyo is the main source for the municipal water supply and the two textile factories in the city. It is also used for irrigation downstream of Senjoyo river. There is a public pool at the spring, which is crowded every day, both with locals, who use it for bathing, laundry and washing dishes, as well as tourists, who enjoy its beautiful forest setting, spiritual significance and lack of admission fee.2 Although largely regulars, the people who use Senjoyo do not for the most part reside there. Like the activists, they are transient, guests who share and activate a common locality. During the first festival, the spring played an important role, as a gathering point and performance site. It was repeatedly referenced in artworks and performances, for example Indra Yanti’s Menjahit Sampah, ‘Sewing Rubbish’, Senjoyo, 2006, and the performance Plastic Man (Figure 3.1). The second Festival Mata Air was staged at a kampung in Salatiga’s cbd called Kalitaman (‘river park’ in Javanese). Kalitaman is located below both a large shopping centre and the ‘main drag’ of Salatiga, where many residents work, and from which a large quantity of waste makes its way through the kampung waterways (See Figure 3.2 for performance highlighting rubbish issue). One of Kalitaman’s springs, traditionally used as a public bath for men only, has dried up completely. Two springs remain, one of which has been converted to a public swimming pool with an entrance fee, owned and run by the city council. As at Senjoyo, the other spring is used for bathing, laundry, washing dishes, and relaxation. Kalitaman was chosen by tuk not only because of the environmental problems it faces, but also because the kampung had 2 Although the pool was built in colonial times, the spring itself is ancient, and bathing in it was believed to secure long life.

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Figure 3.1  Performance Plastic Man, Festival Mata Air, kampung Senjoyo, Salatiga, 2006 Photo: Alexandra Crosby

already fought for its water rights in the 1990s, when an outside company had tried to take over all three springs (Crosby 2007). The 2008 festival was held at Kalimangkak (which ironically translates as ‘dirty creek’). The waterway is managed (or mismanaged) by a co-operation between no less than four separate rt.3 On one side of the creek are privatelyowned rice fields, irrigated by the creek itself, and a tpss (Tempat Pembuangan Sampah Sementara), a council-run temporary rubbish tip used to sort and store rubbish that is then transported to the main city tip. There is also a hotel and café (Hotel Kalimang and Café Kelinci) as well as many homes. Three springs are connected to the creek and used by kampung residents for bathing and washing. Typically, the festival programs include a range of music on a number of stages, from the local high school choir to nationally famous punk bands, outdoor sculptures, games, traditional performance, a market place for independent producers, workshops, and children’s activities. In creating Festival Mata 3 Rukun Tetangga (rt) is the smallest administrative unit of Indonesian society and defines the official boundaries of a kampung.

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Figure 3.2 Group performance Rubbish Cheerleader, Festival Mata Air, kampung Kalitaman, Salatiga, 2007 Photo: Alexandra Crosby

Air, tuk formed an identity in response to the physical geography of Salatiga. They then performed that identity by activating existing kampung in the city. In doing so, the collective also engaged with globally circulating ideas of community, art and environmentalism that influenced their own definitions of ‘local’.

The Kampung Quandary

How do we define or translate kampung, a word reflecting on the ways people relate to each other and their localities, a term of long-standing fluidity now being explicitly reinterpreted and reclaimed? The following translations of kampung and its derivatives are from Kamus Indonesia-Inggris (IndonesianEnglish Dictionary) (Echols, Shadily, Wolff and Collins 1997, 258). kampung: 1 village. 2 quarter. 3 residential area for lower classes in town or city perkampungan: 1 settlement. 2 gathering place kampungan: countrified, boorish

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The idea of the kampung as both a physical site and a community of people is an important part of tuk’s practice. As Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti points out in Chapter 2 of this volume, ‘kampung’ is a highly flexible term which can convey varying perspectives on the realities it describes: it may lack a direct English translation in part because it has always been conflicted, in various ways. Its slippery meanings – a village, a neighbourhood, a slum, a home – are all important and evoke a number of questions: Can kampung function as the conceptual equivalence to the English ‘community’, or the German ‘Gemeinschaft’? Is it possible to speak of a ‘virtual kampung’ in the way ‘virtual communities’ have been coined? Can there be a ‘global kampung’ like a ‘global village’? Can a kampung be temporary? As tuk uses kampung as the site of their cultural activism, these questions become inherently part of their practice. One of the many associations of kampung relates to the ongoing dialogue between community and nation. In a similar way to the interplay between national and regional languages, the space of the kampung, how it is created and how it creates itself, defines what is local in a national context. While the role of a kampung can be devised and imposed at a national level, the kampung can also become a unit for organizing dissent. In her thesis on the development of Internet practices in Indonesia (Lim, 2005), Merlyna Lim draws on Foucault’s term the ‘Panopticon of surveillance’ to describe how the kampung system operated during the New Order. Lim points out that security measures, including the culture of reporting guests (outsiders) to kampung authorities, were imposed by the state after the anticommunist sweepings of 1965. During that time, Lim argues, the kampung system performed much the same role as the high-tech surveillance systems of major world cities today, albeit much more simply and cheaply. People generally accepted unquestioningly that the state had the right to monitor the comings and goings within their kampung, thus relinquishing any notion of civic space, and they were also encouraged to be suspicious of strangers. The rt system along with the Siskamling (Sistem Keamanan Lingkungan – neighbourhood community watch) were part of the territorializing project of the New Order regime which sought to bring existing social divisions into the service of the state as well as developing new mechanisms for control (Barker 1999). Besides as a system of surveillance, the kampung also provided a way to quantify groups of people, to conduct census, keep track of dissidents, in short, control the population.4 4 Rachmah Ida also makes reference to the use of kampung structures by the New Order state for population control and surveillance, in her discussion of the gardu community guard house in Chapter 4 of this volume.

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However, the kampung was not simply an imposition by the State on the population. Laine Berman describes the paradox that emerged in the visual language at the end of the New Order when the role of the kampung as a building block of the nation was challenged by the rising dissent. Under Suharto, the gapura (entrance way) to the kampung was usually decorated to reflect the ideology of the regime: cast or sculpted statues of revolutionary heroes, images of ethnic unity, maps of Indonesia, the two-finger symbol of the national family planning campaign dua anak cukup (two children are enough).5 Meanwhile on the streets and alleyways of the kampung, very different sentiments about the regime were reflected in posters, banners, T-shirts and graffiti (Berman 1999). These expressions of kampung operated in two directions, from the state about citizens and from citizens about the state. Thus the term ‘kampung’ has come to have important connotations of resistance for activists. They often identify themselves as kampung and kampungan (uncultivated, low class), drawing on a positive image of the kampung as a site of egalitarian collective identity. This image is grounded in a genealogy of activism that precedes the controlling mechanisms of the New Order and needs to be considered along with the negative pictures of the kampung as a tool of surveillance presented above. In some cases dating back to collective opposition to colonialism, this heritage is celebrated today in the names and practices of music and theatre groups.6 Take, for example, the Yogyakarta protest band Dendang Kampungan and the Solo performance troupe Wayang Kampung Sebelah, both of whom performed at Festival Mata Air on multiple occasions. Dendang Kampungan (Kampung Songs – dendang means ‘happy chants or songs’) prides itself on being able to perform protest songs in any situation with any number of members, with or without rehearsals. The band uses the term ‘kampungan’ defiantly to express their inclusiveness and lack of concern with professionalism. During Dendang Kampungan performances, the number of participants is not fixed. Everyone has the right to have a creative role in the process of making the songs, including the lyrics, the rhythm, or the instruments used. Individual authorship of songs is not acknowledged. The term ‘kampungan’, generally understood to imply lower class vulgarity and lack of style, is here celebrated as an indicator of egalitarian participation and inclusiveness. 5 The motto Dua Anak Cukup was part of Suharto’s population control program that was launched in 1974. The campaign included billboards, songs, and subsidized family planning programs. 6 For an in depth discussion of the ‘remixing’ of anti-colonial and post New Order activism, see Crosby (2013).

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Wayang Kampung Sebelah (Wayang from the next-door neighbourhood) also employs the idea of a kampung as a point of resistance. This contemporary version of Javanese puppet theatre uses Indonesian language, rather than Javanese, so as not to be exclusive. Unlike ‘traditional’ wayang, the performance uses modern musical instruments and puppets made from cardboard which appropriate traditional wayang characters and also represent figures from contemporary popular culture such as the infamous Inul. The shows tackle issues of prostitution, government corruption, environmental destruction, and globalization played out and discussed in kampung communities full of gossiping residents. The performance developed for fma in 2008 told the story of a natural water source exploited by corporate interests and a corrupt local council.7 These examples illustrate the varied, contested, shifting nature of contemporary understandings of the terms ‘kampung’ and ‘kampungan’. Long used in dominant discourse with connotations of uneducated rural simplicity and vulgarity, mobilized during the New Order within a vocabulary of objectification and depoliticization of the masses, today these terms are being reclaimed and worn with pride. Such processes are evident not only in small-scale arts groups, but also in mainstream popular culture. The famous rock band Slank titled their 1992 album Kampungan. Another example is the television show Empat Mata (literally ‘Four Eyes’), hosted by Tukul Arwana, represented as wholly ‘kampungan’ in his language and humour. The huge popularity of this program suggests a degree of identification by viewers with Tukul’s struggles with the increasingly globalized experiences of everyday life. The term kampungan, it would seem, is closely connected to the way many Indonesians think of themselves, and the shifts in its meanings reflect changes in and re-evaluations of their sense of self. In the arts generally, kampung is often interchanged with ‘community’ in discussions focusing on cultural participation. The idea of seni kerakyatan (people’s art) from the Sukarno era has seemingly coalesced with global trends in visual arts that prioritize participation. These trends involve social contexts and relations, what French critic Nicolas Bourriaud calls ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud 2002). In many arts projects in Java, well before Festival Mata Air, seni kampung was used by artists and arts writers to refer to participatory art that either engaged a community or was produced directly by a community. Today the term community or komunitas is widely employed and celebrated in Indonesia. Yet the concept of community brings its own set of ambiguities.

7 Another example is the participatory media group Kampung Halaman, which also refers to the concept of the kampung to mean ‘grassroots’.

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Some of these ambiguities are part of the appeal of community as a tool for analysis of kampung.

The Community Quandary

In her study of site-specific art, One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon points to the way community can describe very different groups. “On the one hand, the term ‘community’ is associated with disenfranchized social groups that have been systematically excluded from the political and cultural processes that affect, if not determine, their lives” (Kwon 2002, 112). When we speak of ‘the gay and lesbian community’, for example, or ‘refugee communities’, we are referring to groups that are bound together by their common experiences of oppression. On the other hand, community is used to refer to the groups that carry out this oppression, for example ‘the business community’. In the West as in Indonesia, ‘community’ connotes belonging and inclusiveness. But conservative, romanticized notions of community can also exclude people. Gillian Rose (1997) argues that there must be a move away from the search for some pure concept of community based on ‘territorialized and territorializing boundaries’ because of the exclusion those boundaries create. Community is now applied to a wide array of social forms for which connotations of place are not relevant. Since we now talk of ‘online communities’, where people gather virtually, the concept of community no longer always has associations of a physical site. Like ‘kampung’, ‘community’ is changing and through events like Festival Mata Air, activists participate in the process of redefinition. So, what kind of community is Festival Mata Air? Is ‘community’ the best way to describe the practices that make up the festival, or are there other ways of conceptualising the kampung as a site and a practice? For the festival, the geographical site is important, even defining, but it is not the entirety of the event. One alternative way to describe the social relations that activists draw out of ‘kampung’ and ‘community’ comes from American theorist James Gee who speaks of ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee 2005). Gee analyses some of the social forms commonly thought of as communities, for which the term may not be the best fit. He focuses particularly on networked learning environments to show that what happens within them is more than what we generally define as community activity. Gee suggests that ‘community’ is the wrong way to think about these groups, who work in the same space, but move in and out of it, arguing that an ‘affinity space’ better describes the way members share knowledge and experience around a particular idea or set of ideas, particularly online. Affinity spaces are characterized by voluntary affiliations rather than a shared physical space.

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Gee’s examples are affinity spaces created around ‘real-time strategy’ computer games, but the definition also fits for a festival like fma, where the grouping is voluntary, temporary and mobile. When a festival like fma occurs in a kampung such as Kalitaman, the kampung may be the site of performance, but it also becomes much more than that. As well as a physical space, it is also a space of interaction. It becomes a space where multiple communities interact, renew previous affinities, form new affinities, imagine the potential of future affinities, and perhaps most importantly, learn together. As they make a festival, activists and residents do form a community within a kampung, but they also move in and out of affinity spaces, all the time generating new senses of place. To think of a kampung as an affinity space begins to challenge the idea that places have single, essentialist identities. This is also the challenge made by geographer Doreen Massey when she argues for a progressive sense of place (Massey 1994). It is from this perspective it is possible to envisage kampung not only as the site of transformative social projects but also as active agents of change. An activist kampung is actually generated from fma. This kind of kampung is an affinity space, but it is also strongly linked to a real geography. In this case, it is inseparable from the springs and waterways of Salatiga. It must be thought of as a place. However, in this newly imagined kampung, it is the activity that occurs within the affinity space of the festival that produces this sense of place. Massey argues for an alternative interpretation of place based on particular constellations of social relations. A place, she says, is better thought of as the point of intersection of multiple networks. This works well for imagining the festival as a place. And then, for imagining how this place is connected to global flows, to other places, not just during the moment that the festival occurs, but over multiple moments at multiple scales. Massey argues that such a definition of place “allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (1994, 155). To examine these links, let us begin by looking at how tuk has moved through physical places, working with existing kampung by forming relationships to people and environments.

Festival Mata Air: A Mobile Sense of Place

Retrospectively, fma can be viewed as a series of events that map the water sources and streams in Salatiga. Each incarnation of the festival has focused, not only on a kampung, but on a particular spring. The map is multi-dimensional,

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showing how the friction generated within festival spaces is a form of social change. In one sense, the collective has been driven from one point to another by the various administrative boundaries of the kampung of Salatiga. In another sense, they have followed the natural paths of the water sources and passageways throughout the city and it is these paths that have coincided with the organic networks of artistic collaboration. The journey of Festival Mata Air to three neighbourhoods, Senjoyo, Kalitaman and Kalimangkak, is a story of multiple tensions between activists and kampung but also of tensions within kampung. It shows what can happen when an affinity space is created around a local environmental issue. This space can challenge the imagined community of the kampung, generating another sense of place, a counter imaginary, within that kampung. tuk’s strategy during each festival has been to draw kampung residents together around their common water source. But the relationship between a kampung and its water is not necessarily simple. There are those who use the springs every day, for washing, swimming, bathing, and there are those with the power to make decisions about the springs as resources. The most revealing of these relationships is between tuk and the kampung of Kalitaman. The internal politics of the kampung that hosted Festival Mata Air 2007 forced a redefinition of tuk’s collective identity, challenging the way they imagined themselves as a ‘local’ organization. Festival Mata Air 2007 was generally felt within tuk to have been a success. Grievances from residents were limited, media reports (newspaper and radio) had been all positive, and several of Kalitaman’s youth had subsequently joined tuk, attending and organizing meetings, and signing up for workshops, exhibitions and other events outside Kalitaman. There was excitement and enthusiasm about working at Kalitaman again on the 2008 festival. There was also continuing discussions around an idea raised during workshops of Festival Mata Air 2007, that Kalitaman might become an ‘eco-kampung’. As activists imagined it, the kampung would take responsibility for various collective practices such as water filtering, waste reuse, composting, and biodegradable packaging so their neighbourhood could serve as a model of sustainability, and in turn, attract attention, funding, and tourism. In April 2008, tuk organized a community forum to discuss the ‘eco-kampung’ concept and the upcoming festival in November 2008. As with other community meetings, the time, agenda, and invitations were organized through the Bapak Rukun Warga, the neighbourhood head, who also secured the Kalitaman community hall as a venue. This was the same process that had been used on many occasions leading up to Festival Mata Air 2007. But this time only a handful of people attended, and those who did raised several

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concerns based on gossip that was circulating in Kalitaman, namely that tuk was exploiting the kampung of Kalitaman. The rumours were, firstly, that tuk had made huge profits from Festival Mata Air 2007 selling photographs of the kampung in Australia and, secondly, that tuk had received overseas funding, of which it had not shared with the Kalitaman community. These rumours began with confusion around information that appeared on social networking sites, announcing and documenting tuk’s activities in Australia. In fact, photographs of the festival had been used to raise awareness in Australia but none of these photographs were sold, and they were exhibited only in a small council-funded Community Arts Centre in Sydney.8 Secondly, tuk, at that stage, had not received any funding from overseas sources except for personal donations from fellow activists and a meager amount from a small ‘Sponsor a Tree’ program it had tried to establish in Australia. The accusations were denied, but clearly needed further discussion with a wider audience; tuk attempted to organize a second forum but was not granted permission to use the community hall. Taking a different tack, they organized a pemuda (youth) meeting. The twenty or so young people who attended voiced surprise that there had been grievances raised by their elders and expressed general eagerness to be involved in more tuk activities and programs. Creative brainstorming and planning began for future campaigns. Shortly after this meeting, tuk received four formal letters, from each of the four neighbourhoods (Rukun Warga, rw) that form Kalitaman, stating that Kalitaman would not host another festival. The letters raised several complaints; that children’s learning had been disrupted during the week-long activities; that there was not enough security on site; that there was drunkenness; and that there was a general disturbance of the peace. Secondly, they accused tuk organizers of going ‘behind their backs’ by organizing the youth meeting, and not respecting the kampung’s established code of conduct. The letters bore the official signatures, letterheads and stamps typical of New Order bureaucratic style, and were expressed in the formally correct language of Suharto’s presidential speeches, which provided a general model for government discourse, as described by Virginia Hooker (1993, 282). While tuk had relied on informal mutuality, the neighbourhood officials had seemingly reverted to a statist sense of locality, where kampung were defined in opposition to each other and kampung affairs were determined by the hierarchal structures within them.

8 An exhibition titled ‘Art for Earth’s Sake’ was held at Pine Street Community Arts Centre as part of the Gang Festival, 2007.

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The real reasons for the degraded relationship between the kampung authorities and tuk are a matter of conjecture. Around the time of Festival Mata Air 2007, plans were made to convert the large spring at Kalitaman (Pemandian Kalitaman), to a bottling source for the Salatiga branch of the national government water company, pdam (Perusahan Daerah Air Minum). While there had been some media coverage of the deal (Suara Merdeka, 2007), there had been very little actual community consultation regarding the change of use or its impact on residents. tuk considers it unlikely that the sale of the spring and the refusal of the kampung authorities to host Festival Mata Air 2008 are coincidental. Other reasons are more publicly identifiable. tuk did not offer money to the kampung council to continue their activities. From the beginning of the process, this had been a point of contention. It had been hinted on several occasions, by members of the council, that money was expected, that this was the budaya ‘local custom’ for staging such events.9 tuk, as a young, small nonprofit organization was both unable and unwilling to offer. They preferred a model based on mutual (non-monetary) reciprocation, and argued that this was budaya for community events elsewhere, pointing out that the kampung benefited from the profits of paid parking during the event and an increase in local business revenue. tuk’s mistake at Kalitaman was to assume a common imaginary with kampung authorities. For tuk this imaginary was based partly on the activist history of the kampung, particularly the resistance to the sale of the spring in 1994. This history is certainly important to the identity of many Kalitaman residents, but the idea that it defines the ‘sense of place’ of the entire kampung is certainly a misconception. To take a more famous example, Uluru may be a site of struggle to many people, a site that represents the long ongoing battle by Indigenous people in Australia to reclaim their land. But to others, even those who know its history, the place may be thought of as Ayers Rock, may be remembered as the site of a romantic holiday, or may only be recognized as the image of a natural wonder seen on a calendar at the dentist’s surgery. While the story of the protest to protect the spring at Kalitaman is publicly known, it does not mean the springs are forever safe from privatization. The neighbourhood heads had clearly changed since 1994, as had the nature of their relationship with their constituents. Those in power now imagined the festival as they did the springs, as a source of potential profit. They clearly felt that that they had legitimate ownership over the identity of their kampung. 9 It is in fact ‘customary’ for neighbourhoods to be compensated for any use of the ‘public space’ in their jurisdiction, i.e. closing the street down for a wedding or religious ceremony.

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They may have even been convinced that they had the community’s best interests at heart. But all the local participants of the festival, who had sung, danced, joined workshops, celebrated, and planted gardens at fma had also embodied a sense of place. These differences problematize the notion of place as a single, coherent identity. So what does tuk – a young, creative activist collective – do in such a situation, with a conflict over the sense of place of their festival site? After two great festivals, tuk’s sense of purpose was strong, its identity robust, and its energy building. tuk packed up its festival and moved on to another kampung. The third festival, held at Kalimangkak in 2008, was even bigger and better. Interestingly, a number of young residents of Kalitaman, the same people who had facilitated the youth meeting, joined the collective and kept working on the project. They still lived in Kalitaman, as they had always done, but they worked now in a greater sphere, and began to define their own territory, expanding their kampung. For them, the community of tuk had drawn them out of Kalitaman, at the same time drawing them more deeply into its conflicted sense of place. It had shown their kampung for what it was, a group of people living in close proximity, who nevertheless had different interests and attitudes in regards to particular issues. In Kalitaman, people’s shared identities are embodied in the neighbourly relations of the kampung. These relations, because they share a physical site, may seem solidly ‘real’. But the kampung is also fragile. Through Festival Mata Air, the young people realized they are bound by neither the physical nor imaginary borders of Kalitaman. They could, in fact, participate in multiple communities, move in and out of affinity spaces, and invent their own notions of kampung. What the experience of Kalitaman did for tuk, by forcing the collective to relocate, was to challenge the idea of the kampung as a static, rooted community. The way fma occurs at multiple sites shows that part of the work done in creating a festival is to develop representations of place that can be transported, reformed and re-imagined.

A Global Kampung

When fma’s kampung dislocates, moving from Kalitaman to Kalimangkak on the other side of the city, it begins a momentum which allows it to move even further. It is now that we can start to talk about the global interaction of this small local event. How this movement produces a global sense of place is a messy and sticky process. When fma moves from one kampung to another, what is it that actually moves?

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Firstly, it is representations that are circulated. These representations come in many forms, but most prolific is photographic documentation of the festival. Thousands of digital photographs circulate the internet after each festival, catalysed by social networking sites such as Flickr and Facebook. Tagged with ‘Festival Mata Air’ or the acronym ‘fma’, these images build up a visual sense of place that is constantly referred to by activists and artists, both those who were present and those who were not. Also, the brand of the festival moves with the activists that produce it. This includes the mottos, logos, and websites created to publicize the festival, which also document, represent and reproduce it. These representations must also be understood as a set of ongoing practices that continue to generate place. For example, the images on Flickr and Facebook spark discussions that evaluate the festival’s success and begin plans for its future. These discussions are held in multiple languages, and, because information about the festival is rapidly circulated on a global scale, include communication between local residents, international journalists, researchers, and potential funders. These communications all feed back into a sense of place that is connected to the global as much as it is to the Kalitaman. It is through these processes, that tuk engages with global discourses on environmentalism and raises awareness of local issues on a global scale. The kampung administrators are left in the dust of these processes, still stamping their official letters that complain about the noise disruption during Festival Mata Air. Clearly, this trajectory of place, expanding outwards from the physical space of the festival sites to the virtual spaces the festival generates is important for a kind of activism that is tactical and effective. To be able to carry on with its work, fma must be able to move and change, remaining an affinity space and constantly building a more progressive sense of place for the kampung with which it works. Conclusion The end of the New Order in Indonesia gave rise to a diversity of cultural spaces in which ‘new’ forms of activism took place. Many of these forms, such as the festivals discussed in this paper, have emerged as people have redefined the notion of kampung and their own connections to their neighbourhoods and their natural environment. This cultural activism has made it increasingly difficult to continue thinking of the association of particular places with what was previously defined as ‘traditional culture’ as something static.10 10

Two major forces appear to have influenced these developments, the political changes which occurred at the end of the New Order period, resulting in increased activism of

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fma demonstrates that within new cultural spaces, place is constantly generated. The process of challenging those who consider themselves authorities over a place or guardians of a community interrogates the assumption that local is something fixed and closed. tuk’s practices continue to generate a sense of place in virtual spaces, which can also challenge the idea that the identity of a place is bound to its physical site. In terms of global significance, festivals like fma are important in showing that global interaction happens where people make it happen. While very focused in their subject matter, the exchanges that occur before, during and after Festival Mata Air are local, national and global in scale. In this way, a small kampung in Salatiga can be thought of as just as global as a Jakarta-based transnational business. Delving into the complexities of what is meant by ‘local’ in a place like Kalitaman reveals that it is relationships between people that produce place. This production is impossible to describe simply in terms of interactions between centre-periphery or artist and audience. These places are not only recreated in different physical as well as virtual spaces, but they continue to be reproduced in these spaces. This is a generative, mobile sense of place, a different kind of local, what might be thought of as a mobile kampung. This sense of place is generated by working relationships between people, by the artworks and performances they produce, not by administrative powers. These activists are shaped by the geographical places in which they work, but their struggles also define the identities of those places in ways that go beyond traditional notions of kampung or community. Their festivals can be understood as more than mixes of traditional and contemporary culture, or art and activism, but as collections of cultural practices that actually do something, generating place every step of the way. References Barker, Joshua. 1999. “Surveillance and Territoriality in Bandung” In Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, ed. V. Rafael, 95–127. Ithaca: Cornel University SEAsia Program. Berman, Laine. 1999. “The Art of Street Politics.” In awas!: Recent art from Indonesia ed. Hugh O’Neill, Timothy Lindsey et al., 75–77. Melbourne: Indonesian Arts Society. diverse forms, and global technological change. The availability of relatively cheap digital video cameras combined with newly claimed political freedoms, for example, can be seen in the proliferation of video activism in Indonesia. See Crosby, Thajib et al. (2011) and Edwin Jurriëns in this volume.

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Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du râeel. Crosby, Alexandra. 2007. “Festival Mata Air: A community takes a fresh look at water.” Inside Indonesia 90, October-December. Accessed 23 March 2014. http:// www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/festival-mata-air. —— 2013. “Remixing Environmentalism in Blora, Central Java 2005–10.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16.3: 257–269. Crosby, Alexandra, Ferdi Thajib, Nuraini Juliastuti and Andrew Lowenthal. 2011. “A Chronicle of Video Activism and Online Distribution in Post-New Order Indonesia.” In Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, 178–195. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Echols, John, Hassan Shadily, John Wolff and John Collins. 1997. Kamus IndonesiaInggris: An Indonesian-English Dictionary, 3rd edn, Jakarta: Gramedia. Gee, James. 2005. “Social Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces: from the Age of Mythology to a Today’s School.” In Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context ed. K.T.D Barton, 214–227. Cambridge University Press. Hooker, Virginia Matheson. 1993. “New Order Language in Context.” In Culture and Society in New Order Indonesia ed. Virginia Matheson Hooker, 272–293. Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, New York: Oxford University Press. Kurniasih, H. 2008. “Water not for All: The Consequences of Water: Privatization in Jakarta, Indonesia.” 17th Annual Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Melbourne, July 1–3. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, Mass: mit Press. Lim, Merlyna. 2005. “@rchipelago Online, The Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia.” (PhD dissertation, University of Twente). Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, G. 1997 “Spatialities of ‘Community’, Power and Change: The Imagined Geographies of Community arts Projects.” Cultural Studies, 11(1), 1–16. Suara Merdeka. 2007. “Kompleks Pemandian Kalitaman Direlokasi” Suara Merdeka 26 November. Accessed 23 March 2014. http://www.suaramerdeka.com/­ harian/0711/26/kot23.htm.

chapter 4

Imagining Community in Contemporary Surabaya Rachmah Ida This chapter engages with the themes of expression of local identity and community through performance central to a number of contributions to this volume. It focuses on electronic visual media, television and video arts, as new performance formats which have helped construct alternative forms of community within which a sense of belonging to a ‘local’ social context occurs. These communities have become sites where shared symbols, values, norms, and ideologies are reinforced and celebrated among the members. Whereas previously the state and political parties used ‘community’ in the sense of a physical and social environment to enforce their authority and safeguard ‘stability’, after the shift from the New Order to the reform era, communities have been given the opportunity to engage in public debate. My study analyses two examples of the construction of community through electronic visual media in the East Javanese city of Surabaya. The first is a tv program called Cangkrukan (Gathering), which has been broadcast once a week since 2002, primarily on a local private television station, jtv Surabaya.1 In the program the neighbourhood guardhouse, gardu, an everyday institution for maintaining local security,2 is used as a site of interactive discussion of current issues between residents of lower class city neighbourhoods, guest speakers, studio audience members and viewers watching at home. My analysis explores the interplay between the gardu as a monument of neighbourhood surveillance and the formation of urban communality post-New Order. I argue that the televisual construct of the ‘gardu community’ has enabled the viewers,

1 For the first 9 years of its life the Cangkrukan program was broadcast over jtv Surabaya. In May 2011, it moved to the Surabaya station of the national television broadcaster Television of the Republic of Indonesia (tvri) Surabaya after a dispute between the performers and the jtv producer, apparently over money issues. However in 2012 the program returned to its ‘home’ at jtv and continues to be broadcast from there today. 2 Traditionally adult males in a kampung carried out guard duty, called ronda, on a rostered basis. They would patrol the neighbourhood occasionally during the night and between rounds gather at the gardu to chat, play cards, doze and socialize. During Suharto’s New Order, this practice was replaced in some kampung by the use of hansip or pertahanan sipil (civil defenders), who were assigned rostered tasks and received a small payment from the local district administration (kelurahan and kecamatan) for carrying out these duties.

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the citizens of Surabaya, to recover the gardu as a space of neighbourhood interaction and idealized solidarity, to express their social and political views, and experience a sense of created community with others of the same social status across the city. The second example of the creation of ‘symbolic community’ (Cohen 1985), focuses on the activities of a group of Surabaya citizens who produce video arts. In 2007 several young artists, who describe themselves as ‘av nerds’ (penggila audio visual), established a group formally named ‘Surabaya New Media Art Centre’. The group meets regularly in a place that they call an ‘electronic party place’ where the artists share new information about events and the vj (visual jockey) artists show their new visual art experiments. These two communities have occupied different spaces and places to express their sense of ‘democratization’ in the post-New Order era of Indonesia. While the televisual community uses gardu as a site of community discussion in a television show, mobilizing the symbolic function of the gardu in recreating neighbourhood identity and solidarity, the Surabaya Video Art comm­ unity, in a different way, has utilized its own ‘centre’ to form a new art community and join in efforts to define the identity of urban Surabaya.

The Gardu as a Community Institution in Indonesia

Joshua Barker (1998) explores the spatial dimension of neighbourhood security in the construction of communal identities in urban Indonesia. He examines the relations between the state strategy of surveillance and the local practices of security watch. In his study, Barker shows how the state and the local community have cooperated and competed with each other in defining who are the outsiders and the insiders within the space of gardu. In their studies of the rural politics of colonial Java, Jan Breman and Onghokham (cited in Kusno 2006: 113) looked at the complex processes by which a bordered village existed. The gardu in their study is described as a site intimately connected to the spatial politics of Java under colonial conditions, which has long been part of the state’s apparatus for the structuring of community identity. In modern day Indonesia, gardu has experienced variations and shifts of meaning over time. It has functioned not only as a post for neighbourhood surveillance, but also as a site of community social practices, a marker of political territory, and as “a product of a single culture inherited from ‘our ancestor’.” (Kusno 2010: 241). People who live in urban Java would recognize gardu as a gathering place, mainly for men, for night watch and leisure, including gambling and gossiping.

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A gardu is a temporary place built on a kampung lane or at the corner of the street in some housing complexes. It is made from materials such as bamboo, wooden planks and perhaps a thatch roof. Usually it is supported by stilts, measures about two by two metres and is open on the front side. Today, however, gardu are often not in good condition and have become used for other purposes, for instance, for political communication and organization as will be described below. Kusno (2006) explains that in a big city like Jakarta, gardu often function as the ‘front door’ of elite housing complexes, used to scrutinize guests and outsiders and who enter the complex. During the New Order, gardu in many places in Jakarta were utilized as pos hansip (civil security posts) in the housing complexes. The posts predominantly functioned as “the eyes and ears of the state, guard posts from which the government could survey the daily life of the streets and the inhabitants of the city” (Kusno 2006: 111). The inhabitants who lived behind the pos hansip were the ‘insiders’ as opposed to the ‘outsiders’ who were wandering the streets. Furthermore, Kusno’s study demonstrates the different meanings and functions of gardu during Suharto’s New Order and Megawati’s government. During the New Order era, gardu exemplified a post for military command (known as pos komando or posko), a control place temporarily set up by the military when they were posted in a new unfamiliar area. In contrast to Suharto times, gardu during Megawati’s government were used as the so-called pos komunikasi (communication posts) of members of Megawati’s pdip (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan) political party. Initially the pos komunikasi were built in certain areas of Jakarta to protect Chinese Indonesians from attack during the political riots of May 1998. However, after the riots, Megawati and the pdip continued to set up gardu on many street corners and in kampung lanes in parts of Jakarta and some other cities outside Jakarta, such as Surabaya. The gardu houses then were labelled command posts of pdip and used mainly for political consolidation and communication among the party’s supporters during the national election in 1999. The pdip’s gardu continued to exist as centres of grass roots consolidation and strategy planning to win voters or pos pemenangan (literally ‘victory posts’) for pdip and Megawati in the 2004 and 2009 elections. In Surabaya, these pdip political posts can be seen in many kampung lanes and on several street corners. The posts were used intensively during the national political campaign and the regional elections for East Java governor and Surabaya mayor in 2007 and 2009. During normal times, these gardu either remain empty or are used by street traders or scavengers as a place to rest. In some housing areas in Jakarta, the gardu places have also been occupied as command posts of Forum Betawi Rempug (fbr) or Betawi Brotherhood

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Forum (see Brown and Wilson 2007; Leksana 2009; Samiaji Bintang 2009). fbr’s gardu are used not only as small security posts to secure Jakarta’s kampung areas from criminal acts, but also for informal meetings of the fbr members. These places are also sometimes used as sites where new members, who are interested in joining the forum, pledge oaths of loyalty. As can be seen from these studies, gardu in urban Indonesia have long been used not only for political control by the New Order, but also as a space where particular political interests have attempted to secure their position in the society, and for power consolidation by a society organization like fbr in Jakarta. Thus, the gardu has a double function as a security post and a political consolidation and command post at the same time. In fact, nowadays many gardu houses in urban areas have lost their function as a space for night watch and social interaction among the inhabitants of kampung neighbourhoods. The gardu becomes a place where local cultural practices (social communication, gambling, gossiping, reminiscence) can no longer be performed, accommodated and circulated. As a consequence, the existence of gardu, as part of local culture and a community institution, is nostalgically longed for and idealized by local residents. The following section examines an idealized portrait of gardu as an open space where people from diverse backgrounds and positions in the society can talk about and share their feelings.

The Gardu Community in the Cangkrukan Television Program

Benedict Anderson recognizes monuments as an important type of ‘symbolic speech’ for Indonesian political cultures. He points out that “few observers have recognized that monuments are a type of speech, or tried to discern concretely what is being said, why form and content are specifically what they are.” (Anderson 1973: 61) Anderson suggests that to understand the workings of a particular culture, it would be illuminating to unpack the form and content of its monuments, even though people could not fully account for the role of these cultural artefacts in forming and transforming collective identities. Various meanings can indeed be invested in a single cultural artefact. By looking at the signifying functions of the cultural artefact gardu (guard house) in the television program Cangkrukan, this chapter tries to explore the spatial dimensions of a ‘symbolic community’ institution and its meanings in the new Indonesia. As mentioned above, a gardu not only functions as a guard house maintaining the security of kampung inhabitants, but has also been used traditionally as a place where community members can talk, while gambling, about

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­kampung issues, celebrity gossip, political scandals and corruption or terrorism, without fear of being charged or summoned by the people discussed. The neighbourhood residents in the gardu participate spontaneously in an egalitarian way. The interaction in the gardu is generally relaxed, but at the same time can give expression to shared social concerns. Within the gardu, people can reflect on various events and issues and potentially initiate action or social change. All these features of gardu life are re-created in the Cangkrukan talk show program on local Surabaya television. The program was initiated by an artist community calling itself artis jalanan Surabaya (the street artists of Surabaya) led by Cak Priyo, a popular Surabaya tv comedian, and Suko Widodo, an academic from Airlangga University. These two people felt that Surabaya needed a place in where the citizens were able to speak up about and criticize both local and national issues relating to their everyday lives. Cak Priyo in a personal interview explained that he and several people, including Suko Widodo, wanted to provide opportunities for the citizens of Surabaya, who are identified as open and spontaneous, to convey their comments and criticisms to local government representatives and to others on issues that they think will impact on their lives as small people (wong cilik), who have become the objects of policy makers, the victims of so-called development and urban improvements. We wanted to provide a public sphere for the rakyat (the people), because their access is limited. We then talked to jtv, and the producer agreed to give us an hour time slot in the evening. […] We were very surprised by the responses and enthusiasm of the public to the program. We’ve improved the format, the background, and have become selective in picking up public issues…We decided to discuss more local controversial issues than national (Jakarta-centric) issues. We have selected and invited experts, victims, and common people involved with the topic and we invite viewers to phone in and engage with our conversation, so our program is more interactive. We want to invite people of various social and ethnic backgrounds in East Java, that’s why we use Javanese and Indonesian language at the same time, and that makes the audience feel drawn in and the show popular. personal interview with Suko and Priyo, November 2009

The setting of the show is a constructed guard house on a street corner in an urban kampung area of Surabaya. Those occupying the gardu place are ordinary kampung residents, street artists and musicians, and food pedlars. The ordinary residents receive a very small fee to cover their transport costs, while

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the food traders are paid for the food consumed by the guests and other participants during the show. The street children musicians (pengamen anak jalan­an), food stall (warung) traders, and street artists, along with transgendered individuals, play their own parts as distinctive members of kampung communities in Surabaya. The term cangkrukan (sitting and talking together), referring to the informal style of communication of the gardu, is also seen to typify social interaction among Surabaya citizens more generally, in sites such as bus terminals, train stations, pangkalan becak (trishaw stand), coffee stalls and cigarette stands. The studio has been set up to replicate exactly the setting of the people’s cangkrukan on the street.3 Each show focuses on a particular topic, which has been decided through deliberations involving Cak Priyo and Suko Widodo as the hosts, and the producer of the program. Current controversial issues occurring in Surabaya and East Java are the main priority of the show. These could include corruption, social welfare, public services, bureaucracy, poverty, regional elections and developments. The program opens with a vocal performance by a group of street musicians called Sanggar Alang-Alang, followed by conversation among people in the gardu, who take the initiative in starting to problematize the topic. During the talks viewers in their homes and elsewhere around Surabaya can also participate in the show by phoning the studio and sharing their opinions and complaints with the regional government and other parties concerned. This interactive feature makes the show dynamic and lively. The preceding conversation and incoming phone calls are then discussed by several guests with special expertise on the topic who have been invited to join the show. I was an observer in the jtv station one evening in November 2009 and again in December 2013. In the 2009 program the discussion centred on nationalism, focusing on the specific topic ‘what is the meaning of being Indonesian?’ The show was opened by a conversation among several kampung males talking about the Chinese in Indonesia, and how as a kampung community, those men showed their feelings towards the Chinese people in their neighbourhood. The situation of the Chinese is often seen as closely connected to the issue of nationalism, since stereotypically the Chinese are regarded as 3 The director of jtv Imawan Mashuri explained in an interview with me in December 2013 that that the setting of the Cangkrukan program was intended to evoke the atmosphere of some iconic places in Surabaya such as Wonokromo, Ampel, Joyoboyo and Maospati. “So we put in an old bicycle, a trishaw, a real food vendor (gerobak), unused public pay phone machine, along with gardu.” The inclusion of waria (transgendered men) in the program created the kind of colourful conversation and jokes frequently heard in such sites.

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foreign (warga negara asing keturunan), non- native, not loyal to their adopted homeland, and causing jealousy due to their disproportionate possession of wealth. The remarks of the gardu group exemplified common attitudes among Surabaya kampung people towards the Indonesian Chinese. Different feelings about the Chinese people were expressed and debated, leading into discussion of the broader question ‘what does it mean to be Indonesian?’ A Chinese woman invited as a guest on the show then became involved in the conversation. This lady, Lan Fang, is a popular author who has written many novels about Chinese women and communities. In the show she strongly asserted that she is a citizen of Indonesia, even though she is not a supporter of any political party. Lan Fang argued that those who are regarded as citizens of Indonesia are seemingly only those who are partisans of a political party. Lan Fang felt that the rights of citizens, especially those who are non partisans, have been ignored or sidelined by the Indonesian government, which is dominated by politicians from the political parties. She continued that many Chinese Indonesians are not supporters of any political party, resulting in the fact that Chinese people are not regarded as Indonesian citizens. Chinese political rights are virtually ignored in the current political atmosphere in Indonesia. Lan Fang also suggested that nationalism cannot be determined simply by whether one is a partisan of a political party or not. She described how Chinese people remain the object of discrimination by the state and its political apparatuses. In the show, residents of kampung communities, as citizens of Indonesia, expressed their feelings and opinions concerning their nationalism. People used their own words and expressions to give meaning to what being Indonesian and Indonesian ‘nationalism’ meant to them. Using the common language of kampung Surabaya, the gardu communities tried to translate the term ‘nationalism’ and its usage for themselves. They also commented on everyday national political life seen on the media and how they reacted to it. For the gardu communities, ‘democratization’ as introduced in the country seems not necessarily to comply with the expectations held by the citizens. One of the men in the gardu said that as a kampung inhabitant, he also felt unfair treatment by the government. According to him, the government and political parties pay more attention to their own interests rather than placing the people, the rakyat, at the heart of the national development process. The gardu man argued that rakyat always become victims of so-called ‘development’. In the name of ‘development’, many illegal street people’s shelters and trading stalls, for instance, have been demolished by the regional government, but none of the political parties have reacted to the government action and spoken out on behalf of their constituents.

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When I revisited the studio in December 2013, and watched a live broadcast of the Cangkrukan program, I saw no significant changes apart from the fact that Cak Priyo is now the sole host. Suko Widodo, the academic who used to act as co-host, left the program when it moved back to jtv from tvri in 2012. The show that Sunday night focused on preparations for political elections in Indonesia in April 2014. Speakers commented on the campaigns of the candidates for election to the provincial, national and city legislatures, whose promotional posters fill the city streets so that many citizens are sick of the sight of them. They queried the commitment to the people of these candidates and posed the question “do we trust them to represent us in dprd?” The lively, frank, critical style of discussion seen earlier as typical of the Cangkrukan program was very much in evidence here. On this occasion I also had the opportunity to talk to the producer and several performers as well as audience members in the studio about the show. My conversations with them enriched the picture of the quality of ‘localness’ of the Cangkrukan program and its resultant ability to engage with its audiences, as explained in the following discussion.

Local Community Identities in Cangkrukan tv Program

According to the producer of the program, Cangkrukan continues to exist because of its carefully controlled simplicity and localness. The producer and the tv performers have been committed to maintaining simplicity in the numbers of performers involved and the setting of the show, while also choosing issues of significance to the local community, expressed in a familiar, straightforward way (personal interview, December 2013). Some examples of such issues and their expression are Ayo Kampanye sing Damai Dulur! (Let’s campaign in peace, bro!), or Yo Opo Nasibe Pedagang Pasar? (How have traditional market traders fared?), or Ayo milih Pemimpin sing Amanah! (Let’s choose accountable leaders!) The producer sees the Cangkrukan program as in keeping with the particular East Javanese character of audience members, which he defines as “dynamic, deeply committed to their [East Java] culture, with strong bonds of local solidarity, spontaneous, highly inquisitive and religious,” (personal interview, December 2013). The program is also designed to capture the quality of local Surabaya life as sing rodo nakal atau berani (a bit naughty or daring) and to cater to the tastes of Surabaya audiences, who are fanatical about their local identity, and fed up with the focus in the media on Jakartaoriented issues and features. Cak Priyo, the presenter of the show, reports on a survey held in 2005 which showed that its audiences consisted predominantly of teachers, small and

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street traders, public transport drivers, and middle to lower income earners (interview with Cak Priyo, December 2013). He sees the program as replicating the ‘real’ people’s cangkrukan, which usually takes place in the kampung gardu. The broadcast time of 9.00 to 10.00 pm reflects the understanding of Surabaya people of cangkrukan as a male get-together – Cangkrukan rodo bengi rodo gayeng (Cangkrukan are more fun and lively the later it gets). For audiences the intimate, interactive style of the show and its informal local language are major attractions. One audience member I interviewed in the studio said that he likes the way Cak Priyo greets viewers in their homes, as if they are his own relatives and close acquaintances. In particular use of the word dulur meaning “bro” suggests close ties, a lack of separation between the host and the viewer at home. For example, in opening the program that night, Cak Priyo had welcomed viewers in bahasa Suroboyoan, the distinctive local version of Javanese language, with the exhortation “Dulur, timbangane nganggur ayo tengak tenguk ndik Cangkrukan!” (Bro, rather than doing nothing, let’s join in Cangkrukan!) Audience members in the studio, those phoning in from home with their opinions, criticisms, and responses, along with the guest speaker, likewise speak in a mixture of Indonesian and Surabaya Javanese. The particular accent, dialect and tone of their conversation seem to heighten the feeling of engagement. Although Cak Priyo’s language might sometimes be considered ‘coarse’ by non-Surabayan speakers of Javanese, Cak Priyo defends it as in keeping with the character of Surabaya people. He resists the idea of imitating the style of typical national (Jakarta) television hosts. Utterances such as Picek a motone awake dewe? (Are we blind?), Gak usah pindah channel, cek gak tambah goblok (Don’t switch channels, so we won’t get more stupid), Jancuk! awak e dewe dibujuki terus (Fuck! We’ve been continually tricked) or Budek tah awakmu mau?! (Are you deaf?!) would be regarded as unacceptable broadcasting language by many people. Words like picek (blind) goblok (stupid), jancuk (fuck), and budek (deaf), often heard in everyday interaction in middle and lower class communities, might seem appropriate only in such informal contexts, not on air. Yet audiences appear quite unconcerned by the use of such words in the program. For them, the language used by the host expresses the closeness between the people in the studio and the viewers at home, and the particular localness of Surabaya’s culture captured on television (personal interview with a studio audience member, December 2013). Imawan Mashuri, director of jtv, when I spoke to him explained that the local quality of the Cangkrukan program is consciously maintained to differentiate it from typical national talk show programs. The formality of the mainstream talk shows mushrooming on national and local television, in Mashuri’s

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view, creates the impression of a “one man show,” with no evident audience engagement. In the Cangkrukan program, in addition to language use, local Surabaya identity is conveyed through music, as traditional Surabaya musical forms are combined with a contemporary band. He reported that kentrung music, involving mainly ukulele and traditional bamboo instruments, known as kentongan, and ludruk garingan, literally “flat ludruk,” ludruk performance4 without gamelan music, are combined with acoustic guitars and band instruments, particularly drums. Sometimes terbang jidor. handmade percussion instruments used commonly in Islamic music, are also played. Several audience members I interviewed in the jtv studio not only expressed enthusiasm about the localness of style and content of Cangkrukan, but also perceived the program as providing a new form of community engagement with current social and political issues in Surabaya and nationally. They regard it as a new model of talk show not found elsewhere on mainstream commercial television in Indonesia. One man stated: Cangkrukan is a special kind of tv show. It has real people engagement. The topics of discussion are everyday common topics like flooding, problems with garbage in Surabaya, land disputes, youth activities, regional politics, provincial election, and other debatable issues […] Well, although I saw sometimes the issues were repeated and the problem raised was unresolved, but I still view this program as providing a medium for the community to be involved in the development of Surabaya and East Java […] our voices should be heard. hs, a member of the floor audience, personal interview, December 2013

At the same time the words of a performer in the program give a sense of the personal experience of community belonging conveyed through the show: I have been involved as a performer in this program since 2005. Although I get paid very little…just enough for my transport [motorcycle], but I continue to support this program, I feel I am part of the community. I’ve grown up in the kampung, and I sometimes join cangkrukan in my community, so I feel no difference between cangkrukan in my

4 Ludruk is an East Javanese popular theatre form cultivated particularly in Surabaya, which consists of an opening dance, ngremo, gamelan music, songs by male transvestite singers, clown dialogues, and a dramatic play as the main performance. For an extended discussion of ludruk see James Peacock (1969).

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kampung and the cangkrukan here [jtv], only here is broadcast on tv, so my neighbours can watch me on tv. ed, one of performers, personal interview, December 2013

The feeling of closeness to their local cultural life and the opportunity to get involved in a community forum constructs the Cangkrukan program as an imagined televisual community. Conversations in the gardu revive the memories of urban kampung people of the existence of gardu as a guard house and late evening gathering place in their neighbourhood; the gardu as an idealized ‘symbolic community’ connects in turn with the ‘real’ community and the televisual community. The sense of ‘community’ is clearly culturally constructed by the media. Television producers create a televisual community and maintain its ‘originality’ in order to keep audience ratings high, and to create a stable environment to attract advertisements. However, the continuation of this televisual community, in turn, has shaped the view of the audiences about their social environment. In the era of democratization in Indonesia, the Cangkrukan community provides acknowledgment of the existence of those ‘voiceless’ groups that continue to be manipulated in their participation in the social and political life of the country. In addition to the Cangkrukan form of community, the following section explores another type of community that has recently emerged in Surabaya. This community meets regularly, has shared interests in producing video art and initiates their own public exhibitions in their own ways. In the environment of urban middle class society, the existence of such young creative and talented groups can be seen as enriching the continuing process of democratization in Indonesia in the post-New Order era. These young ‘nerds’ concerned with the advancement of media technologies, but also with the social conditions of the people, have tried to open a space for voicing their opinions and feelings through their creative art performances on the street and several public arenas like art galleries and local coffee shops in Surabaya.

The ‘AV Nerds’ Community in Surabaya

Several young performing art and visual artists in Surabaya decided in 2007 to establish a visual arts community, consisting of performing and video arts artists and electronic musicians in Surabaya who have a similar interests in new media art. As the ‘Surabaya New Media Art Centre’, the group meets regularly to share their new art productions. According to Benny Wicak, a coordinator

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of  the community, its members come from various backgrounds, including ­students, artists, and young people who have gone mad with technology and produce art from this technological challenge. That is why they call themselves the ‘av Nerds’ Benny says. “We are the av nerds, who have gone insane with contemporary paint art, new media art, science-fiction films, electronic music, and contemporary philosophy. We hate stupid Indonesian sinetron (soapies); and of course we use new media as a tool of democratization in our art projects.” (Personal interview, April 2010). In 2009 this community introduced themselves to the public in Surabaya through a major video art exhibition, ‘VIDEO WORK: Surabaya International Video Art Festival’. Almost all the productions addressed the themes of ‘freedom’ ‘democracy’ and ‘independence’. According to one of the members, Taufik Monyong, his video art work about street performance, titled ‘Street Gladiator’, was intended to express feelings of freedom from the authoritarian regime and from conservatism in Indonesia. Monyong, who performed as an artist in this production, is a well known painter and performance art practitioner in Surabaya who also operates movie theatres in several kabupaten (district, regency) in East Java for middle to lower class movie goers. Monyong has dedicated his house in a kampung lane, Jalan Nginden IV, in the eastern part of Surabaya, as an art workshop and gallery for his colleagues. His reason for doing so is that he is aware of the limited art spaces in Surabaya available for lower income (kampungan) young artists. He realizes not many artists can have their own exhibitions in commercial art galleries. At the same time, Monyong recognizes that not many ordinary members of the public have access to established art galleries. For him, any art expression should be facilitated. So, by using his house, Monyong feels that he has not only provided a space for art productions, but also at the same time given opportunity to the general public to access and appreciate art exhibitions without feeling intimidated. The Surabaya av Nerds community has also been conducting a biannual media art exhibition named ‘Abandoned’ since 2007, and members of the community hold individual art exhibitions in several art galleries in Surabaya. They usually meet in an art workshop or someone’s place as they do not have a permanent workshop or centre. Benny explained that the community has very productive members, who are mainly young vj (Video Jockey) and electronic musicians who share their new art works in the community cangkrukan. In its ‘private’ community space, which Benny calls a ‘gigs party’, the members of the av nerds display and contest their identities through the creation of their art projects. According to Benny Wicak, the av Nerds can be described as an ‘intellectual art community’, in that its members not only use technology as a medium of

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art, but also discuss concepts and terms in contemporary philosophy, which are usually circulated among the academic community. “We read many books on philosophy. So, we do not only talk about the video technology and our art works, but we also try to analyse some philosophical ideas and terms” (personal interview). This av nerds community is not a pre-existing entity that expresses itself through a symbolic art medium or art tools, but it is a formation that comes into being through the circulation and use of shared cultural forms, through new media art and technology. Drawing on Birgit Meyer’s concept of ‘aesthetic formations’ (Meyer 2008), the av Nerds can be seen as a community formed through “shared imaginations that materialize through embodied aesthetic form” (Meyer 2008: 7). This community has defined their citizenship and feelings of ‘nationalism’ through art creations. Concerned with the socio-political situation of the nation, they choose to express their political participation, their understandings of freedom, independence and democracy, through the medium of new technologies, widely exploited in other contexts for monetary gain. A recent activity of the av Nerds was an exhibition called ‘Electrowork’ which was used by the community to launch its website: http://waft-lab.com, as a new medium to communicate with the public and assist members of the group to express their creativity. Video art communities in Surabaya have also built networks with similar communities in other cities, mainly Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Jakarta. In 2013, av Nerds Surabaya participated in the International OK Video Festival 2013 in Jakarta,5 collaborating with Kinetik av, a Jakarta-based group. Through these activities, Surabaya video artists and artists from other places experience a sense of connection with a larger community of similar interests. In linking the television program Cangkrukan with the young video artist community, I suggest that members of these two constructed communities have expressed their identities as citizens of the nation through their own interpretations of communality. The Cangkrukan television community has imagined itself through a television talk show, while the young video artists have utilized the euphoria of new media technologies to convey their criticism through creative art productions. These two different groups have created a sense of commonality by involving and engaging individuals in communities of their own interest.

5 For a discussion of this biannual festival, bringing together hundreds of Indonesian and international video artists, see chapter 5 of this volume.

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Conclusion The end of the New Order era has stirred the production of new forms of community in Indonesia. These communities involve not only communal gatherings of people, but also the collective production of cultural values, political insights, and creative ideas shared among the members. Community is formed in different ways and it is subject to change. The two different communities described above have shown how their members have defined their own territory and their respective identities. The gardu community television program has created a form of community for viewers who do not constitute a community as such, but feel a sense of commonality with others, a kind of collective identity, while watching. In a different way, the av Nerds people have utilized new audiovisual technologies to form their community. Their efforts appear to confirm what Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “Feels good: whatever the word ‘community’ may mean, it is ‘good to have a community’” (Bauman 2001, 1, cited in Meyer 2008, 3). The prospects for ongoing continuation of the communities created may perhaps be open to question, difficult to measure, but for now, for those involved, their existence is strong and defining. References Anderson, Benedict. 1973. “Notes on Indonesian Political Communication.” Indonesia 16 (October): 39–80. Barker, Joshua. 1998. “State of Fear: controlling the criminal contagion in Suharto’s New Order.” Indonesia 66 (October): 44–98. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity. Brown, David and Ian Wilson. 2007. Ethnicized Violence in Indonesia: The Betawi Brotherhood Forum in Jakarta. Asia Centre, Murdoch University, Working Paper no 145. Cohen, Anthony. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London & New York: Routledge. Kusno, Abidin. 2006. “Guardian of Memories: in Urban Java.” Indonesia 81 (April): 95–149. —— 2010. The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form. London: Duke University Press.

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Leksana, Grace. 2009. “Struggling to be Young: Brotherhood among the Poor Urban Youth of Jakarta.” Inside Indonesia 95 (January-March). Accessed 16 February 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-95/struggling-to-be-young. Meyer, Birgit ed. 2008. Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses. New York: Sage Publication. Peacock, James. 1969. Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Samiaji Bintang. 2009. “Becoming a Master of Batavia.” samiaji bintang blog. Accessed 16 February 2014. http://samiajibintang.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/becoming -a-master-of-batavia/.

chapter 5

Shaping Spaces

Video Art Communities in Indonesia1 Edwin Jurriëns

This chapter discusses the rise of video and new media art communities in Indonesia since the late 1990s – ‘communities’ in the sense of groups of people with shared artistic and social interests who work collaboratively in ways that will be illustrated and analysed below. These communities have been formed partially as a result of the greater freedom of speech of the post-Suharto era, the globalization of information and communication networks, and the availability of increasingly cheaper and easier to handle media production and consumption equipment. I argue that the various communities derive a sense of identity predominantly from the way in which they situate themselves in relation to four fields of discourse and activity in Indonesian society: firstly, the modern art establishment; secondly, mainstream television and popular culture; thirdly, community media and local development; and fourthly, formal and informal education systems. Each in their own way, the Indonesian video and new media art communities adopt and/or react against aspects of these four different fields. Video art was introduced in Indonesia in the late 1980s and early 1990s by a few pioneering artists, including Teguh Ostentrik, Krisna Murti and Heri Dono (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 20). These early pioneers used video projections and television screens as integrated parts of art installations that also included other media, such as painting, sculpture and performance (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 25; Hasan 2003, 156). Throughout the 1990s, it was especially Murti who consistently focused on video as a medium of artistic expression (Murti 2009a; Jurriëns 2010). The international video art pioneer Nam June Paik inspired him to use video art as a critique of the Indonesian television culture of the 1990s, which was undergoing a new phase with the introduction of domestic commercial channels (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 21).

1 Some of the material in this chapter is discussed also in Jurriëns (2009a). I would like to thank Krisna Murti, Herra Pahlasari, Aminudin Siregar, Reina Wulansari, Gustaff H. Iskandar, Vincensius Christiawan, Irene Agrivina, Ade Darmawan, Reza Afisina, Hafiz and the Video Lab, Common Room, House of Natural Fiber, ruangrupa, Forum Lenteng and Ruang Mes 56 communities for their generous support of my research.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_007

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A new generation of Indonesian video artists, born in the 1970s and predominantly based in Java and Bali, have built their own communities and organized and participated in national and international art festivals since the late 1990s. Due to the increased freedom of speech and the availability of relatively cheap communication technology, video currently enjoys broad acceptance as a tool of creative expression in Indonesia. Video applications on cameras, iPods and mobile phones have become widely available, especially among the Indonesian middle-class youth. These youth have positioned themselves not merely as consumers but also as producers of media content, including video art. Unlike the video art pioneers, the majority of the younger generation do not integrate video technology into art installations, but present so-called ‘single channel’ videos on television or cinema screens as art objects in themselves (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 25). The main source of inspiration for this ‘second generation’ is usually not the conventional fine arts, but contemporary popular culture such as television commercials, music videos, soap operas and Internet sites. They often take a multi-disciplinary approach, with ideas derived from such diverse disciplines as art history, media studies, anthropology and sociology (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 26; Murti 2006, 60–61). According to publisher and art critic Ronny Agustinus (2003, 115) the new generation of video artists grew up in a time of repression by the New Order regime and searched for alternatives in computer technology, alternative music videos (especially early mtv) and experimental films (such as Quentin Tarantino’s). At the same time, they were also influenced by mainstream Hollywood films, Western pop music and commercial television series. In a similar way to other Indonesian art critics (Hujatnikajennong 2006, 26; Murti 2006, 60–61), Agustinus (2005, 17) criticizes the young video artists for adopting rather than taking a critical distance from these genres of popular culture. I believe a more fruitful approach is to explore the diverse and sometimes paradoxical discourses and practices of contemporary Indonesian video art across generations. Some of the younger artists are concerned with politics not in an overtly ideological sense, but in more subtle and varied ways. For instance, young Indonesian video artists have addressed the politics of the body, gender  and the representation of historical events.2 In this chapter I will show ­specifically how Indonesian video art communities have come into being and 2 Examples of young Indonesian video artists who have addressed the politics of the body and  gender in their work are Reza Afisina, Tintin Wulia (Wiyanto 2003, 46) and Nerfita Primadewi (2006, 32). Examples of youth art communities that have critically discussed the representation of Indonesia’s 1965 state coup and its traumatic aftermath are Taring Padi

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created a sense of presence and cohesion by engaging with the politics of art production, consumer culture, community development and education.

Against the Modern Art Establishment: Collaboration and Community

One of the most compelling reasons for young Indonesian video artists to join together and establish new media art communities has been dissatisfaction with the government and business-supported Indonesian modern art establishment. This establishment heavily relied on the modernist ideas of the artist as a single and unique source of creativity, and the museum or art gallery as the standard venue for the display of works. Some video artists, especially the older generation, still follow these conventions, as they prefer to work individually and to produce art that invites a limited audience to contemplate, rather than directly interact with, the artist or the work of art. Many other artists, however, see the new medium of video as an opportunity to establish art communities as a different way of organization; collaborative art works as a different mode of production; joint exhibitions and festivals as a different form of presentation; and public art spaces as a different venue for exhibitions, meetings and discussions. This focus on community, collaboration, joint activities and publicness is not only a reaction against the modern art establishment, but also serves as a strategy to undermine some of the dominant principles of contemporary capitalist society, such as individualism and the commoditisation of culture and space. Site-specific video installations with multiple and sometimes anonymous creators, who often derive elements from existing works of art or popular culture, are, for the moment, less likely to end up in a system of commercial commodity exchange.3

(Fangs of the Rice Plant), Kedai Kebun Forum (Garden Café Forum) and Klinik Seni Taxu (Taxu Art Clinic) (Juliastuti 2007b, 142). 3 This type of counter-strategy has inspired and is supported by many Indonesian video artists, and was one of the central themes of the 2005 OK.Video ‘Sub/version’ festival, organized by the group ruangrupa, which will be discussed later in this chapter. In the festival’s catalogue, Agung Hujatnikajennong (2005, 34), one of the co-curators of ‘Sub/version’, asked the rhetorical question: ‘[C]an we still talk about resistance in this 21st Century, when one’s lifestyles, from music, fashion, religion, politics, to sex, are regulated by the mass media and advertizement – extensions of the advanced capitalist system – usurping all niches in our day-to-day lives?’. In his essay, he suggests ‘sub/version’ as an artistic strategy to erode the

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Since the turn of the century, some of the most active video art communities have been Common Room (Bandung), Forum Lenteng (Jakarta), House of Natural Fiber (Yogyakarta), Jatiwangi Art Factory (Jatiwangi), Klinik Seni Taxu (Bali),4 Ruang Mes 56 (Mess Space 56, Yogyakarta), ruangrupa (space of shapes, Jakarta), Tromorama (Bandung), Video Lab (Bandung) and waft (Surabaya). Several art critics have observed the continuities and differences between these communities and other collectives in Indonesia’s art history, such as the sanggar (studio) system, which operated from the 1940 until the 1960s,5 and the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement) of the 1970s.6 capitalist system from within. For a more detailed discussion of Hujatnikajennong’s essay, see Jurriëns (2013a). In addition to the spirit of creative collaboration and networking, another aspect of this strategy has been Indonesian video artists’ embrace of piracy and Common Source hardware and software for their artistic production. A strong manifesto exposing the negative implications of the current international system of copyright and intellectual property, especially regarding the transfer of knowledge to developing countries such as Indonesia, is Ronny Agustinus’ ‘An essay with no copyright’ in the same 2005 OK. Video catalogue. 4 Based in Denpasar. The term ‘taxu’ is derived from the Balinese word taksu, which refers to something that has magical or sacred power. The art community wants to criticize the fact that taksu has been applied to almost any art and culture from Bali. It has become a mere strategy, ‘taxu’ rather than taksu, which serves diverse interests and has no longer a specific meaning attached to it. As a ‘clinic’, the community wants to heal Bali’s ‘unhealthy’ contemporary art and education system by providing an alternative to the hegemony of abstract impressionism as well as the sometimes coarse and vulgar resistance to this hegemony (Klinik Seni Taxu 2004). 5 In the traditional sanggar a senior artist worked and lived with a group of students who would follow his art style, thoughts and way of life (Harsono 2003, 16). The sanggar members provided non-formal art education and organized art exhibitions for lay people in the Indonesian villages and cities (Harsono 2003, 20). In the early 1960s, the sanggar was influenced by party politics and started to combine art with overt ideology and propaganda (Harsono 2003, 16). The sanggar almost disappeared after 1965, as a result of the depoliticizing of society and the arts under Suharto’s New Order. 6 In 1975, the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru was established by young artists in reaction against the depoliticizing of the arts. The movement rejected the Western modernist criteria of formal arts education in Indonesia and wanted to revitalize the ideal of art as a reflection of local culture and society (Harsono 2003, 20). Their members showed social commitment in their works of art, but did not engage local communities in artistic collaboration. The latter type of artistic collaboration has been explored by art communities and individual artists since the 1980s. The most prominent among them is Moelyono, who developed art education based on the idea of seni rupa penyadaran (‘awareness art’), or art that makes local communities aware of their social conditions (Moelyono 1997; Harsono 2003, 21). For a more extended analysis of this type of social commitment in Indonesian art and media, see Jurriëns (2013b).

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According to Amanda Rath (2003, 4), some of the contemporary (video) art communities are similar to their ‘historical cousin’ the sanggar, as they are ‘politically outspoken’ and concerned with ‘the alleged neo-colonizing effects of global exchange’, ‘national identity’ and ‘national culture’. While the sanggar generation participated in the revolution and protested against colonialism, part of the younger generation has searched for alternatives to the New Order legacy of suppressive state policies. Other contemporary art communities have been less politically motivated and rather aim at increasing their participation in “an international arena of appropriated and reconfigured artistic, cultural, and social practices and discourse” (Rath 2003, 5). This second group displays “the tendency to recycle those areas of social and cultural practices that have until now been left un-mined by dominant art discourses or practices,” including “urban-living experiences, pop/tv culture, and sometimes gendered spaces” (Rath 2003, 5). I believe that many of the contemporary Indonesian video art communities do not demonstrate a clear-cut distinction between the two different approaches, but are inspired by a combination of both political and not immediately political – artistic, social or commercial – motivations.

Alternate Arts Spaces

One of the first contemporary art spaces in Indonesia was Cemeti Art House, established by Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo in Yogyakarta, 1988 (Clark 2005). In just over 25 years, Cemeti Art House has built a solid reputation and is a highly successful model for the organization of alternative art events in Indonesia (Harsono 2003, 21–22; Wardani 2003, 26–27). Art critic and former Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru member FX Harsono (2003, 23–24) has argued that art houses like Cemeti, unlike other Indonesian modern art establishments such as the National Gallery in Jakarta, are not for business or government purposes. According to Harsono (2003, 23), the alternative art houses also promote a greater diversity of artistic media and events, including performance art, video art, digital art and music concerts, and offer more opportunities for artists and other members of society to meet and build a sense of community: A space is no longer interpreted merely as a place to display paintings, but also as a place where a community can build a dialogue. A space is no longer felt as something eerie, which can only be visited by the educated people and the higher middle class. A space is no longer restricted by walls and a roof, but is also a place where every day the public can conduct daily activities, embark on a journey, etc.

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According to Harsono (2003, 25), the contemporary Indonesian art communities, spaces and events could be signs of a return to democracy and creative freedom after the fall of Suharto, and/or the result of developments in the international art world. He is not convinced, however, that the recent artistic initiatives are able to present strong local alternatives to globalization, as they lack clear ideological and aesthetic direction. According to cultural critic Nuraini Juliastuti (2007a, 107), the explosion of alternative art spaces in Indonesia also tends to cause the concept of the ‘alternative’ to lose some of its vigour: “[Talking about alternative art spaces] has become boring, because everyone seems to know already about the complex issues of these alternative spaces, the problems they are facing, and the possible solutions, as if there is nothing left to be discussed.” At the same time, she rightly acknowledges some of the accomplishments of the alternative art scene – such as the reinvigoration of cultural movements, social empowerment activities and other contributions to the democratization of Indonesian society – which were unlikely to be achieved by the official (art) institutions (Juliastuti 2007a, 115–117).

Groups and Activities

In one of her articles, Juliastuti (2007a) explores the history of one of Yogyakarta’s longest running new media art spaces, Ruang Mes 56. Ruang Mes 56 derives its name from its original function as the dormitory and mess of the Indonesian Air Force. In 1993, the dormitory began to accept university students and developed into a meeting place for photography students of Institut Seni Indonesia (the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, isi) Yogyakarta. The space was also used by a rich diversity of other people, including retired Air Force members, performers of dangdut popular music, karaoke club singers, gamblers and hawkers. In 2002, the space received a more formal status as independent art community. Its users adopted the name of Ruang Mes 56 and started a program of exhibitions, workshops and artist residencies (Juliastuti 2007a, 108–112). Today Ruang Mes 56 attempts to keep its activities running by giving each of its members the responsibility over a specific art program. The members are also required to donate a percentage of their private income to the Ruang Mes 56 community (Juliastuti 2007a, 113–114). The community’s current focus is on photography and video art. It has produced the highly successful ‘Video Battle’ series with compilations of Indonesian video art and short films.7 So far, 11 7 The duration of these short videos is typically between 30 seconds and five minutes. The makers usually perform aesthetic experiments by manipulating the camera angle, recording

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series have been produced, which are predominantly distributed to art galleries and distro.8 Copies of the compilations are limited – several hundreds of each series – and prices similar to those of regular Indonesian vcds and dvds, that is, below Rp. 50,000. The main producers, Wok the Rock and Wimo Ambala Bayang, prefer to be directly involved in the sales, so they can choose customers who truly appreciate Ruang Mes 56’s work (Juliastuti 2007c, 138). Another example of a largely self-funded new media art community is Common Room in Bandung (Jurriëns 2014). Common Room was established in 2003 as a joint initiative of the new-media art community Bandung Center for New Media (BCfNMA) and the independent bookshop Tobucil (Le Sourd 2006, 61; Voragen 2008). Common Room was initially meant as an open space for community-based activities and the promotion of literacy and creative development. Its venue comprised a small library, a guest room, a computer workshop, and a studio and exhibition space. It widened its scope and changed its name and status to Common Room Networks Foundation in 2006, after merging with BCfNMA and registering as a non-profit organization (npo) with the Ministry of Law and Human Rights. Similar to its predecessor BCfNMA, Common Room generates income from book sales, profits made on art projects, and funding from international nongovernmental organizations (ngos) such as the Dutch Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Humanistisch Instituut voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking, or hivos) (Le Sourd 2006, 61). One of BCfNMA’s main activities was hosting the 2005 Art Camp, an international event for talented young media artists (Iskandar 2006, 130). Common Room has organized numerous exhibitions, workshops, music concerts, public lectures and artist residencies (Le Sourd 2006, 60). Since 2007, it has been the host of the international new media art and socio-­cultural festival ‘Nu-Substance’. One of the most active and consistent Indonesian new speed and editing tools of hand-held cameras. Many of the videos can be seen as alternative video clips, as the visual experimentation is often accompanied by existing or self-composed music. Some videos make use of materials from mainstream television and popular culture (for instance, mtv video clips, Indonesian soap operas and Hollywood movies from the silent film era). Other videos are self-made animations using everyday objects, clay figures, drawings and/or texts. One type of video consists of visual and conceptual explorations of space, objects and/or bodies. Another type is predominantly meant to tell a story about oneself (for instance, to express feelings of love, anger, friendship, loneliness) and/or politics and society (for instance, about war, religion and class). 8 Distro (short for ‘distribution outlet’, derived from the terminology of zines) are alternative shops in urban centres such as Bandung and Yogyakarta, where youth sell their own retail clothing, zines, cassettes, cds, vcds and dvds (Iskandar 2006, 106–107; Luvaas 2008; Uttu 2006).

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media art communities is ruangrupa in Jakarta (Clark 2005; Crosby 2008; Berghuis 2011). It has made important contributions to the practice of and discourse on video art in Indonesia through its large-scale international festivals, comprehensive festival publications, critical art magazine Karbon (available in print and on-line) and intensive collaboration with other art communities and educational institutions. Initially ruangrupa could not afford a physical space for its community, because of the high costs of accommodation in Jakarta. The community worked on the basis of three or four-month projects which were funded by the sale of art works (Darmawan 2006a, 122). Nowadays ruangrupa receives funding for its art festivals, publications and other activities from international ngos such as hivos. According to one of its founders, Ade Darmawan (2006b, 98), it is not easy for alternative art communities to maintain continuity in their activities because of financial problems, changing membership and difficulties in management and organization. Since 2003, ruangrupa has organized the bi-annual video art festival ‘OK. Video’, which always attracts the participation of hundreds of Indonesian and international video artists. The 2003 OK.Video festival consisted of exhibitions, workshops, special presentations, music video screenings, seminars and artist talks. It was organized at the National Gallery in Jakarta, which underwent “the biggest temporary makeover it has experienced in its lifetime” (Streak 2003, 29). The organizers installed 13 video projection screens, 17 flat screen monitors and 30 dvd players in order to show 92 different works of video art (Streak 2003, 30). They collaborated with the Montevideo Netherlands Media Art Institute (The Netherlands), International Media Art Award (Germany), Potluck Video Festival (Denmark) and The Danish Video Art Databank (Denmark). In the exhibitions, the works of 56 artists from 19 different countries were shown. The special presentations included PULSE (South Africa), Videoart Center Tokyo (Japan) and Videotage (Hong Kong) (Hujatnikajennong 2003, 86). The workshops, moderated by the German artist Oliver Zwink, included discussions and collaborative works on the theme of urban space (Zwink 2003, 34). Since 2004, ruangrupa has also organized the bi-annual art festival ‘Jakarta 32 derajat Celsius’ (Jakarta 32 degrees Celcius). The festival, specifically designed for university students from the Jakarta region, is meant to artistically document and stimulate the interaction between the Jakarta youth and their urban environment (Achmad 2006, 4). Apart from photography and video art, it includes graphic design, fashion, painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. In 2006, in the second of these festivals, more than 250 works of art were presented and/or documented over a period of three months. The Presentasi Khusus (Special Presentations) section showed the works of 5 independent

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groups of students – Project_Or, Sakit Kuning (Jaundice), Artcoholic, Propagraphic, and Forum Lenteng – who were challenged to work collaboratively and survive as a collective (Shandra and Darmawan 2006, 11). The festival also organized workshops on the theme of Bermain di ruang tunggu publik (Playing in public waiting rooms).9 In an article in the 2003 OK.Video festival catalogue, Agustinus (2003, 23) criticized the fact that the festival was organized at the most authoritative centre of conventional modern art practice, the National Gallery in Jakarta. Agustinus explained that the institutionalization of art in spaces such as museums and art galleries had been problematic throughout the history of modern art. He wondered why video art had to be ‘exhibited’ at all, and believed a more efficient strategy of display was the broadcasting of video art. By reaching a mass audience through the medium of broadcast television, video art would be able to undermine the conventions of mass communication: To enter television and disturb the viewers: I believe this is the ideal ambition of a video artist. The spectacle culture has to be criticized, sabotaged if necessary, not just celebrated. Cultural Studies cannot continue with just cheering about seeing the intertwined chaos of mass culture, it has a task to criticize and change [mass culture]. …Let us hope that OK Video’s claim is not wrong, thousand times wrong: as if video art was never born to communicate more intensively with the public, as if video art was never born to criticize spectacle culture – as if it is only a different phenomenon of the spectacle culture itself, which gives society no other choice than to devour it. Agustinus 2003, 123

Perhaps partially in response to Agustinus’ critical remarks, the theme of the second OK.Video festival in 2005 was ‘Sub/version’. With an ironic play on 9 For two weeks, three times a week, the participants in these workshops had discussions with each other and the workshop moderators about how to approach the central theme (Yunanto and Pringgotono 2006, 24). The participants came up with creations that normally would not be displayed in public spaces because of their playful, personal or decontextualized character. The art works were installed at bus stops in Jakarta and included a sand sack for boxing exercises, the recorded sounds of a flight terminal, a horoscope prediction machine, comics, and a map of ojek (motorcycle for public transport) stops along one of Jakarta’s main roads, Thamrin-Sudirman (Yunanto and Pringgotono 2006, 24). The organizers deliberately did not ask for permission from the local authorities, as they felt the public was also never notified about the installation of the many billboards along the Jakarta roads (Yunanto and Pringgotono 2006, 25).

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television commercials, organizer Darmawan (2005, 12) explained that video art was now an accepted phenomenon in Indonesia, which had to fulfill its fullest potential as a critical monitor of the mass media: [Video] art no longer pretends to be ‘strange’, nor does it perform acrobatics to receive attention. …It exists within a media system in order to play, question, steal, inspire, influence, even destroy…Sub/version – Solutions for a small planet. Just do it, just do it… In response to Darmawan, art critic Hujatnikajennong (2005, 48) agreed that (Indonesian) video art did not have to invent new territory. Instead, it had to demonstrate knowledge of and have a critical attitude towards existing social and artistic practices and discourses, in order to create ‘subversion’ and correct ‘failures from the past’.

Beyond Panopticon: Television, Video Art and Media Literacy

Another important reason for young video artists to organize as communities and engage in joint activities is to critically discuss contemporary popular and consumer culture, particularly national public and commercial television. A prime example is the Bandung-based video art community Video Lab. The community was established in 2003 by artists who apart from creating their own work wanted to document the development of video art in Indonesia. In 2004, they organized a video art project entitled ‘Beyond Panopticon; Art and global media project’ (original title in English), which dealt with the creative use of media technology, alternative spaces for art exhibition and a critique of mainstream broadcast television. The ‘panopticon’ in the 2004 project specifically referred to Indonesia’s first Palapa satellite, which was launched in 1976 and contributed to “the construction of a nation’s identity through a ‘virtual’ control system” (Siregar 2004). Similar to the panopticon prison system, Palapa could exercise surveillance without being noticed by the people under surveillance. According to Video Lab, control was also exercised through the propaganda of Indonesia’s state broadcaster Televisi Republik Indonesia (Television of the Republic of Indonesia, tvri), which was able to cover most of the archipelago through the Palapa system. Other forms of control were the banning of commercials and other ‘foreign’ influences on tvri in the 1980s, and the introduction of domestic commercial television in the early 1990s, which mainly offers pure entertainment to the public (Siregar 2004).

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Video Lab attempted to undermine these types of control and go ‘beyond panopticon’ by using television screens in an electronics store to display selfcreated video films in public. This electronics store, Electronic City, is situated in one of Bandung’s busy shopping malls. According to Video Lab, shopping malls constitute a specific type of public space which is accessible to all social classes. At the same time, however, malls create a distinction between those who are passive observers and consumers, and those who know about and actively engage with the goods and services on offer, including computers, the Internet and other digital technology. With ‘Beyond Panopticon’, Video Lab tried to demonstrate that a shopping mall can become a site to break free from normal social conventions and class distinctions, provided that people dynamically interact with this alternative social environment (Siregar 2004). In this project Video Lab members turned the consumer goods in the electronics store into a means for creating and displaying their own works of video art. They also organized discussions about video art, music and photography workshops, and a drawing contest for children. The children were allowed to make drawings on white goods such as refrigerators, thus reusing and rethinking consumer goods in an alternative way. The graphic design of the ‘Beyond Panopticon’ brochure suggested that such creativity could not be expected from tvri, which had been the state broadcaster since 1962 and was desperately seeking to transform itself into a public television station in the early 2000s. The brochure had illustrations of tvri as a sad, passive lady who was trapped in her own image. The tvri lady was contrasted with another group, supposedly the Video Lab people themselves, who were portrayed as active, eating, kissing, connecting with other people and setting themselves free. Ad-like slogans such as ‘nothing more, nothing less, only love’ and ‘united catalyst’ illustrated that the second group had passed the engagement-with-media-technology test, enjoyed freedom and could function as a mediator between technology and society. At the same time, however, the Video Lab community did not identify the reasons behind the gap between the media literates or ‘digerati’ on the one hand, and the media illiterates or ‘pona’ (Persons of No Account) on the other (Siregar 2004). I believe this gap is not simply caused by differences in attitude, or ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’, but also has its roots in profound socio-economic obstacles that exclude certain groups in society from access to education and technology. While the video works displayed in Electronic City set an example of alternative media content and sites of display, Video Lab did not invite or train the mall visitors or other groups without any media equipment and/ or computer knowledge, to actively participate in the production of media art. In this sense, ‘Beyond Panopticon’ was a successful project, but remained

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restricted to a group of well-educated middle-class youth. The concepts and formats of the video works may have been well beyond the reach of some of the ordinary shoppers in the mall.

Militia: Video Art and Community Development

Other Indonesian video art communities obtain a sense of identity precisely by providing media equipment and art education to groups in society which are underrepresented in or do not have easy access to the mainstream media and conventional art venues. Like community media facilitators – ngos who promote the involvement of local communities with video and other media – these video art communities believe that the social and political empowerment of disadvantaged communities can be strengthened by giving people the opportunity to engage directly in media content, management and ownership. Compared with regular community media, however, ‘community’ video art has a stronger emphasis on stimulating people’s imagination and promoting aesthetic experimentation. A telling example is ruangrupa’s third OK.Video festival of 2007. This festival went one step further than Beyond Panopticon as well as the previous editions of the OK.Video festival by choosing the theme of ‘Militia’ and explicitly aiming at social empowerment (Crosby 2008). The meaning of ‘Militia’ was explained in a curatorial statement by one of the organizers, Hafiz (2007, 13): The word militia (milisi – in Indonesian) means to arm a group of people to set up an armed movement for change and seizing power. However, militia also means to empower civil society in an organized, planned manner, and also to have civil society mobilized for changes that were initiated by itself. As part of the festival, ruangrupa organized intensive seven-day video workshops for local communities at 15 locations in 12 different cities. The workshops gave the communities information about the OK.Video festival, the history of video art, and the links between video art and social, political and cultural conditions (Afisina 2007, 34). The participants were also taught the different aspects of video film production, ranging from making notes, keeping a diary and drawing scenes to the actual shooting and editing process. According to one of the organizers, Reza Afisina (2007, 35), the workshops were meant to give the local residents a new perspective on their daily lives by ‘recording’ the places where they lived and worked. He hoped that the creative

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process would make the participants knowledgeable, critical and active in  dealing with and adapting to changes in their social and physical environments. Militia also used the National Gallery in Jakarta for an exhibition called ‘Video In’, consisting of submitted video art as well as work created in the various festival workshops. In the ‘Video Out’ part of the festival, art works were displayed outside the National Gallery, in public spaces such as office buildings, cafes, shopping malls and railway stations. Artists were asked to match their work of art with the character of the work’s place of display. The curatorial team of Militia guided the creative process by mediating between artists and local communities, and helping both groups of participants with retrieving information about the history and patterns of utilization of the different localities that were to function as public exhibition spaces. The Video Out projects, similar to the regional workshops, were meant to record local narratives and produce collaborative works of art that were different from mainstream art (Hafiz 2007, 14–15). Hujatnikajennong (2007, 24) observed that the third OK.Video festival had a strong interdisciplinary character and attempted to break with elitist hierarchies in the art world. According to the art critic, the festival focused on ‘video’ rather than ‘video art’ by presenting works that aimed not only at aesthetic quality but also socio-cultural relevance. Apart from the various workshops, there were other demonstrations of video ‘militancy’ at the festival, such as Irwan Ahmett’s project tv Milisi (Militia tv). This project was carried out by an underground group that had special equipment to shut down, change and distort channels on television sets in both public and private spaces. In the Video In exhibition, the group presented posters and photo and video documentation of their radical anti-television campaign (Ahmett 2007, 172). Elsewhere (Jurriëns 2009b), I have shown that individual artists such as Jompet Kuswidananto and Tintin Wulia have likewise addressed the politics of mediation in their works of art. In addition to video art communities, there are also civil society organizations such as Kampung Halaman and Etnoreflika in Yogyakarta, which specifically focus on the production of short video documentaries in collaboration with local communities.10 In all these cases, the 10

Kampung Halaman and Etnoreflika, like other community media facilitators in Indonesia, have a special interest in representing themes, which, although relevant to local society, are often ignored by the mainstream media. For instance, Kampung Halaman has organized video workshops that enable local youth to express their thoughts and feelings about issues such as the traditional arts, sexuality, education, health and natural disasters. The organization has issued two volumes of ‘thematic community-based videos’ (video

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young Indonesian new media artists and documentary makers attempt to contribute to social development by using video not only as a medium for representing macro issues such as local governance, health and the environment, but also for reflecting on the micro-politics of today’s information society and enhancing people’s media literacy.

Prosthetics and Intelligent Bacteria: New Media Art and the Educational System

The House of Natural Fiber (honf)11 is an example of a new media art community that represents the social problems of local communities while also attempting to provide creative solutions to such problems. The community has arisen out of the specific belief that new media art can fulfill important educational purposes. It uses new media art as an object of aesthetic and scientific experimentation as well as a tool for the transfer of theoretical and practical knowledge. Its members collaborate intensively with teachers and academics and have expressed criticism of and explored alternatives to the standard Indonesian school and university curricula. honf’s artistic and technological initiatives go well beyond video and include such unusual media as prosthetics and ‘intelligent’ bacteria. honf was founded in 1999 in Yogyakarta by a group of young artists with diverse backgrounds and interests. Vincensius Christiawan (‘Venzha’), Director of honf, is a graduate in Interior Design from isi Yogyakarta and a self-professed technology and ufo maniac. Venzha was an artist in residence in Japan and he and other honf members have participated in numerous international new media art workshops and exhibitions in Europe and Asia (Surat 2003, 20–21). Similar to the constituents of many other Indonesian new media art communities, the honf members adhere to a dynamic concept of community, which is not based on preconfigured notions of structure and longevity,

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berbasis komunitas tematik) on dvd, called Dengar! (Listen!) Compilations 1 and 2. As part of its publication strategies, the organization holds monthly community video screenings called ‘Nonton bareng di kampung’ (Let’s watch together in the neighbourhood). The screenings always take place in communities other than the ones that created the videos, in order to facilitate inter-local exchange of materials and ideas (Videochronic 2009, 38). Not only the collective’s name, but also the titles of most of its programs and activities are in English. This is not unusual considering honf’s impressive international network. For more information on honf, see Jurriëns (2013a).

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but on the principles of freedom, responsibility, social awareness and collaboration: The concept of this community is not to become a permanent group with a static membership and a leader, but rather to focus on an awareness of integrity in doing anything which is meaningful to them and their surroundings. This awareness allows Venzha to encourage everybody to freely join in. The only commitment is to work together. This freedom has allowed the community to survive to the present day. People join in as their lives allow them, and leave if the need arises, which is only natural. The House of Natural Fiber 2010

In their mission statement, the founders describe honf as a new media art laboratory that focuses on the interconnections between art, technology and society. They try to provide a critique of and innovation in cultural development by exploring the interactivity between new media art and people and environments. They see themselves as ‘forward thinking’ individuals who contemplate the future of art and technology in a positive and creative way. They believe that the combination of art and technology, in the form of new media art, provides ‘limitless’ opportunities, and that anything can be or become art as long as it is in line with people’s sense of reason and responsibility (The House of Natural Fiber 2010). The core activities of honf include the Education Focus Program (efp), Cellsbutton or Yogyakarta International Media Art Festival, Yogyakarta International Videoworks Festival (yivf) and HonFab Lab Indonesia. honf’s own information outlets include the monthly bulletin 10:05 (also written ‘Ten o Fev’) and the Internet radio station DeadMediaFM. efp, which has obtaining and transferring knowledge about art, science and society as its main objective, forms the basis of all other honf activities. efp is meant as an alternative to the formal Indonesian education system, which, according to the honf members, suffers from serious gaps in infrastructure and curriculum development, especially in the field of media studies (Gong 2009, 27; Surat 2007, 19–21). honf recognizes and attempts to build on the often ingenious responses from society to these and other problems that are not addressed by government or business. The new media art community attempts to give shape to efp by bringing artists, academics and various social institutions and communities together in interdisciplinary research and education (Murti 2009b, 134–135). In the framework of efp, honf has collaborated with international organizations as well as Yogyakarta-based educational institutions, such as the Microbiology Lab of Gadjah Mada University, the

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Informatics Lab of Duta Wacana University, the akprind Institute of Science and Technology, the Yakkum rehabilitation centre, the ppsj wild animal rescue centre and several junior and senior high schools. HonFab Lab is honf’s ‘research and development’ division, a laboratory for artists, researchers, teachers and students with an interest in the production of creative technology. The concept derives from the ‘Open Hardware’ philosophy, which, similar to the ‘Open Source’ and ‘Open Content’ principles, promotes the exchange of products and ideas that is relatively unhampered by commercial or political-administrative restrictions. honf developed its own laboratory with help from the Waag Society in the Netherlands, which created Fablab Amsterdam (Fab Lab 2010). honf has organized its own lab-like experiments to explore the social and artistic applications of a wide range of technologies, from the use of robotics for assistance in fishery to the use of microbiology for the improvement of agriculture. Examples of lab projects in progress are ‘Under $50 prosthetics’, ‘Intelligent bacteria’ and ‘S.A.T.U.’ ‘Under $50 prosthetics’ has been a collaborative project with Fablab Amsterdam and Yakkum since early 2009. The aim of the project is to invent below-knee prosthetics that are under $50, which would be much more affordable for Indonesian clients than the current alternatives. In line with honf’s aesthetic mission and requests by the patients themselves, the project partners attempt to give the prosthetics a natural look, so users are not embarrassed by them. In January 2010, honf members were invited to the Netherlands in order to learn from Fablab Amsterdam about using the equipment and developing collaboration strategies. The two new media art communities experimented with the use of 3D scanners and cheap Indonesian materials such as bamboo for the production of prosthetics. The honf members also made a tour of Kamer Orthopedie in Amsterdam, a company specializing in manufacturing prosthetics (honf Prosthetics 2010). ‘Intelligent Bacteria’ is a project in collaboration with the Microbiology Department of Gadjah Mada University. Its main idea is to find new methods for producing cheap and safe alcoholic drinks to reduce health problems caused by unsafe home-brew. According to honf, these problems intensified after the Indonesian excise duty on alcohol was increased in March 2010, and those from the lower and middle social income groups created or bought cheap home-brew with high levels of methanol due to unhygienic fermentation in the production process. honf has experimented with various types of fruit as fermentation materials such as salak and sweetcorn to create wines in various colours and tastes (Christiawan, personal communication, 29 June 2010). The new media art community presented their own wine factory as installation art at the Yogyakarta Arts Festival (Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta,

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fky) in July 2010. The installation derived its aesthetic and performative qualities not only from the colourful materials and mechanical devices, but also from the use of gases created during the fermentation process for the generation of experimental sounds.12 honf also uses new media art to focus public attention on agricultural issues.13 An example is the installation art work titled ‘S.A.T.U.’ (‘one’ in Indonesian, and also an acronym for ‘Saturn Analogy of Trans Urgency’). This interactive installation was presented at the Next Wave Festival, which took place from 13 to 30 May 2010 at the Meat Market art space in Melbourne. Its name refers to the reflection of hexagonal shapes from the planet Saturn. The work imitates some of the experiments done by scientist to explain the appearance of such shapes, which also occur in various natural phenomena and are  represented in symbols of ancient civilizations around the globe (Next Wave 2010). The installation consists of three rotating hexagonal aluminium structures in a dark room. While rotating, the structures transmit so-called ultra-sound (above 20 kHz) or infra-sound (below 20 Hz) that cannot be heard by human beings, and near-ultrasonic, audible sounds that are meant to give the audience a sense of presence in the space. The use of sound in the installation represents ‘the basic form of energy created by the vibration of matters’. The installation is meant to test the effects of this type of proto-energy within the proto-structure of the hexagon on life forms such as plants as well as nonlife forms such as water. The honf community believes that spectacular experiments such as ‘S.A.T.U.’ – in which the energy derived from sounds, shapes and movements may help plants grow in the dark – can renew people’s interest in agricultural growth processes and, in a broader and more philosophical sense,  give shape to utopian ambitions such as the creation of “an alignment between art and science, individual and community, energy and space” (Next Wave 2010). 12

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In February 2011, this installation was crowned winner of transmediale.11, a prestigious festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, Germany, which included 300 competing projects from 30 different countries. From 2010, honf has tried to develop more projects for and with farmers and rural communities as part of a new program called ‘p.a.d.i.’ (‘Rice’ in Indonesian, but also an abbreviation for ‘Paradigm of Antidotes to Deconstruct the Infrastructures’). The program addresses the irony that Indonesia, as a predominantly agricultural society with one of most fertile soils in the world, is also one of the world’s largest importers of rice. honf tries to give the Indonesian public a more positive image of agriculture through the use of state-of-the-art technology and the promotion of the study of the subject at schools and universities (p.a.d.i. 2010).

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Conclusion As illustrated by the quote from the honf members, most Indonesian video or new media art communities are not based on strict criteria of membership, such as ethnic or professional background or political or religious affinity. Indeed, what is most striking about these communities are their internal diversity and fluidity, comprising people from a rich variety of geographical origins, academic disciplines and personal convictions. What binds these people together is usually a shared concern about one or more broad artistic and/or social issues, such as contemporary Indonesian art conventions, television and consumer culture, local development and education systems. Another way for new media art communities to build coherence, presence and identity is simply by being active; active in organizing festivals and exhibitions and creating and maintaining physical and virtual art spaces and networks of national and international counterparts. When a community is no longer active or visible, it will no longer generate discourse and dialogue, and slowly cease to exist. The proliferation of new media art communities in Indonesia could be seen partly as a response to the capitalist urge for media users and producers to differentiate themselves from others and to look for specific niches in the overcrowded globalized media market. Some artists and communities have been rightly criticized for not taking enough critical distance from contemporary popular and consumer culture. At the same time, however, video art, arguably more than any other medium in Indonesian modern art history, has provided both breadth and depth to Indonesian art practice by incorporating ideas from fields as far apart from each other as anthropology and microbiology. While ruangrupa presents itself as a ‘space of shapes’, one could argue that Indonesian video and new media art initiatives also ‘shape spaces’, in the sense that they create environments for discussing, criticizing and sometimes providing solutions to key issues of Indonesia’s democratic present and future, including the quality of its informational, educational and agricultural infrastructures. The strength of these initiatives is their attention to the aesthetic, the performative, and the utopian, which makes them arguably more independent, imaginative and solution-oriented than the mainstream media. References Achmad, Laila. 2006. “Editorial”. In Jakarta 32°, ed. Indra Ameng, Ardi Yunanto, Andang Kelana, 3–4. Jakarta: ruangrupa.

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Kesenian, Direktorat Jendral Nilai Budaya, Seni dan Film, Departemen Kebudayaan dan Pariwisata. Rath, Amanda. 2003. “Perihal seni alternative dan ruang seni alternatif/Altered-natives and altered-spaces; Alternative art and alternative art spaces/Altered-natives and altered-spaces.” Karbon 5(05): 4–15. Shandra, Ary Buy and Ade Darmawan. 2006. “72 dpi.” In Jakarta 32°, ed. Indra Ameng, Ardi Yunanto, Andang Kelana, 8–11. Jakarta: ruangrupa. Siregar, Aminudin TH. 2004. ‘Melampaui kontrol pikiran lalu tubuh’. In Beyond panopticon, ed. Heru Hikayat and Herra Pahlasari. Bandung: Video Lab. Streak, Greg. 2003. “It’s more than OK.” In OK Video: Post event, ed. Agung Hujatnikajennong, Ade Darmawan, Farah Wardani, 29–31. Jakarta: ruangrupa. Surat. 2003. “Heterogenouz; Obsesi kami”. Surat Yayasan Seni Cemeti 15: 20–21. —— 2007. “Cellsbuton #01; Yogyakarta International Media Art Festival.” Surat 30: 19–23. The House of Natural Fiber. 2010. “The House of Natural Fiber: Yogyakarta New Media Art Laboratory.” Accessed 22 January 2014. http://www.naturalfiber.com/index .php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57&Itemid=57. Uttu. 2006. “Distro: Independent fashion moves from margins to mainstream”. Inside Indonesia 85(Jan-Mar) Accessed 22 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/ feature-editions/distro Videochronic. 2009. Videochronic: Video activism and video distribution in Indonesia. Collingwood: EngageMedia. Voragen, Roy. 2008. “The city as autobiography: The self and the city as reflexive projects.” Melintas 24(2): 163–183. Wardani, Farah. 2003. “Obrolan bersama: A conversation with Mella Jaarsma.” Karbon 5(05): 26–32. Wiyanto, Hendro. 2003. “Drifting along the small foams or riding the waves.” In OK Video: Post event, ed. Agung Hujatnikajennong, Ade Darmawan, Farah Wardani, 38–53. Jakarta: ruangrupa. Yunanto, Ardi and MG Pringgotono. 2006. “Menunggu untuk bermain.” In Jakarta 32°, ed. Indra Ameng, Ardi Yunanto, Andang Kelana, 22–26. Jakarta: ruangrupa. Zwink, Oliver. 2003. “OK urban space/OK urban life.” In OK Video: Post event, ed. Agung Hujatnikajennong, Ade Darmawan, Farah Wardani, 32–35. Jakarta: ruangrupa.

chapter 6

Balinese Cultural Communities and Scenes Brett Hough Bali might be termed an anomaly in Indonesia. It is the only province that is both an island and the home of a single ethnic group, albeit a rather diverse one. It is also the only part of the archipelago to have steadfastly retained the Hindu-Buddhist culture that first came to the region over a millennium ago. Although the New Order state as the all-dominant force in cultural production left its mark on Bali, tourism and the strength of tradition have also been determining forces, differentiating Bali from other parts of Indonesia. I will argue that as a result of this unique situation, the ending of the New Order and the implementation of regional autonomy have not led to substantial changes in either the contexts of production or performances of the arts. This is not to suggest absence of change, but rather that contemporary performance activities are little different in kind from those taking place before 1998. As Balinese have always had at their disposal a range of cross-cutting groups which provide a focus for cultural activity and an anchor point for identity, there appears to have been no felt need to create new communities amidst the fluidity and uncertainty of modern life. In other words, there has been no discernible emergence of entities that define themselves as ‘communities’ (komunitas) in a different way to the groups which have long been a part of the performing arts landscape. These groups tend to be parochial in nature, fulfilling local roles and needs, without much reference to a sense of shared ‘Indonesianness’. Nonetheless, there remains a general commitment to promotion of diversity and an ethic of ‘each to their own’ – desa kala patra (place, time and circumstance) in Balinese terms, or Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in diversity) in the wider Indonesian context. The first part of this chapter will provide an overview of significant events that have occurred in Bali since 1998 that provide the background to any discussion of the performing arts over the last decade. In the second section I will describe the practice of performing arts, in particular the process of learning and the social settings within which artistic activity occurs, which in part helps explain the absence of any dramatic change in focus or form. In the third part I will overview some of the current groups, individuals and institutions that are widely recognized as active practition­ ers and promoters of artistic production as well as innovation and experimentation.

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The Socio-Political Context of Bali since 1998

The decade or so since the end of the Soeharto era has been witness to a number of momentous events in Bali. In addition to one-off occurrences there have been the constant socio-cultural, economic, and increasingly, environmental concerns surrounding the tourism industry. Prior to 1998 there had been growing opposition to development on the island, particularly that financed by the rapaciousness of the Soeharto family and those closely associated with them.1 Politically, many Balinese had already thrown their support behind Megawati Soekarnoputri and her pdi-p party in their confrontation with Soeharto and Golkar, largely due to Megawati’s connection to Bali through her father and grandmother and pdi-p’s role as the successor to the pni nationalist party. Given the context it was not surprising that Balinese actively embraced the calls for Reformasi, political reform. The degree of identification with Megawati as ‘one of their own’ was dramatically demonstrated in the riots which took place when she was denied the Presidency after the 1999 elections, resulting in the destruction of the government office buildings in Denpasar, Singaraja and Negara.2 While the riots can be seen as a manifestation of frustrations over the sidelining of a candidate perceived to be non-Muslim, and directed towards symbols of government, the bombing of the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar in Kuta on 12 October 2002, and the Jimbaran Beach bombing on 1 October 2005 by members of Jemaah Islamiyah were understood as direct attacks by Muslim outsiders against Balinese themselves and their visitors. In the main Balinese responded with remarkable calm, refraining from turning their anger and disbelief into violence or reprisals against Muslim residents. The main reaction was rather to question their own actions and neglect of ritual responsibilities, which may have caused the cosmos to be out of balance. Such self-reflection led to a ritual response in the form of a cleansing ceremony to appease malevolent forces and to ensure the spirits of those killed did not remain bound to the bombsites.3 Throughout this same period the implementation of regional autonomy has necessitated a shift of bureaucratic responsibility from the provincial level to 1 The most notable was opposition to development of the Bali Nirwana Resort near the seaside temple of Tanah Lot, and at Padanggalak to the north of Sanur beach. See Warren (1998) and Schulte Nordholt (2007) for further discussion of these and other development-related issues. 2 Schulte Nordholt (2007, 17) suggests that outside forces were also involved in the attacks, that they were not simply “a spontaneous expression of popular anger” but rather politically orchestrated from Java. 3 See Chapter 5 in Lewis and Lewis (2009) for extended discussion of the bombings and Balinese responses to the events.

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that of the regency. Branches of the provincial bureaucracy had already existed at the regency level: now these offices have assumed a higher level of responsibility, in the cultural field as well as other matters. The shift has brought a jostling for political position in open competition at each level and the formation of strategic alliances. Another issue causing considerable public concern has been ongoing unregulated development and the lack of adequate infrastructure to cope with waste, sewerage, and water use.4 Accompanying these environmental troubles has been the perception that negative socio-cultural effects have been undermining Balinese identity. The main response can be seen in the largely media driven Ajeg Bali (literally ‘Bali Standing Strong’) movement to promote a return to core Balinese values and pride in Hindu-Balinese identity.5 At one level it represents a reaction to a sense of a loss of control, of being under siege, and swamped by outsiders and their influence. On another level it is a somewhat reactionary retreat into an idealized Balineseness, manipulated by an urbanbased elite. As such it can be viewed as the latest in a series of elite attempts to direct public discourse through mobilizing concern over the perceived threats posed to Balinese culture by external influences, manifested throughout the New Order by tourism development. A more recent concept evident in public discourse over the last few years has been the call to identify, highlight and utilize kearifan lokal (local genius) in all domains of life, including the arts.6 It is within this wider context that we need to consider developments in the performing arts over the last decade.

Overview of the Performing Arts

Bali has long had a reputation for the vibrancy of its performing arts and the maintenance of traditional forms in the context of modernization and tourism. In part this has been facilitated by the integration of performance into ritual contexts and the strength of local social structures, particularly at the level of the banjar (hamlet). In particular, voluntary groups (seka) devoted to 4 See Warren (1998 and 2005) for details of these problems and Balinese responses to them. 5 The key media organization behind the movement was the Bali Post Group headed by Satria Naradha. In 2004 the media group published Ajeg Bali Sebuah Cita-Cita (Ajeg Bali: An Ideal), which is a collection of short pieces outlining its meaning and content. For critical discussions of ajeg Bali see Allen & Palermo (2005), Creese (2004), Ida Bagus (2010), Lewis and Lewis (2009, 151–159, 177–178), Macrae and Putra (2007, 176–178), McGraw (2009, 311–314), Reuter (2009) and Schulte Nordholt (2007). 6 See for instance the article in the Bali Post daily newspaper by Ibed Surgana Yuga (2004).

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music, dance or literary pursuits have remained the foci within village communities, while studios (sanggar) draw on a wider pool of interest. Tourism has provided further opportunities for performances and sources of income, providing opportunities for more Balinese to actively engage in music, dance, and theatre than had previously been the case before the advent of mass tourism in the 1970s.7 Although tourism has opened up possibilities, it has also acted in certain ways to constrain artistic innovation and creativity. In the performing arts, the tourism industry provides incentives to maintain ‘tradition’ in order to present to tourists ‘authentic Balinese cultural expression’. That is not to argue that innovation and creativity are totally absent. There are certainly individuals and groups who are active in creating new works, and seeking new forms of expression. The point to note is tourism represents a force promoting conservatism and packaging of the existing repertoire. Generally only a small proportion of audience members – be they Balinese or non-Balinese – are interested in anything that deviates from the tradition. Among Balinese performers much innovation or experimentation with new elements tends to be within the existing repertoire, rather than directed towards creation of something totally new. Such conservatism is due also to the pervasiveness of the kebyar8 style of music and dance that has dominated the performing arts for the last 70 years or so. Although widely thought of as a versatile ensemble and style, which radically changed the performing arts with its emergence in the 1930s, it can now be seen as something of a millstone that constrains more widespread innovation due to its dominance.9 Transmission of the performing arts takes place in three main contexts: families and local communities; formal educational institutions; and private studios. In a village or local community context training is essentially an ­everyday  social activity. Direct participation and interaction characterize ­community-based learning, providing several possibilities for passing on local traditions. The most immediate transmission occurs from an early age from 7 My focus is specifically on the performing arts rather than the arts more widely. Although I do not touch upon the following areas I acknowledge the work of Emma Baulch on the alternative music scene, Edwin Jurriëns’ work on radio and video production, and the research by Nyoman Darma Putra and Helen Creese on kakawin sung poetry programs on radio and television. All of these areas are part of the wider scene but outside the scope of my discussion. 8 Kebyar is the popular modern (twentieth century) style of Balinese music and dance associated with the gong kebyar musical ensemble, a version of the traditional Balinese gamelan orchestra characterized by its large size and spectacular style of playing. The term kebyar itself means to ‘burst open’, which is descriptive of the dynamic nature of the musical style. 9 For a counter view see McGraw (2013).

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parents, siblings and other members of an extended kin network.10 Outside of family groups most communities have one or more seka (voluntary groups),11 associated with musical ensembles or performance genres, such as gong kebyar, angklung, and baleganjur musical ensembles and arja, gambuh and wayang wong traditional theatre forms. These seka usually meet to practice on a regular basis in the bale banjar (hamlet meeting pavillion), and will perform for community-wide ceremonial occasions such as a temple anniversary (odal­an), or may be ‘hired’ out by community members to play at familial ceremonies (weddings, tooth-filing, and mortuary rituals). They provide not only the performing arts accompaniment that is a feature of much Balinese ritual activity, but also an important means for the transmission of a community’s artistic heritage. These groups are also a source of local pride, particularly those that win competitions.12 An alternate learning opportunity is direct study with a noted performer, either from the community or from another village.13 For dance and dramatic forms the traditional method of instruction is one of imitation and hands-on manipulation to indicate the desired posture and intensity of each movement.14 If a student is learning a form such as arja sung drama the vocal line is taught at the same time. The goal is to not only to ‘imprint’ (mencetak) the teacher’s style onto the student’s body but also directly impart to him/her the spirit of the dance, to sensitize the student to taksu (divine inspiration).15 Sanggar studios are usually home-based, set up by an individual or sometimes a group. Unlike a seka, which generally draws its membership from a specific community, sanggar are open to anyone who wants to learn and can 10

11 12

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See “Learning to Perform” in Dibia and Balinger (2004, 14–17) for further discussion of the process in relation to dance and dramatic forms, “Music in Balinese Society” in Tenzer (1991, 103–111) for a specific discussion of musical learning, and Sedana (1993) for discussion of the training of a dalang (shadow puppeteer). Variously written as seka, sekaa, and sekaha. See Warren (1993, 7–8) for discussion of seka as a concept. See Ornstein (1971, 30–35) for a discussion of two seka gong from the neighbouring villages of Ubud and Peliatan in the early 1960s, and Sanger (1985) and (1986, Ch. 2) for a detailed discussion of two groups in Gianyar in the early 1980s, one in the village of Singapadu and the other in the village of Pejeng. See Sanger (1986, 318–319) for further discussion of this practice. For an excellent visual example of a young girl learning the role of the condong (comic maidservant) in legong kraton, see the video Bali Beyond the Postcard. Also Bateson and Mead (1942, 87–88) for a written and photographic description of the renowned kebyar dancer Mario teaching his signature dance kebyar duduk to a young boy. See Dibia and Ballinger (2004, 11) for a succinct discussion of taksu.

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pay any required fees. Consequently, students do not have to be members of the community or display any particular talent or aptitude. As classes may consist of a large number of students of varying ages and abilities, one-on-one instruction is difficult to provide, particularly at the early stages of learning. Many sanggar tari (dance studios) have adopted the more ‘analytic’ method used at the Performing Arts High School (smki) and the Indonesian Arts Institute (isi). In these institutional contexts instruction is usually in a group, with students imitating the teacher from behind or in a mirror, and may entail counting out of the beat. At smki and isi students are required to take a number of units to complete their degrees and are therefore expected to learn several different styles, explore contemporary dance techniques and take theory-based classes alongside practical ones. Students are thus more likely to learn a range of individual dance or music pieces rather than acquire broad skills such as dancing, singing, acting, storytelling and the ability to improvise within a dramatic genre, as was often the case for older performers. In other words students learn a ‘technique’ rather than an entire form. If they do develop expertise in other areas it is generally due to having done so outside of these institutional contexts. For most performers it is still not possible to make a living solely from performing. For some, it may be possible to devote much of their time to creative endeavours if they have a supportive spouse or other family members who obtain income by other means. For others, tourism has provided a source of income through regular engagement at hotels, tourist shows in local communities, and through private one-on-one tuition. As members of village and hamlet communities and often extended kin networks, performers are expected to provide their services for ceremonial or ritual purposes. Payment is usually of a prescribed type according to the kind of ceremony or ritual involved. The importance of the service lies in fulfilling social and ritual obligations (ayahan, ngaturang ayah) to the community or, in certain cases, to a patron. Although the direct remuneration may be minimal, participation sustains a wide social network; often outside an individual’s kin group, that can be called upon for assistance at a later time. Given the preponderance of performances in community and temple (pura) contexts the audiences are overwhelmingly community members and the group of people (pemaksan) responsible for the upkeep of specific temples. At events such as the Bali Arts Festival, the audience is more diverse and likely drawn from the greater urban area of Denpasar.16 The most popular shows, 16

See Laura Nozlopy’s PhD thesis (2001) for an extended discussion of the Festival.

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competitions between gong kebyar musical ensembles, attract the supporters of the two groups competing against each other, producing engaged and boisterous audiences. For classical theatrical forms such as gambuh and arja or contemporary drama and theatre, the audiences are generally aficionados who relish the opportunity to see a performance or the curious who use the opportunity of the Arts Festivals to sample something beyond their usual interests without too much investment of time or money. The informal context of many performances allows people to wander in and out as they please. Tourist performances in hotels are generally for paying guests, therefore, do not involve a local audience; those in community pavilions are also open to community members, but attract minor local interest as the shows are generally the same each performance. Performances held in conjunction with temple celebrations, particularly large scale ones, provide not only entertainment for the attending deities and congregation throughout the long days and nights of ritual activity, but often an opportunity to see noted performers or groups in a local context. Most performing venues are open pavilions (bale), sometimes with a raised performance area. Nowadays, these venues increasingly use sound systems and electric lights, although generally of a basic kind to provide illumination rather than for dramatic effect. Only in venues such as the Arts Centre, isi, hotels or during festivals is there likely to be a more elaborate staging of events. In general wayang kulit shadow puppet performances still utilize oil-filled lamps (blencong), though some puppeteers use electric lighting and computer generated video projection for artistic effect.

The Political Economy of the Performing Arts

The arts have always played a crucial role in ritual and cultural expression at all levels of society throughout Bali, ranging from relatively simple, unadorned forms in poor communities through to the grand and elaborate forms associated with noble families. While much artistic expression at the local level is devotional in intent, the arts have also provided a means of asserting status claims, and displaying and celebrating political power. Since independence artistic expression has been utilised in the service of wider political and social agenda, promoting nationalism and voicing the perspectives of competing political groups during the Sukarno period, and instilling the ideology of development (pembangunan) and specific government messages in the Soeharto era. In the period since Soeharto’s demise in 1998, the main focus has been local or internal, in keeping with the cultural concerns discussed earlier, given expression in the concept ajeg Bali.

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Political developments since 1998 have naturally been reflected in certain ways in the performing arts. The inbuilt capacity of dramatic forms such as wayang kulit, topeng dance drama, arja, and gambuh to convey social commentary, both through the choice of story and comments by the servants and clown characters, has provided much opportunity for reference to current events.17 See, for example, the incidents in which clown figures engaged with the figures and issues of the 2008 elections reported by Andrew McGraw (2009, 306). Likewise, in the context of regional autonomy and democratization of the lower levels of government, local political leaders have been able to boost their political capital by appearing interested in and supportive of the arts, through attending performances, holding a performance as part of a campaign event and sponsoring a local arts festival.18 Meanwhile there have been some examples over the past decade of artists in political protests, and taking up broad political issues in their work.19 Overall, however, the change of political regime has brought no substantial changes in the production or content of the performing arts. The great majority of activities taking place now are not dissimilar to those that occurred before 1998 in their focus on the needs of local adat and the tourism industry. The overt political use of the arts that occurred from the late 1950s through to 1965, as the pni and pki parties staged competing performances of janger20 and other forms has not re-emerged.21 Traumatic memories of the polarization and conflict of this time, and of the violent backlash later directed towards those seen to have been associated with the pki, presumably works against 17 18 19

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For discussion of the penasar servant characters as mediators and interpreters, see Picard (1996, 144–145). See McGraw’s comments on practices of this kind in the context of the 2008 election campaign (2009, 303–304). The most notable cases have been the protests against the anti-pornography laws in 2007 in which many performers were active participants, and the protests at isi against the re-election of Wayan Rai S as the Rector. Andrew McGraw (2009) provides an extended discussion of these and other examples of recent protest or critiques embedded within performances. He also mentions artists who have incorporated wider national concerns into their work, citing the example of a performance by I Gusti Putu Sudarta focusing on the theme of the future of Indonesian multiculturalism in the face of fundamentalist tendencies within Bali and elsewhere (314–315). Janger is a twentieth century genre in which male and female performers use call and response songs and combine dance and drama elements to tell a story or convey an educational message. Partai Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian Nationalist Party) and Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party).

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such politicization.22 Nor is the heavy-handed monopolization of performance to spread propaganda messages characteristic of the New Order government in evidence today. What is evident instead is a continuing engagement by many groups and individuals with preservation of traditional genres, along with an intense pride and belief in the performing arts as intrinsic to Balinese cultural identity and social transformation. The rigidity of established male and female roles in particular forms is another focus of attention. In other cases artistic practice enables the group to engage with wider contemporary issues, some of which are specific to Bali, others relate to Indonesia more generally. Examples of these practices are reviewed in the following section.

Groups, Individuals, Institutions and Events

Out of the thousands of groups associated with the performing arts, there are a number that stand out in their distinctive form, purpose, and orientation. They are also prominent in terms of volume of activity and media attention. Although all retain a Balinese ethos of working, some of the groups are firmly located in specific communities; others come together on an ad hoc basis; while one is more avowedly supra-Balinese. The Arti Foundation (Yayasan Arti) exemplifies the latter concept, Sanggar Çudamani, Sanggar Seni Kreativitas Bajra Sandhi and Kelompok Teater Kampung Seni Banyuning follow a community-based pattern, while Topeng Shakti, Luh Luwih are more akin to an all-star group of performers who come together for specific performances. These categorizations are not fixed, however, as there are overlaps between the groups in underlying rationale, organizational principles and orientation towards the wider community. Many are centred on key individuals who represent esteemed artists in their own right, such as Kadek Suardana, Dewa Putu Berata, Ida Wayan Granoka, Putu Satria Kusuma, Desak Nyoman Suarti, and Ni Nyoman Candri. There are other prominent performers who, although they may be associated with a group, tend to be known for their 22

Geoffery Robinson (1995) provides the most comprehensive discussion of the political economy of this period and the extent to which families and communities became polarized in support of the two major parties in Bali. Ruby Ornstein (1971) focuses more specifically on the performing arts highlighting the splits that occurred due to political affiliations and use of the arts for overtly political goals. See Putra (2008, 98–102) for discussion of the use of dramatic forms by the lkn (Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional or the Institute of National Culture), the cultural wing of the pni (Indonesian Nationalist Party), and its counterpart Lekra (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat) associated with the pki. See McGraw (2009, 305) for a similar assessment of this period’s legacy.

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i­ndividual works such as Wayan Dibia, Nyoman Sura, Made Sidia, Wayan Nardayana, and Cok Sawitri. All of these groups and individuals interact in some way with the main institutional players on the arts scene such as isi, the Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali – pkb) and the Bali Post Media Group. Groups The Arti Foundation (Yayasan Arti) was established in July 1998 as an organization committed to the conservation and development of Balinese performing arts through creating contemporary works and promoting the incorporation of traditional forms into new pieces. By utilising the institutional form of a foundation, yayasan, rather than a studio, sanggar, the four founders – theatre director and composer Kadek Suardana,23 writer and journalist Gde Aryantha Soethama, legal expert Dewa Gede Palguna and Swedish ex-patriot dancer and choreographer Ulf Gadd24 – were signalling their intention to act as advocates for the arts by organizing festivals, workshops, seminars and producing publications, rather than confining their efforts to training and performances, as is generally the case with a sanggar.25 This intention was clearly evident in the Foundation’s first project – the production of Gambuh Macbeth in 1999. The project involved both research and study of the revered but now rarely practiced dance drama gambuh, an artistically and interculturally innovative interpretation of the Macbeth story in gambuh form, and a showcase of the skills of still extant groups in an associated five-day gambuh Festival (Parade Gambuh).26 Other major performance pieces include Ritus Legong (Legong Rites) (2002), Tajen I (Cockfight l) (2002), Tajen II (Cockfight ll) (2006) and Sri Tanjung: The Scent of Innocence (2009). Alongside these productions, the Foundation has jointly sponsored a World Peace Festival and organized a parade by performers and community groups to the site of the first Bali bombings and performed a ritual barong dance as part of the cleansing ceremony held there. The key creative figure within the Foundation is Suardana who is assisted by a loosely structured core group for specific productions.27 Included among 23

24 25 26 27

As mentioned above, Kadek Suardana sadly died on 8 October, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The text, therefore, refers to the situation up to that point. For more information  see  http://www.thejakartapost.com/bali-daily/2013-10-10/Balinese-art -world-deeply-mourns-loss-kadek-saudana-html Accessed 26 January 2014. Ulf Gadd died in 2008. For more information about the Arti Foundation see their website at http://www .artifoundation.com/. See Hough (2011) for a discussion of the Gambuh Macbeth production and Arti’s artistic practice. In her 2007 article “Freelancers: Independent Professional Performers of Bali,” Laura Nozlopy provides an in-depth discussion of Suardana.

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this group of long-term members have been musicians Mari Nabishema, Ketut Lanus and Anak Agung Made Putra, along with dancer and choreographer Nyoman Sura.28 Many of the other musicians and dancers who have been associated with Arti since 1998 are graduates of stsi/isi, hence established performers. Suardana no longer actively performs himself in productions, but rather is the artistic director, dramaturge and composer. As he is particularly well connected to the arts elite in Bali and beyond, he is able to draw upon the talent and expertise of a wide group of people.29 Although he maintains overall artistic control, he willingly delegates creative responsibility to others to provide them with a nurturing environment in order to realize a production as a collaborative endeavour. For most of the last decade Arti has been based at the Arts Centre in Denpasar rather than within a banjar or community, allowing it greater leeway in its artistic pursuits, as there are no expectations of actively contributing to the local community. While the Arti Foundation was established as a yayasan rather than a sanggar and from the outset was conceived as a supra-local group, Sanggar Çudamani is firmly embedded within a specific community in Gianyar, a context which significantly influences its form and creative pursuits. On its website the group defines itself as “a professional company with a working philosophy much like a family temple or sanggar” whose members “positively contribute to the artistic, cultural and political life of their village.”30 Established in 1997 by brothers Dewa Putu Berata and Dewa Ketut Alit in their home community in Pengosekan, Ubud, the sanggar consists of some 31 core members of musicians and dancers from ‘different areas in Bali’, including American expatriate Emiko Saraswati Susilo who is married to Dewa Putu Berata.31 According to their website “members…work to achieve a balance of being active creative artists while also preserving ancient and rare forms of Balinese music and dance” through study of seldom performed “classic repertoire” along with composing new works. In keeping with its stated aim of contributing to the community, classes are held to teach local children and teenagers, and services provided in the form of ngayah at times of temple and community ceremonies. The group has received funding from the Ford Foundation to support its community outreach, toured 28 29

30 31

Mari Nabeshima, who was Kadek Suardana’s wife and creative partner from the late 1990s, died tragically on 4 July 2010. For some years before his death Suardana collaborated closely with Anak Agung Puspayoga, who was the mayor of Denpasar before running for the position of ViceGovernor of Bali in 2008. For more information about the group see their website at: www.cudamani.org. The two brothers have had a falling out in recent times according to McGraw (2009, 310).

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to Europe and the us, and collaborated with a number of international artists both in Bali and elsewhere. Berata and Alit, as composers/musicians, are the key creative figures, assisted by dancer Susilo and choreographer Nyoman Cerita. Being based in the home community of the two brothers, the group is necessarily expected to contribute to its ritual and artistic life. This is reflected in a relatively conventional style and approach, evident in the major performance piece the group toured to the us in 2005, titled Odalan Bali: An Offering of Music and Dance and based on the activities of a temple anniversary.32 The group is exceptionally well-polished, providing audiences with a program anchored in the existing repertoire that displays virtuosity and is easily consumed by local and foreign audiences. In contrast the style and creative output of the Sanggar Seni Maha Bajra Sandhi established in 1991 by Ida Wayan Oka Granoka Gong from Budakeling in Karangasem, East Bali, is neither conventional nor easily consumed. Granoka, who is from a Brahmana Buddha family, is a lecturer in Balinese literature at Udayana University and lives in Banjar Batukandik, Padangsambian in Denpasar. The group’s core members are Granoka’s wife and children along with the children of supporters, all of whom are trained in traditional dancing, singing, music, and yoga techniques. Journalist and writer Wayan Juniartha (2007) notes that although on the surface Bajra Sandhi appears to be a performing arts group, it is, on a more fundamental level, “an aesthetic and spiritual community that uses the arts as a medium to reach enlightenment.” Granoka has eschewed the dominance of the gong kebyar ensemble and style through creation of his own ensemble, the pakarana, and three ‘cosmic dances’: Baris Sankalpa, Barong Sandhi Reka and Legong Lalana Awaduta. According to Juniartha (2007) “performances are always conducted on a mandala that represents sacred space and offerings” with clear references to classical texts such as the Sutosama and Sanghyang Kamahayanikan. For Granoka a performance represents yogic practice directed towards ‘the enlightenment of man’. In his piece, Juniartha cites Granoka’s view that: “Greed has replaced purity, and the whole universe is in suffering because of that.” As a result, Juniartha (2007) contends, “Granoka aims at gradually taking the world back onto the path of purity…by introducing the purity of sound through Bajra Sandhi’s Pakarana ensemble, the purity of action through its cosmic dances, and the purity of thought through its yoga techniques.” 32

Information about the production can be found in the program notes for the performance in 2005 at www.calperformances.org/learn/program_notes/2004/pn_cudamani. pdf. See also Kathy Foley’s (2008) review of the production in the Asian Theatre Journal.

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The group is very much centred on Granoka’s aesthetic and religious philosophy, which he has put forward in a number of publications. Juniartha notes that many Balinese scholars find his writings “far beyond their comprehension” due to “his verbose sentences and esoteric vocabulary [in which he pairs] Sanskrit words with modern scientific terms and sacred mantras in one sentence.”33 He does, however, impress people as a very deep thinker who is committed to the achievement of a long-term, singular artistic project rather than engaging in a series of relatively discrete and disconnected ones. On several occasions the group has performed locally and internationally to mark significant occasions. For instance, in 2004 they were part of Cultural Festival associated with the Olympic Games in Athens, and in 2008 they staged the Grebeg Aksara Prasada procession from Bali to Java to mark the 100th anniversary of the National Awakening Day.34 According to a Jakarta Post report by Dicky Christanto (2008), the aim was to “strengthen spiritual ties between fellow Indonesians in the hope they could overcome differences and focus on developing the nation.” Christanto cites Granoka stating: “Right now, people argue over whether they hold greater truth than others and get easily involved in unnecessary conflicts. What a waste of energy. We must stop this before greediness consumes us as a nation.” Of the three groups discussed so far, Bajra Sandhi seems to be the most paradoxical, in as much as it is intensely parochial in style and harks back to a perceived pre-gong kebyar aesthetic, yet at the same time it is the most universal in its vision and unconcerned by public taste, tourism and artistic trends. The fourth group Sanggar/kelompok Teater Kampung Seni Banyuning is different again in a number of significant ways. It is based in Desa Banyuning, Singaraja, North Bali, is associated with a community rather than a particular individual and has a long involvement with contemporary theatre forms, most notably drama gong, a modernized, popularized style of Balinese theatre widely performed in the 1970s and 1980s. The group seemingly gained fresh impetus when Putu Satria Kusuma returned in 1998 after spending a number of years in Denpasar working with the modern theatre group Sanggar Putih headed by Kadek Suardana, before he established the Arti Foundation. By the time Putu returned home, drama gong was already waning in popularity throughout Bali, providing him with an opportunity to take the group down the path of contemporary theatre. Under Putu’s guidance the group has created productions drawing upon Balinese stories and performance traditions. 33 34

See, for instance, Memori Bajra Sandhi (1998) and Reinkarnasi Budaya (2007). There are several clips of the procession, which has been staged on other occasions, on Youtube. See, for instance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGBkhW62iaY.

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As a director he is committed to allowing group members the opportunity to perform without too much concern with looking beautiful or overly polished. Commentaries on these productions highlight their communicative potential, particularly because of their use of humour and plain (polos) aesthetic. Halim HD (2009), commenting on the group’s 2008/9 production Cupak Tanah (Cupak of the Land) stated that the group is: a community that uses a process akin to divine inspiration in their performance in keeping with their commitment to their artistic tradition. And when I asked them [about it, they replied] we’re from a rural community, this is what we have and this is what we believe in. Well, conviction! They talk of conviction. Meanwhile in Solo and many other cities, there’s a lot of theatre that isn’t about conviction but rather just about getting to perform.35 The group has toured their productions to Denpasar, Java and Jakarta and seems very much focussed on local audiences with no pretence to wider international engagement. The groups Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih are likewise more concerned with engaging Balinese audiences due to their performance of dance/drama genres dependent on Balinese languages and cultural knowledge. Rather than consisting of members based in a particular community they come from several communities, hence are akin to the all-star or bon style groups, usually associated with arja, the dance drama form topeng prembon and drama gong. Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih are unique in being comprised entirely of female members, who are committed to pushing the boundaries of accepted performance practice by venturing into hitherto male terrain. According to Catherine Diamond (2008, 244), Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih emerged out of one of the all-female gamelan groups established during the 1990s with government support to encourage and display the (limited) involvement of women in cultural activities. The key person behind the establishment of the group in 1993 along with its offshoots is Desak Nyoman Suarti, an accomplished dancer and jewellery designer. 35

…sebuah komunitas dengan proses yang mendekati ‘taksu’ di dalam pementasan mereka, sebagaimana tradisi yang mereka yakini di dalam dunia kesenian. Dan mereka, ketika saya tanya, kami datang dari desa, mas, inilah yang kami miliki dan yakini. Nah lo, keyakinan! Mereka bicara tentang keyakinan. Sementara di Solo dan banyak kota lainnya, ada begitu banyak teater bicara bukan tentang keyakinan tapi asal manggung, bagaimana action.

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As the first of the groups to form, Luh Luwih (1995) provided the sociality and ‘safety in numbers’ of a large group following the model of women’s gamelan, which had already gained a degree of acceptance by the wider public. Consisting of some thirty core members, both amateur and professional, and mainly middle-aged, the group was in a position to “set about performing the all-male genres one by one” – starting with wayang wong and calonarang dance dramas (2003) and kecak (2004) (Diamond 2008, 249). Apart from Suarti’s pivotal role, the key people involved were Ni Wayan Mudiari (music), Ni Wayan Sekariani (dance) and expatriate American Jero Made Rucina Ballinger (performer, publicist) (Diamond 2008; Ballinger 2005). Topeng Shakti (1998) was the smaller of the two groups consisting of arja performers Ni Nyoman Candri and Cokorda Istri Agung both from Singapadu in Gianyar and expatriate Italian Cristina Formaggia who was a long-term student and performer of gambuh and topeng (Diamond 2009, 244).36 The group’s intention was to break into the male domain of topeng or mask dancing. With their respective backgrounds in arja and gambuh, the three women were all familiar with the Panji stories used in these genres so were able to draw on those stories in place of the conventional topeng narratives which are based on dynastic chronicles (babad). Although all three are accomplished performers with the all-round singing, dancing, and acting skills required to dance topeng, they face the belief, in both their own perception and that of male performers, that women do not have the physical attributes of body type and vocal quality to convincingly dance male characters. A further barrier to widespread acceptance of Balinese women dancing topeng is the fact that it is generally performed in a ritual context, from which menstruating women are barred. Hence a menstruating woman performer would neither be able to wear a consecrated mask nor take part in ritual activity. In the case of the solo ritual form of masked dance, topeng pajegan, there is one specific mask known as Sidakarya that is considered not suitable for a woman to perform under any circumstance (Diamond 2008, 247). Carmencita Palermo (2005) contends that it is not lack of ability or the possibility of female performer’s unavailability that is really the issue but rather one of perception. In other words, Topeng Shakti’s activities could be the start of a process of change, but one which may take some time to gain wider acceptance due to the deeply engrained beliefs surrounding the ritual aspect of the genre, and entrenched male dominance. The determination of these exceptionally talented women to contest male dominance in established dance/drama genres, potentially opens the way for 36

Cristina Formaggia died in 2008, bringing to an end the original trio.

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new creative directions, provided those involved can move beyond the need to simply beat males at their own game. That it is to say, if they begin to develop, masks, characters and narratives that express a female perspective, rather than accepting the status quo as a creative dead-end, to be emulated but not overturned.37 Individuals While groups such as Arti, Bajra Sandi and Çudamani are closely associated with specific prominent individuals, there are several distinguished performers who pursue a more freelance style allowing them to develop their own solo projects or work with an existing group on a production, without the need to make an ongoing commitment to a particular group. One of the most respected is Wayan Dibia who comes from a family of arja performers, has a well-established reputation as a dancer and choreographer, and is a keen initiator of and participant in collaborative projects in Indonesia and internationally. He is also an accomplished academic with a doctorate from ucla and was a former director of stsi, Denpasar. In 2004 he established the Geria Olah Kreativitas Seni (geoks) in his home community of Singapadu in Gianyar. It is neither a foundation like Arti nor a sanggar like Çudamani or Bajra Sandi but rather a performing arts space that is used for activities including performances, seminars, discussions, lectures, and workshops. Although a fairly basic space, it offers local and visiting performers, artists and scholars a venue in a village renowned as a centre for the arts that is conveniently close both to Denpasar and the Ubud area. As Dibia has extensive local, national and international networks he is able to bring people together for specific projects. One of his ongoing passions is exploring the potentialities of arja as a dramatic medium. Most recently for the 2009 Bali Arts Festival he directed an arja production based on the novel by North Balinese writer AA Panji Tisna Sukreni Gadis Bali (Sukreni, A Balinese Girl) and drawing on past forms of arja. The production was significant and innovative in using a narrative outside the conventional arja repertoire of Panji stories and combining elements from the forms arja doyang and arja gaguntangan in which the performers wear everyday dress, use simple movements, and sit around in a group until it is their turn to perform. In the 1930s arja doyang troupes would travel around the country, performing unencumbered by the need for musical accompaniment and elaborate costumes. This performance format emphasizes acting and dialogue and the skills of the performers to differentiate characters 37

Diamond (2008, 264) forms a similar assessment regarding the potential of these developments.

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rather than other, more spectacular elements of arja in its contemporary form. For his production Dibia added a musical accompaniment based on the gaguntangan ensemble.38 Dibia is now part of the senior generation of performers who have experienced institutional arts education alongside the training they received in their families. Many of the most prominent performers in Bali have either studied at smki, the Secondary High School for the Arts or at its tertiary equivalent, isi. Among the younger generation of prominent graduates are Made Sidia, Wayan Nardayana and Nyoman Sura. Both Sidia and Nardayana are graduates of the shadow puppetry (pedalangan) program, while Sura is from the dance program. Sidia is the son of a noted performer, Dalang Made Sidja, from the village of Bona in Gianyar. From an early age he was exposed to the arts and to a range of influences associated with the various local and international visitors who have come to study or collaborate with his father. He is a graduate of both smki and stsi, where he has been a lecturer in pedalangan since the mid 1990s, and has established a reputation as an energetic dalang, dancer and choreographer, particularly of large-scale experimental shadow theatre and sendratari (modern dance drama) productions. He has worked with several international artists/theatre producers on collaborative projects both in Indonesia and elsewhere, and is perhaps best known for his wayang kontemporer (contemporary shadow theatre), which he has developed over the last decade or so, particularly in the context of his international collaborations.39 Although not the first dalang to introduce new technology into his performances, as this was already a trend at the time he was studying at stsi, Sidia seems to be the one most closely associated with introducing multiple changes, often extending the form into a theatre piece that requires extensive rehearsal and coordination of a large group of performers, musicians, and technical operators. In an article fellow Faculty member and dalang Nyoman Sedana (2005, 75) details the technical requirements of wayang kontemporer, which can include up to twenty performers, three narrators, and multiple puppeteers sitting on skateboards moving the puppets across the six metre wide screen. Images from daily life and film footage are projected onto the screen, along with coloured lighting effects. Dancers perform between the light projection source to create shadows on the screen, while the accompanying music is created using an eclectic mix of instruments and sounds. Sidia has developed a reputation for including 38 39

See Sumatika (2010) for details of the performance. See the Bali Post interview with Sidia by Ruscita (2005) for an insight into Sidia’s views on his artistic practice.

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social critique concerning issues such as environmental destruction, rapacious development and the 2002 Bali bombings. He was commissioned to produce a performance that could be used to assist in the psychological healing of those affected by the bombings, particularly children. The production, titled Wayang Dasa Nama Kerta (Ten Names of Peace), tells the story of the havoc caused by the god Siwa after he transformed himself into a demon and descended to earth, before reverting to his divine form at the end of the story. The relevance of the story to the Bali bombings lay in its message about learning to tame one’s inner demons and tolerate differences in others. In contrast to Sidia’s extensive use of technology, production of crossover theatre pieces and international collaborations, dalang Wayan Nardayana remains more firmly based in Bali and aligned to a familiar, albeit modified, wayang style. Moreover, in his stage persona as Cenk Blonk (pronounced: Ceng Blong), he is currently the most popular wayang kulit performer in Bali, able to draw crowds in the thousands. Many of these performances are subsequently released on vcd and excerpts uploaded to YouTube. According to Dewa Ketut Wicaksana (2010), Cenk Blonk’s wayang is considered to be a form of pop wayang (pop art within the wayang tradition) due to the fact it is light on message and heavy on humour. Unlike Sidia, Wayan Nardayana has not come from a performing family but rather developed his own interest in wayang while growing up in Desa Batan Nyuh, Belayu, Tabanan, where there happened to be four dalang. It was only much later in his thirties he entered the pedalangan program at isi to obtain ‘formal’ qualifications.40 He had, by that time, already established himself as dalang of note due to his use of humour and the addition of two Tabananspecific characters known as Nang Klenceng (Cenk) and Pan Eblong (Blonk), based on the traditional wayang punakawan (clown servants), which have become his mascots. It is through these additional characters, who speak in a noticeable Tabanan accent, that Nardayana comments on current social and political issues (Wicaksana 2010). Apart from Ceng and Blong, Nardayana has introduced several other signature features to his performance repertoire such as use of coloured lighting in place of an oil lamp, a semarpagulingan musical ensemble in place of the conventional gender wayang group, the addition of four female singers, and use of Javanese puppet movement techniques for the battle scenes (Wicaksana 2010). All of these features are underpinned by well-developed and accomplished vocal, narrative and ­puppetry skills. 40

See the interview with Nardayana in Musman (2003) for more information about his background and career as a dalang.

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Another graduate of stsi who has gone on to establish a reputation as a dancer and choreographer is Nyoman Sura from the village of Kesiman in Denpasar.41 As with Nardayana he does not come from a family of performers, but gained basic dance training by attending a sanggar tari while at primary school and continuing with dance as an extracurricular activity during high school. He initially had no intention of pursuing a career as a dancer and applied to stsi only after he failed to gain entry into Udayana University. During his undergraduate years he specialized in contemporary dance, in part as he did not consider himself to have the classical looks for kebyar style dances. After graduating in 1996 he worked at a hotel for a while, before applying to stsi for a faculty position in the Dance Program. In 1998 he joined the Arti Foundation and performed the part of Lady Macbeth in the production of Gambuh Macbeth.42 Although at first reluctant to take on this characterization, considering himself too dark skinned and tall to play a female, he soon made the role his own, bringing to it a dramatic quality that effectively conveyed both the ambition and fragility of Lady Macbeth. In the later Arti productions Tajen I and Tajen II he choreographed and performed the role of a fighting cock in battle against expatriate Swedish modern dancer/choreographer Ulf Gadd. Over the last ten years he has continued to create solo pieces often based around themes of identity, and participated in various Indonesian festivals of contemporary dance and choreography as well as several international collaborations. More recently he appeared in Garin Nugroho’s 2006 film Opera Jawa in the role of Sure.43 Among female performers working in a contemporary idiom, Cok Sawitri is surely the most prominent and controversial. Born into a satria (noble/warrior caste) family in Sideman, Karangasem she has been characterized as a writer, performance artist, and social activist who “challenges common (mis)perceptions and (mis)representations of women in history” (Diamond 2008, 255). Like Granoka, who also hails from East Bali, and with whom she has collaborated, there is a desire to ground her performance practice in Balinese religious philosophy and classical performance traditions. This grounding in Balinese tradition is evident in the name of the group she set up called Kelompok Tulus 41

42 43

Nyoman Sura also sadly died on 9 August 2013 from pancreatic cancer just two months before Suardana. The text, therefore, refers to the situation up to that time. With their untimely deaths the Balinese performing arts lost two of its more creative artists. For further information see http://www.thejakartapost.com/bali-daily/2013-09-18/remembering -nyoman-sura.html Accessed 26 January 2014. Interview with the author in 2003. For information about Opera Jawa see William’s (2007) interview with Nugroho.

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Ngayah, which Diamond glosses as “Group with Highest Dedication to Religious Service” (256). Sawitri’s best-known work has focused on reinterpretation of the Calonarang story, a historical legend about conflict between King Airlangga of East Java and a widow from the village of Dirah, which has particular resonance for Balinese due to the transformation of the widow into Rangda, the powerful witch who opposes the protective figure of the barong in the Calonarang dance drama performance. According to Diamond, Sawitri began the conceptualization of this work, Pembelaan Dirah (In Defence of Dirah) in 1990 “in response to President Suharto’s abuse of power and combined all her interests in gender, politics, history, and religion, fusing them into performance experiments grounded in the traditional Rangda story” (258). Diamond further contends that Sawitri’s reinterpretation …emphasizes Rangda as an incarnation of Durga, the Hindu Goddess of Death, who, instead of being a terror, is the female savior of the world, saptashi durga, “the mother of all things good.” Cok Sawitri questions the discrepancies between Rangda’s representation in texts and in performance: “There was an obvious contradiction between the traditional interpretation of the story and the actual use of the story in the purification rituals of Balinese Hindus. That was the thing that motivated me to explore the theme in the first place” (quoted in Juniartha 2004, 18). (2008, 258) Barbara Hatley in her discussion of Sawitri’s monologue presentation of Pembelaan Dirah in 1996, cites her as drawing parallels between the attack on Calon Arang and her followers by King Airlangga’s soldiers in tenth century Kediri and the contemporary attack on Megawati and the pdi in July of that year by forces loyal to the Suharto regime. For Sawitri both events symbolized “the suffering of the nation under brutal power holders” (2008, para 20): With tousled hair, black-rimmed eyes, and red-painted mouth, singing eerily, Cok's image is both menacing and mesmerising, as she recounts the story of the destruction of her hermitage by thousands of soldiers, yet her refusal to respond with violence to avoid further bloodshed, just as Megawati offered moral and legal challenges but no physical resistance towards the Suharto regime. The central focus of Cok Sawitri’s work, akin to that of Granoka and Bajra Sandi, lies in her engagement with the more esoteric side of Balinese arts,

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which she attempts to translate into a contemporary idiom of modern theatre. In her specific focus on reinterpretation of the Calon Arang story from a women’s perspective she doesn’t confine herself to working within existing genres as is the case with Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih in their projects, but rather uses the freedom of a non-traditional form to focus attention onto the story itself and the figure of the widow of Dirah. Moreover, she is able to make connections across time and space to wider socio-political events and pursue an activist agenda, albeit in a somewhat parochial manner. Diamond in her evaluation of Cok Sawitri and groups such as Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih contends that these women are part of “a quiet revolution” characterized by “women opening more doors for girls, and girls being more assertive in opening doors for themselves” through providing role models and facilitating opportunities to learn and to perform (2008, 261). Most of the groups and individuals discussed so far have at some stage utilized the opportunities and resources offered by the key institutions active in educating, promoting and presenting the arts to a Bali wide audience, namely the Institute for Indonesian Arts (isi, Denpasar), the Bali Arts Festival (pkb) and Bali tv. Institutions As the only tertiary level institution in Bali that specializes in the arts, isi attracts a range of students from all over Bali, including highly talented individuals and members of families of performers, as well as those who have little artistic or cultural capital but do have a desire to learn. Although beset by internal problems, most recently the controversy over the election and reappointment of Wayan Rai S as the Rector, the institution’s great strength lies in the opportunities it provides for students and Faculty to explore other genres and traditions.44 Moreover, during the last ten years or so there has been an increase in the number of Faculty members undertaking higher degree qualifications, mainly S2 (ma), but some S3 (PhD), at sister institutions outside of Bali, mainly in Solo and Yogya, thereby exposing them to new ideas and potentially assisting them to expand their creative repertoire in other directions free of the constraints invariably placed upon them in Bali. The Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali, pkb) has similarly worked within a set of expectations and routines that have made it difficult to move the festival beyond an annual repetition of previous years’ ones in terms of format,

44

For details of the dispute surrounding Rai’s re-appointment see McGraw (2009, 316–318).

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performances, and associated activities.45 It has up until now been the centrepiece of the provincial government’s involvement in the arts, requiring a considerable budget to facilitate participation by selected groups, commissioned performances and invited domestic and international performers. Much of the program is devoted to, and the overwhelming majority of audience members attracted by traditional genres, and the large-scale gong kebyar competitions and sendratari performances, held on the Ardha Chandra open stage. As a showpiece event, the pkb also provides a relatively prestigious performance opportunity for a range of genres and styles, from traditional forms rarely seen or heard today to contemporary creations, some of which would struggle to find an audience at another time. Like isi, the pkb potentially provides a supportive context for creative exploration and development. Yet it tends to be impeded by an overly bureaucratic organizational structure and vested interests who have seen the pkb as an annual financial windfall, most of which does not reach the performers themselves. It is only recently with the structural changes to governance introduced under regional autonomy that a window of opportunity has opened for introducing incremental changes, which may in time result in a more decisive reshaping of the Festival. Until those changes occur, the pkb will continue to be an immensely popular annual event devoted to the artistic status quo and directed towards internal consumption, without providing much creative leadership or a space for the avant-garde. Bali tv, as the newest of the institutional players, occupies a similar territory in the performing arts landscape. Avowedly parochial in programming, the tv station and the Bali Post Media Group, owners of both the station and the Bali Post daily newspaper, have been major beneficiaries of the New Order’s demise and the devolution of authority away from the centre, from Jakarta to Denpasar. Moreover, the association of the media group’s head, Satria Naradha, with the ajeg Bali discourse has placed the station in the forefront of asserting a normative view of Balinese culture and artistic expression. In contrast to the national broadcaster tvri, the station has expanded the amount of broadcast time available for local content, some of which is in Balinese, including in-house productions (news, documentaries, variety programs, public service messages), recorded cultural events (ceremonies and performances), and commissioned events. Festivals One final development to note that is linked perhaps to the implementation of regional autonomy is the emergence of more overtly regional festivals that aim 45

See Laura Nozlopy’s (2001) doctoral thesis for in-depth discussion of the Festival.

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to celebrate local diversity. Unlike the Bali Arts Festival, which is funded by the provincial government and meant to represent Bali as a whole, these recent additions are smaller, centred on the local area and generally sponsored by local hotels, businesses and tourism offices. As the target audience consists largely of tourists and ex-patriot residents, the majority of activities are ones likely to appeal to these groups, such as sporting events and competitions, food and fashion shows, western style music performances, along with a ‘cultural parade’ or some other activity providing local colour. The new festivals located in tourist areas such as Sanur, Kuta, Candi Dasa, and Nusa Dua tend to be aimed mainly at attracting tourists, rather than necessarily celebrating local pride. By contrast, the organizers of the Denpasar City Festival are clear in their intention to promote Denpasar as a kota kreatif berbasis budaya unggulan (creative city based on superior culture). The festival began in 2008 under the title of Gajah Mada Town Festival and centred on the recently renovated section of Jalan Gajah Mada, in the historic heart of the city. The renamed festival in 2009 was held over four days from December 28–31 culminating with the New Year’s Eve celebration titled Melepas Matahari ‘Releasing the Sun’. This latter event has been held annually since 2000 initiated and coordinated by Kadek Suardana. It consists of multiple performances on several stages, initially in and around Lapangan Puputan (Puputan Square) in the centre of city, though in later years spread out at other locations to minimize the number of people coming in to the square. The dovetailing of the Denpasar City Festival with the Melepas Matahari celebrations has ensured that there is a strong cultural core to the festival alongside the more overt business promotion activities in the zones dedicated to local food, handicrafts, textile fashion, and horticultural displays. Rather than as an afterthought, the traditional and modern performances and displays are intended to highlight the artistic heritage of the city and to convey the sense of cultural vibrancy. The active inclusion of non-ethnic Balinese groups, as an acknowledgement of the multicultural makeup of Denpasar’s population, has been a conscious focus of the Melepas Matahari festival from its beginnings which continues on in the Denpasar City festival. In 2004 the participation of ethnic Chinese residents gained media attention and praise for its perceived aim to “strengthen the connection between local culture and that of immigrants.” In 2009 the involvement of Muslim communities long-established in Denpasar was a particularly notable feature of the new, combined festival.46 46

The quoted comment is from a Bali Post article in December 2004 “Gemuruh Gong Beri Akan Lepas Matahari” (The thunderous sounds of the Gong Beri will greet the New Year). The piece cites Budi Argawa from the Chinese Association (Paguyuban Etnis Tinghoa)

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The development of the Melepas Matahari celebration and the Denpasar City Festival has come about due to a coalescence of interests, intense pride in locality, and a strong creative vision for promoting Denpasar, in particular between Kadek Suardana and aan Puspayoga, the former mayor. The combination of Suardana, the creative artist with a commitment to Denpasar, and Puspayoga, the Denpasar politician with a keen interest in the arts, has been essential to the realization of both events.

Concluding Comments

Although the performing arts scene in Bali has not altered in any major ways since 1998, creativity abounds, with no sense that the arts are struggling to survive. Overall, the implementation of regional autonomy and socio-political events in Bali such as the 2002 and 2005 bombings and the rise of ajeg Bali discourse have tended to reinforce the status quo in artistic production rather than result in big changes. Whilst most activity is inward looking, artistic production is enriched by the strength of tradition, the diversity of forms, and the perceived creative potential within them. Most Balinese who are involved in the performing arts are kept preoccupied by the need to fulfill community expectations to provide music, dancing and dramatic performances for ritual and ceremonial purposes, leaving little time or inclination to move beyond the existing repertoire. Tourism has reinforced the status quo through providing financial incentives to continue serving up tradition, albeit in a repackaged form amenable to external consumption. In recent times, there has been an imperative to preserve genres or specific forms perceived to be in decline, with most efforts directed towards providing life-support. Nevertheless ‘tradition’ is being drawn on, reinvigorated and fused with new influences in very creative ways by the groups and individuals reviewed. There are beginnings of potentially significant developments in certain areas such as celebrations of locality, including multi-ethnic definitions of local identity, as well as engagement with and interrogation of male–female relations. Overall the picture is one of rich creativity in the arts, with the dominant momentum one of preservation of tradition and ongoing celebration of a sense of self, which still affords some windows of expression of innovation and response to contemporary conditions. stating “the ideal is to have a representative space for diversity to become a solid wall protecting Balinese culture.” (“Idealnya memang ada ruang yang representatif agar keragaman bisa menguat menjadi benteng pemertahanan budaya Bali”).

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Ida Bagus, Mary. 2010. “Getting the monkey off your back: Women and the intensification of religious identities in post-bomb Bali, Indonesia” Women’s Studies International Forum 33(4): 402–411. Juniartha, Wayan. 2007 “Bajra Sandhi reminds world of path of purity, enlightenment.” The Jakarta Post (online). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.thejakartapost.com/ news/2007/07/12/bajra-sandhi-reminds-world-path-purity-enlightement.html. Lewis, Jeff and Belinda Lewis. 2009. Bali’s silent crisis: desire, tragedy, and transition. Plymouth: Lexington Books. MacRae, Graeme and Putra, I Nyoman Darma. 2007. “A New Theatre-State in Bali? Aristocracies, the Media and Cultural Revival in the 2005 Local Elections” Asian Studies Review, 31(2): 171–189. Martin, Gus. 2003. “Lawak Bali, Dadab-Kiul ke Petruk-Dolar.” (“Balinese Comedy: From Dadab-Kiul to Petruk Dolar”) Bali Post (Online) 11 May. Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.balipost.co.id/balipostcetaK/2003/5/11/n8.html. McGraw, Andrew Clay. 2009. “The Political Economy of The Performing Arts in Contemporary Bali” Indonesia and the Malay World, 37(109): 299–325. ——  2013. Radical Traditions: Reimagining Culture in Contemporary Balinese Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Musman, Asti. 2003. “I Wayan ‘Cenk Blonk’ Nardayana: Saya Ingin Wayang Jadi Hiburan Favorit.” (“I Wayan ‘Cenk Blonk’ Naradayana: I want Wayang to become the favourite entertainment.”) Bali Post (on-line). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www .balipost.co.id/balipostcetak/2003/6/29/pot1.html. Noszlopy, Laura. 2001.“The Bali Arts Festival – Pesta Kesenian Bali: culture, politics and the arts in contemporary Indonesia” Unpublished PhD thesis, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, University of East Anglia. ——  2007. “Freelancers: Independent Professional Performers of Bali” Indonesia and the Malay World 35(101): 141–152. Ornstein, Ruby. 1971. “Gamelan gong kebjar: the development of a Balinese musical tradition” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of California (Los Angeles). Palermo, Carmencita. 2005. “Crossing male boundaries: Confidence crisis for Bali’s women mask dancers” Inside Indonesia 83(July–Sept). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/crossing-male-boundaries. —— 2009. “Anak mula keto ‘It was always thus’: Women Making Progress, Encountering Limits in Characterising the Masks in Balinese Masked Dance-Drama” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue 19 (February). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue19/palermo.htm. Picard, Michel. 1996. Bali: cultural tourism and touristic culture. (English translation by Diana Darling). Singapore: Archipelago Press. Putra, I Nyoman Darma. 2008. “Modern Performing Arts as a Reflection of Changing Balinese Identity” Indonesia and the Malay World 36 (104): 87–114.

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Reuter, Thomas. 2009. “Globalization and Local Identities: The Rise of New Ethnic and Religious Movements in Post-Suharto Indonesia” Asian Journal of Social Science 37(6): 857–887. Robinson, Geoffrey. 1995. The dark side of paradise: political violence in Bali. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ruscita, Mas, and Budarsana. 2005. “I Made Sidia, ssp: Kekayaan Bali Jangan Dibabat Habis.” (“I Made Sidia, ssp: Don’t destroy Bali’s wealth.”) Bali Post (on-line) 2 October. Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.balipost.co.id/balipostcetak/2005/10/2/potret.html. Sanger, Annette. 1985. “Music, dance, and social organization in two Balinese villages” Indonesia Circle 37(June): 45–62. —— 1986. “The Role of Music and Dance in the Social and Cultural Life of Two Balinese Villages” Unpublished PhD. Thesis, the Queen’s University of Belfast. Schulte Nordholt, Henk. 2007. Bali an Open Fortress, 1995–2005: Regional Autonomy, Electoral Democracy and Entrenched Identities. Singapore: nus Press. Sedana, I Nyoman. 1993. “The Education of a Dalang” (Edited by Kathy Foley) Asian Theatre Journal 10(1): 81–100. —— 2005. “Theatre in a Time of Terrorism: Renewing Natural Harmony after the Bali Bombing via Wayang Kontemporer” Asian Theatre Journal 22(1): 73–86. Sumatika, I Wayan. 2010. “Dramatari Arja: Mencoba Bangkit dari ‘Tidur Lelap’” (“Arja: Attempting to wake it from ‘deep slumber’”) Bali Post (online). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.balipost.co.id/mediadetail.php?module=detailberitaminggu&ki d=15&id=37426. Tenzer, Michael. 1991. Balinese music. Berkeley and Singapore: Periplus Eds. Warren, Carol. 1993. Adat and Dinas: Balinese communities in the Indonesian state. Kuala Lumpur; New York: Oxford University Press. —— 1998. “Tanah Lot: the cultural and environmental politics of resort development in Bali.” In The politics of environment in Southeast Asia: resources and resistance, edited by Phillip Hirsch and Carol Warren. London; New York: Routledge. —— 2005. “Community mapping, local planning and alternative land use strategies in Bali” Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1): 29–41. Wicaksana, I Dewa Ketut, 2010 “Wayang Kulit Bali: Masa Kini dan Masa Datang” (“Balinese Wayang Kulit: the present and the future”). Accessed 26 January 2014. http://blog.isidps.ac.id/dkwicaksana/. Williams, Lisa. 2007. “Interview with Garin Nugroho” in Electric Sheep 31 August. Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2007/ 08/31/interview-with-garin-nugroho/. Yuga, Ibed Surgana. 2004 “Bagaimana Perkaya Kreativitas Teater Modern dengan Kearifan Budaya Bali?” (“How to enrich the creativity of modern theatre through Balinese cultural genius?”) Bali Post. Accessed 26 January 2014. http://www .balipost.co.id/BaliPostcetak/2004/2/29/g4.html.

chapter 7

The Sundanese-language Drama Festival Celebrating Local Cultural Identity in West Java1 Neneng Lahpan and Wawan Sofwan2 The stage erupts in a cacophony of voices and movement, as children run around setting up musical instruments in full view of the audience. There are drums of various sizes, a set of large suspended gongs as well as a few smaller horizontal gongs and even a guitar. The uproar is all designed to make the performance space look like a hive of activity. Unlike the usual practice of setting up the stage before the performance begins, the sight of the children organizing the props here functions as the play’s opening scene. Once everything is ready and the instruments are properly arranged, the musical accompaniment begins. The stage fills with the alluring sound of interlocking gongs, as the children bring the instruments to life. It’s the opening music for a performance of the story Randu Jalaprang by Tatang Sumarsono. The children who staged this performance were from Teater Bolon, a children’s theatre group from Tasikmalaya, West Java. As the only children’s theatre group based outside Bandung to take part in the 2008 Sundanese-language Drama Festival (fdbs, Festival Drama Basa Sunda), Teater Bolon attracted a good deal of interest, not least because it was competing with more established theatre groups and even professional companies. Its performance of Randu Jalaprang was notable for a number of reasons. Firstly, the story itself was more complex than many of the other stories performed during the festival. Its setting was the Bubat War from thirteenth-century Sundanese history, a controversial event that cannot be explored and dramatized on stage as freely as other stories with a fictional background. In this case, the development of characters in the play demanded some historical knowledge. The performance involved dialogues in a form of Sundanese that differs from everyday language,

1  We wish to thank Prof Barbara Hatley for her input, criticism and suggestions during the course of an intensive and interesting series of email discussions regarding revisions to this chapter. Part of the discussion in the chapter was previously included in an article in the newspaper Kompas. See Lahpan (2008). 2 As explained in the Introduction, Wawan Sofwan discussed this topic in his oral presentation at the workshop on which this book is based, while Neneng Lahpan took responsibility for the writing of the chapter. Neneng is therefore named as first author.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_009

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and the epic-like story required a large cast and the staging of epic scenes such as battles between opposing armies. The same was true of the musical accompaniment and the stage design. The children were not only able to play the range of characters the story demanded, they also showed great skill illustrating the progression of the narrative with the traditional musical instruments that formed part of the stage design. Moreover, these instruments not only supplied the musical accompaniment, but also functioned in a very creative way as the props needed to create the royal court setting.3 It was precisely these aspects of the performance that elicited admiration from sections of the audience. The group succeeded in staging a highly energetic performance that not only entertained the audience but contained a significant amount of information about Sundanese history and culture. In this way, the group illustrated an important function of art. They staged a play that highlighted the aesthetic aspects of drama and stagecraft and the entertainment aspect of theatrical performance, while at the same time it contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about the Sundanese cultural heritage, which has been a subject of concern in some circles in recent years. The preservation of the Sundanese musical heritage and an understanding of the local values enshrined in Sundanese history, together with the maintenance of the Sundanese language, all formed part of Teater Bolon’s performance. Since the inception of the fdbs in 1990 as a bi-annual event, the qualities Teater Bolon brought to this performance have been matched by many other contributions to the festival, mainly by young people. The festival, organized by the group Teater Sunda Kiwari, has seen significant development in recent years. In 2008, it staged performances by 74 contributors, and in 2010 the number of contributors rose to 79. Since then, the festival has become an annual event, with high school student groups performing in odd-numbered years (46 student groups took part in 2011) and open groups performing in festivals in even-numbered years (56 open groups took part in 2012). As a regionally-based cultural event, the festival illustrates some important aspects of Indonesia’s current socio-political dynamics. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the festival has drawn a huge response from children and young people, who make up the overwhelming majority of performers and spectators. Given the fact that young people of this generation are often seen as abandoning their regional linguistic and cultural heritage, the success of the Kiwari festival in 3 In a scene depicting formal deliberations among members of the court, the drums were used as chairs, while in another scene they were piled on top of one another to form the gateway to the palace. In the scene changes, the transition from musical instrument to stage props was handled skillfully and quickly by the child performers.

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maintaining and transmitting Sundanese language and culture among the young is remarkable. It connects very interestingly with the particular history of Sundanese language and culture in the New Order period, and the process of regional linguistic cultural revival made possible by the new social and political conditions of the post-Reform era.

Performance and Local Identity

Viewed in historical perspective, the festival can be seen as part of an awakening interest in Sundanese language and culture that has been in train since the introduction of regional autonomy laws in 1998. In West Java, the maintenance of the regional language, Sundanese, has long been seen as an important means of preserving regional identity, especially in a location that is subject to strong influence from the national capital Jakarta to the West and the numerically-dominant Javanese population to the East (Moriyama 2012, 92). During the New Order period, the use of regional languages ran up against the desire of the central government to preserve the integrity of the national language. This meant that the image of Sundanese declined in the public eye, and Indonesian became the accepted linguistic medium among all sections of the urban community, even supplanting the use of Sundanese in communication between parents and children in the home (Moriyama 2012, 83). Subsequently, with the socio-political transformations of the post-New Order years, rigid control from the centre was replaced by a system of local autonomy, and the issue of linguistic and cultural identity attracted widespread attention. A number of regulations designed to raise the status of Sundanese were introduced, making it a second official language in the regional bureaucracy and a compulsory subject in schools. Outside the bureaucracy, private bodies also began to promote an interest in Sundanese language and culture. Seminars and discussions were held, prizes for writing in Sundanese were instituted, and the publication of written material in Sundanese was given encouragement and support. In this context, the festival illustrates very interestingly how the institutional rhetoric and activity promoting a revival of Sundanese culture is being put into practice, especially among young people. The relationships between performance activities and the politics of local cultural identity in Bandung and other West Javanese cities are significant and interesting topics for ­discussion.4 However this chapter will focus more particularly on the activities 4 These activities encompass the Sundanese puppet theatre, wayang golek, and other forms of traditional performance, as well as the modern theatre associated with the Bandung College

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of the fdbs and the theatre group responsible for organizing it, Teater Sunda Kiwari. After first examining some of the main goals of the Sundanese cultural revival and its sponsors, the discussion will show how the festival and its organizers can be understood within this broader socio-cultural-political framework.

The Revitalisation of Sundanese Language and Literature

In the early years of the twenty-first century the issue of renewal of Sundanese culture came to dominate the thinking of a number of prominent West Javanese cultural figures. Among other initiatives, it was the motivation for the holding of the first International Conference on Sundanese Culture (kibs, Konferensi Internasional Budaya Sunda) in August 2001, an international forum for the discussion of matters relating to the future of Sundanese culture. Alwasilah (2006, 25–26) suggests that the conference had at least two main objectives, firstly to promote a comprehensive understanding of Sundanese culture among the Sundanese people, especially the younger generation, and secondly, to formulate a strategy for bequeathing the Sundanese cultural heritage to that generation. The success of this strategy was seen as being dependent on the involvement of a wide range of social actors, from artists and scientists in all fields, to educators, religious figures, community leaders, journalists, bureaucrats. As part of its policy of cultural preservation, in 2003 the West Javanese regional government also responded to this objective by issuing three new Regional Regulations: Regional Regulation No. 5/2003 on the preservation of Sundanese language and literature, No. 6 on maintenance of the arts and No. 7 on the management of the archaeological heritage, the study of history, and traditional values and museums, all three of which were signed into operation by the Governor of West Java on 13 January 2003 (Alwasilah 2006, 59). Nevertheless, at the time of writing, these regulations have failed to make a tangible contribution to actions in support of the preservation of local culture. For example, the implementation of the new school curriculum has not succeeded in arousing student enthusiasm for the study of Sundanese culture and its language. Because Sundanese language is taught more through linguisticverbal methods rather than a cognitive approach (Alwasilah 2006, 79), many

of the Indonesian Arts (stsi) and performed by independent theatre groups, along with dance groups, video arts communities and many similar initiatives.

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students, especially in urban areas like Bandung, come to see Sundanese as a subject that is too difficult and uninteresting. Sundanese culture specialists often express their concern at the lack of interest in Sundanese language among present-day youth. They point to the declining use of Sundanese as a language of communication among young people, especially in urban areas, both inside and outside the home. But they also bemoan the incapacity of Sundanese itself to properly absorb and apply advances in information technology, especially at the scientific level (see Alwasilah 2006, 36). Numerous articles on these issues have been published in local media, such as the Bandung newspaper Pikiran Rakyat and Sundanese language magazines Mangle and Cupumanik: the national daily The Jakarta Post has also covered this topic several times (2001, Suwarni 2005) and collected newspaper commentaries have appeared in Mahatma ed. (2005) and Alwasilah (2006). Various seminars and conferences have focused on the contemporary state of Sundanese language and culture, along with a limited number of scholarly publications – Rosidi, Ekadjati and Alwasilah ed. (2006), Rosidi (2010) and Moriyama (2012). In these circumstances the fdbs acquires added significance and relevance. It goes beyond the specific issues of performance arts to contribute to a range of other discourses in areas like education, culture, language and community. As the following section on the origins and development of the festival will indicate, it is a reflection of the concern with regional cultural identity that has dominated cultural life in West Java in the post-Reform era.

Teater Sunda Kiwari and the Sundanese-Language Drama Festival in Historical Perspective

The success of the fdbs owes much to the role of its organizer, Teater Sunda Kiwari, tsk, which celebrated its 37th anniversary on 16 January 2012. A 37-year existence is remarkable for an Indonesian theatre company, and the group has undergone many changes in the course of its history. It was founded in Bandung in 1975 by the theatre practitioner R. Dadi P. Danusubrata and the late literary/cultural figure R. Hidayat Suryalaga, who worked together to establish its place in the history of modern Sundanese theatre. The establishment of the group originated in a simple desire on the part of Dadi to nurture the interests of young people in a particular neighbourhood of the Karapitan district of Bandung. Dadi took the idea of setting up a theatre group to Hidayat, the head of the local citizens’ association (rw), who was known for his detailed knowledge of the Sundanese heritage. With Hidayat’s

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encouragement, Dadi formed a group to train the young people of his neighbourhood in performance skills, so that they could take part in a program of activities termed “Agustusan,” staged annually in celebration of Indonesian Independence Day, 17 August. At Hidayat’s suggestion, the group performed in Sundanese, rather than the national language, Indonesian. At first, Dadi called the group Teater Ayeuna, but this was later changed to Teater Kiwari, again at Hidayat’s suggestion.5 The name pointed to the group’s identity as a modern theatre group using the regional language, Sundanese, which was subsequently enshrined in a clause in the group’s constitution which declared that its language of performance would be exclusively Sundanese. The group’s first creative undertaking was a play entitled Pupuh Mijil Pada 82 (Pupuh Mijil Verse 82)6 an adaptation of a work by Haji Hasan Mustapa, a prominent Sundanese literary figure of the early twentieth century. The script was the work of Hidayat, who also directed the first performance of the play on the premises of the local neighbourhood association. There was a suggestion that it might next be performed at the Rumentang Siang theatre in Bandung, but this proposal was rejected by the theatre’s management.7 This rejection caused Hidayat to abandon his direct involvement in performance activities, although he continued to work for the group behind the scenes. As a result, Dadi Danusubrata became the group’s leader and director, a role he has continued to play up until the present time.8 Meanwhile Dadi continued to stage 5 Interview with Dadi R. Danusubrata 10 February 2012. In Sundanese, kiwari and ayeuna both mean ‘now’, ‘the present’, while kiwari can also mean ‘modern’. I am grateful to Mamat Sasmita (Wa Sas) of the House of Sundanese Books (Rumah Baca Buku Sunda), who assisted with interviews and the collection of additional data. 6 Pupuh is a type of metre used in singing when reciting poems (tembang) (Hardjadibrata 2003, 684). In Sundanese tembang, there are 17 types of pupuh, and pupuh mijil is one of them. 7 Rumentang Siang was a prestigious venue at that time. In contrast to its present condition, during the 1970s and 80s it attracted the most popular theatre groups and actors of the time, such as Putu Wijaya, Rendra and Remy Sylado. This meant that in order to appear on its stage, tsk had to pass a rigorous selection procedure that only admitted the best quality works. Over the course of time, however, Rumentang Siang became tsk’s main venue and home base, the organizing centre for the fdbs. 8 Hidayat’s role behind the scenes as a source of scripts for performance was highly significant. He wrote around 30 scripts for the group, including Abah Tuladan, Runtag, Lawe Rontek, Carem, Statsion Para Arwah, Cempor, Tambang Raja Wales, Sanghiyang Tapak, Punden Punden Nu Rarempag, Bon Manusa Bin, Badawang, Tatangga, Nini Uti Nimu Cepuk, Mad Toing Tiodedad, Kukurayeun, Demang Dingkeung, Maing Baing Nyiar Gawe, Enggah Enggih, as well as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Sundanese. Other writers also

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performances for the neighbourhood association, such as a Sundaneselanguage version of Putu Wijaya’s play, Aduh (Gee!). With the support of Hidayat’s idealism and strong Sundanese values, tsk came to acquire its present form as a well-established Sundanese theatre group.9 In a number of its performances, tsk has combined elements of traditional Sundanese theatre with modern theatre. One example is Harewos Goib (Magical Whisper), which was first performed on 30 August 2005 and then again on 23 February 2011. Its traditional elements were drawn from the Sundanese dramatic form longser,10 including a three-wick oil lamp placed in the middle of the stage, an overture performed by percussion instruments, a dancing girl (ronggeng) and traditional singing during scene changes. Also traditional in character were dialogue between the actors and musicians and spontaneous interaction with members of the audience. On the other hand, the performance used modern theatre techniques like a written script, lighting and rehearsed blocking of the actors’ movements on stage (Maulana 2005). The interaction between performers and the audience is a distinctive feature of the traditional-modern blend that tsk has highlighted in its performances. In forms such as longser, this interaction can be very lively, especially as the performance normally takes place in an open area, not in a theatre building. The situation is quite unlike the procedure adopted in modern theatre contexts, in which the audience is expected to observe rules of behaviour and not disrupt the performance by the use of mobile phones, for example. In a number of tks performances and other events we have witnessed during the fdbs where the audience is generally made up of schoolchildren, these conventions are seldom observed. When something interesting happens on stage, the audience doesn’t hesitate to whistle and applaud. No attempt is made to discourage this kind of behaviour, because it is seen as part of the audience’s way of learning to express its appreciation of the performance and its enjoyment of the intimate and uninhibited atmosphere of the traditional Sundanese performance culture.

9 10

contributed scripts, including Yoseph Iskandar, who wrote a number of scripts including Runtagna Pajajaran, Tanjeur Pajajaran, Silihwangi Maha Raja Pajajaran Pasunda Bubat, Pupuhun Sirnarasa, Dalem Cuke, Harewos Goib, Cula Badak. Later writers who produced scripts were Wahyu Wibisana with Tukang Asahan and Tonggeret Banen, Saini km with Prabu Anom Tarus Bawa, Nunu Nazarudin Ashar with Blor, Moh. Ambri with Si Kabayan Jadi Dukun and Dadi himself with Duit. Interview with Dadi R. Danusubrata, 10 February 2012. For more information about longser, Kurnia and Nalan ed. (2003, 94–99).

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fdbs: Regeneration in Transition

While the Indonesian theatre world in the 1990s was preoccupied with a series of controversies and other notable events (Massardi 2003), tsk was pursuing its goal of establishing regional theatre as a new tradition of Indonesian performance practice. According to Dadi Danusubrata, the aim was to make theatre in Sundanese more prominent than Indonesian-language drama in every region of West Java. In 1990, it was the pursuit of this goal that led to the foundation of the fdbs, a drama festival that by 2010 had been held bi-annually on 11 separate occasions; since then it has become an annual event, with festivals specifically for students and open festivals held in alternate years.11 A favourable response to the festival by the Sundanese community has meant that it has been able to grow from year to year, both in terms of the number of participants and the duration of the festival itself. As the following table indicates, the expansion has been particularly marked in the years since 2002: As the data indicates, the high point of the festival came in 2008, when the number of groups expanded by 30 per cent and the festival ran for a full 20 No

Festival

Duration

Participants

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

fdbs i fdbs ii fdbs iii fdbs iv fdbs v fdbs vi fdbs vii fdbs viii fdbs ix fdbs x fbds xi fdbs (Student) fbds xii (Open)

21–24 February 1990 (4 days) 3–8 August 1992 (6 days) 18–24 July 1994 (7 days) 8–16 August 1996 (9 days) 4–10 May 1998 (7 days) 17–23 January 2000 (7 days) 25 February –5 March 2002 (9 days) 16–23 February 2004 (8 days) 13–24 February 2006 (12 days) 11 February–1 March 2008 (20 days) 2–30 March 2010 (29 days) 7–23 February 2011 (17 days) 12 March–1 April 2012 (20 days)

8 groups 19 groups 19 groups 24 groups 24 groups 29 groups 33 groups 40 groups 52 groups 74 groups 79 groups 47 groups 56 groups

Teater Sunda Kiwari (2014)

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Electronic communication with Dadi R. Danusubrata, 18–19 March 2012.

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days. In recognition of that achievement, fdbs X received an award from the Indonesian Museum of Records (muri, Museum Rekor Indonesia) for the longest regional language drama festival ever held in Indonesia, with an average of four performances each day over 20 days (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2008). This was the first time an event like this had been witnessed in any part of Indonesia, and it had been staged not by an arts institute or similar organization but a local theatre group.(Figures 7.1 and 7.2) In the same year, 2008, Dadi Danusubrata’s work with tsk and the fdbs was recognised by a service award in the Rancagé honours for contributions to Sundanese culture, initiated by the literary and cultural figure, Ajip Rosidi. Dadi’s citation for the award noted that his work with tsk had played a part in bringing new groups into existence, and in developing Sundanese-language dramatic works. These kinds of awards are the result of ongoing effort by all the theatre activists associated with fdbs and tsk. The quality of the festival and its technical components have shown consistent improvement, as a result of a process of evaluation which is carried out from one festival to another. The festival held from 12 March to 1 April 2012 attracted 56 participants. The original target for this event was 100 participants, but this was modified

Figure 7.1  Members of the winning group, 10th Festival Drama Bahasa Sunda, Bandung, February 2008 Photo: Dadan Sutisna

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Figure 7.2  Actors from the group Teater Bolon backstage, 10th Festival Drama Bahasa Sunda, Bandung, February, 2008 Photo: Rumah Baca Buku Sunda collection (Wa Sas)

by the inauguration of the student drama festival in 2011, which separated out the large number of student groups that had taken part in previous festivals. Another notable feature of the 2012 festival was the increase in areas of West Java represented in the performers’ origins. While previous festivals were dominated by theatre groups from Priangan, the Sundanese heartland districts like Bandung, Tasikmalaya and Garut, the 2012 festival also attracted groups from the periphery, such as those from Indramayu, Kawarang and Kuningan. This was a very interesting development, because there is a longestablished discourse that distinguishes between the ‘refined’ Sundanese of the Priangan region and its ‘coarse’ variants in the periphery. By involving groups from all these regions, the fdbs succeeded in breaking out of the centre-periphery binary, which knowingly or not, and like it or not, forms part of the consciousness of the Sundanese people themselves. It had the effect of enriching the nature of the Sundanese heritage that was on display during the 2012 festival. The diversity of Sundanese culture was particularly prominent on the sixth  day of this festival, when participants from Indramayu appeared in a

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­erformance in their local language known as Dermayonan (Indramayu p Javanese), and accompanied by the traditional music of Indramayu and Cirebon called tarling. According to information supplied by the festival’s organizing committee, the group fully translated the Sundanese language script they had chosen into their local language. This was an indication of the group’s determination to showcase the distinctive features of their own regional language and culture. Not content with simply presenting a script already written in Sundanese, they chose to adapt it to the regional language form spoken in their own district. Moreover, even though the festival bore the description ‘Sundanese-language’, not ‘regional language’, the committee chose to give the group free rein, a decision that resulted in an enthusiastic response to the ‘difference’ embodied in the group’s contribution from the committee itself, the audience and the judges. It was a mark of the maturity of the fdbs in its approach to the variety of local theatre traditions in West Java. In Dadi’s view, it drew attention to the need for an All-Indonesia Regionallanguage Drama Festival.12 The organization of the first student drama festival in 2011 (fdbsp, Festival Drama Bahasa Sunda Pelajar) was a response to criticism that by combining all categories of participants into one, the festival organizers had introduced inequalities in the judging, the selection of scripts and other aspects of the proceedings. During the staging of the fdbsp from 7–23 February 2011, tsk worked jointly with the Bandung newspaper Pikiran Rakyat and with the support of the West Java regional government’s Office of Culture and Tourism (Disbudpar/Dinas Kebudayaan dan Pariwisata). Forty-six theatre groups from junior and senior high schools in 15 districts and cities in the provinces of West Java and Banten took part.13 When the number of participants in this festival was added to the 56 groups that took part in the 2012 open festival, the total easily met the organizing committee’s original target of 100 groups. The fdbs has always been an almost completely independent event. Government financial support has been nominal at best; for example, in 2008 the West Java provincial government contributed Rp. 14 million out of a total budget of Rp. 110 million. The remainder of its finances came from a band of loyal supporters and an income of Rp. 80 million from ticket sales, with the 12

13

Electronic communication with Dadi Danusubrata, 18–19 March 2012. The competing scripts in the 2012 festival were Satru by Nunu Nazarudin, Nagara Angar by Dadan Sutisna, Kawin Ucing by Arthur S. Nalan and Pajaratan Cinta by Dhipa Galuh Purba. The plays presented by participants in this festival were Si Kabayan Jadi Dukun by Mohamad Ambri, Nu Jadi Korban by H.R. Hidayat Suryalaga, Seksa by Dhipa Galuh Purba and Munafek by Rosyid E. Abby.

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shortfall made up by the tsk leader, Dadi Danusubrata, and like-minded colleagues.14 The 2011 student festival should actually have been the first time a large scale performance event received financial support directly from the provincial government’s budget. In its proposal, the organizing committee had indicated that funding needed to stage the event was in the order of Rp. 180 million. This figure was initially approved, but later, the funds for the festival were dropped from the West Java regional government budget. The committee was determined to go ahead with the festival regardless. Grievances among artists and other concerned parties continued to grow, finally resulting in a ‘declaration of war’ against the injustice being perpetrated on the festival by the government and its Office of Culture and Tourism. Lobbying began on a number of fronts, and the media, especially the Bandung newspaper Pikiran Rakyat, began to draw public attention to the issue. With social networking on sites like Facebook and other ‘guerrilla’ activities this intervention finally succeeded in ensuring that the festival would go ahead. After a lot of effort on the part of all those involved, not just in raising financial support, the West Java Governor Ahmad Heryawan joined in the campaign to save the festival, agreeing to open the event in the Rumentang Siang theatre. The total amount of funding raised was Rp. 60 million from the Office of Culture and Tourism, Rp. 50 million from the Provincial Government, and Rp. 10 million from the City of Bandung Office of Tourism and Culture. The remainder was made up from the loyal support of audiences and philanthropists for the development of Sundanese art and culture.

fdbs and the Writing of Sundanese-Language Drama Scripts

It is generally acknowledged that one of the main impediments to the development of regional theatre in Indonesia is the poverty of written scripts in regional languages. Without the regular supply of scripts by writers like Hidayat Suryalaga and Yosep Iskandar, it is likely that tsk would itself have had 14

The tension between devotion to local culture and anxiety about the prospects for its preservation, due to a lack of interest and support from relevant authorities, was reflected in a comment by the patron of the children’s group Teater Bolon, at the conclusion of the performance described in the opening to this chapter. After expressing the hope that interest would be forthcoming to support these kinds of activities, the group’s patron remarked with a degree of sarcasm, “If some foreign country would like to take the group, I’ll hand them over, as long as it means their future is assured” (Malah mun aya ti nagri deungeun nu rek menta ieu kelompok, rek dibikeun, asal maranehna dijamin).

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d­ ifficulty surviving. In the early years of the fdbs, it was the scripts produced by these writers that enabled the festival’s organizing committee to provide the participating groups with material for performance. As time went by, the need to build up a stockpile of scripts became increasingly urgent, and it was for that reason that beginning with the tenth festival in 2008, the fdbs came to incorporate a script writing competition (Lomba Penulisan Naskah Drama Sunda) in its program of activities. This competition is held before the fdbs, with the participating groups invited to select one of the scripts from the competition for their performance (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2009). In 2010, the eleventh festival also added a workshop on creative directing for aspiring theatre directors. The script writing competition is held in collaboration with the Sundanese Literature Forum (ppss, Paguyuban Panglawungan Sastra Sunda), while the workshop involves the participation of the Indonesian College of the Arts (stsi, Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) in Bandung, an indication that the festival is part of a broadly-based movement for the preservation of Sundanese language and culture. The script-writing competition, in particular, was like a breath of fresh air for Sundanese theatre practitioners struggling to keep regional language theatre alive. A number of talented playwrights have emerged from the competitions sponsored by the fdbs. In the tenth festival in 2008, the competition elicited four entries, to which the organizing committee added another two scripts, making a total of six competing scripts in all.15 In 2010, the five winning scripts, Nazaruddin Azhar’s Sadrah (Resignation), Dhipa Galuh Purba’s Kembang Gadung (Gadung Flower16), Dian Herdrayana’s Genjlong Karaton (The Chaotic Palace), Dadan Sutisna’s Cukang (A Bridge) and Toni Lesmana’s Bandera! Bandera! Bandera! (The Flag! The Flag! The Flag!), were performed as part of that year’s festival Teater Sunda Kiwari 2010).17 In general, the scripts entered in the competition have dealt with contemporary social issues affecting the Sundanese community. For example, both  Sadrah, chosen by 26 participants, and Bandera! Bandera! Bandera!, selected by 13 groups, tell of the open-heartedness and sincerity of the poor 15

16 17

The initial four scripts were Rorongo by Arma Djunaedi, Badog by Dhipa Galuh Purba, Jeblog by Nazarudin Azhar and Randu Jalaprang by Tatang Sumarsono. To these were added Karikatur nu Gelo by Arthur S. Nalan and Akalna si Apin, an adaptation of Molière’s The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin by Rosyid E. Abby. A kind of poisonous flower. A further two scripts (Arthur S. Nalan’s Zaman Dabrul and Rosyid E. Abby’s Meredong, an adaptation of Ke, by Yudhistira anm Massardi) were added by the committee, making a total of seven original scripts that were performed during the festival.

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and abandoned groups in society, along with their complaints and accusations about their mistreatment. Sadrah deals with the irony in the life of a street sweeper, who devotes 40 years of his life to the maintenance of a healthy environment only to succumb to acute bronchitis and lose his job with only one month’s severance pay. It is this irony that shatters his mental stability, as he alternates between feelings of anger and acceptance of his fate. In Bandera! Bandera! Bandera! the family of a war veteran struggles to maintain their idealism in the midst of a bureaucracy and a society that are increasingly devoid of nationalist spirit. The essence of the conflict is played out during the celebration of Indonesian Independence Day, when the family is humiliated and marginalized by the village head and his followers because they do not own a red and white national flag. “No, I don’t have a red and white flag. But that flag is always flying in my heart and in my soul” (Memang kuring teu boga bandera Merah-Putih. Tapi bandera eta ngolebat na jero dada jeung jiwa kuring) is the veteran’s response. Whenever this play is performed, the audience never fails to be stirred by the spirit of Indonesian nationalism. The script writing competition sponsored by the fdbs has not been without its problems and controversies. Again, the issues all revolve around the tokenistic support the competition receives from bodies that might be expected to share its objectives, such as the regional government. For example, on the occasion of the 2010 competition for scripts in Sundanese, the ppss as the organizing body was forced to ask a number of prominent local figures to make donations, in order to raise funds for the prizes awarded to the competition place-getters (“Naskah drama terpaksa dilelang”, 2014). No other financial support had been forthcoming, from both private and government sources. Yet it was this competition that provided material for the 2010 festival, the eleventh time the fdbs had been staged. Despite these difficult circumstances, the production of scripts in Sundanese which the fdbs has sponsored has had a remarkable effect on the development of the Sundanese theatre world.

fdbs and the Transmission of Sundanese Cultural Values

There are a number of features of the fdbs that indicate that the festival plays an important role in passing on the values of Sundanese culture to young Sundanese people. Firstly, the number of high school groups participating in the youth festival shows that the younger generation has responded to the festival and its cultural objectives with considerable enthusiasm. Secondly, the level of interaction and communication that takes place between actors and spectators is a sign that a process of cultural transmission is occurring through

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the performances sponsored by the festival. The audiences are made up largely of high school students, and the direct and indirect forms of interaction between them and the performers can be understood as an interchange that involves the passing on of cultural knowledge and values. In addition, the crowds of young people who flock to the Rumentang Siang theatre in Bandung on each day of the festival is an indication that the enthusiasm of these young audiences is not confined to a small minority of aficionados. They come to support their own school groups, but also simply because they enjoy the performances. Popular opinion tends to see young people as a generation whose knowledge of Sundanese values has been whittled away by urbanization and globalization, but here they spontaneously indulge in a learning process that informs them about their local cultural heritage (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2011a). Caught between the expectation that they will maintain this heritage and a consumerist culture that draws them into ever more intensive involvement with global pop culture, young people are often seen as indifferent to their local culture and its values. Their continuing attraction to the fdbs and its performances, however, suggests that this assumption needs to be re-evaluated. Dedi Fatah, the head of the organizing committee for fdbs XII, illustrates the educative role of the festival with the following example. The scripts put forward by the committee and then selected by the individual participants are sent out three months before the festival to the groups taking part. On average, each of these groups has between 20 and 30 members. During the first month, they normally rehearse twice a week, but this increases to four times a week in the second month and then daily in the month leading up to the festival. This means that for three months at least they are immersed in Sundanese language and culture. When the number of actors and support crew involved in this process is taken into account, it is clear that a significant process of cultural transmission is taking place. As the number of groups taking part increases, the organizers hope that the use of Sundanese in the performer’s immediate environments will also rise (Dewi 2012). A further initiative of tsk in conjunction with the Bandung College of Indonesian Arts Academy (stsi), to allow award winners at the festival (actors, directors, musical arrangers and artistic directors) to study at stsi without having to undergo preliminary testing, is another contribution to the preservation of the Sundanese theatre tradition. All in all, the festival succeeds where more formal initiatives designed to safeguard Sundanese culture, such as the teaching of Sundanese in schools, often fail to achieve their objectives. It provides young people with opportunities for self-expression and identity formation in a free and open environment that is both entertaining and instructive.

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In this way, it shows that art (in this case drama) can perform an important social function at a time of rapid change in the lives of young people.

Off-stage Voices: The Role of the Audience

As the previous section suggests, the success of the fdbs owes much to the support of audiences and their enthusiasm for the performances staged during the festival. Moreover, a breakdown of audiences for the eleventh festival in 2010 according to age groups, based on 2000 questionnaires distributed during the event, confirms the suggestion that this is largely due to the popularity of the festival among young spectators. According to the data collected in this survey, 63 per cent of visitors were aged between 15 and 19, 23 per cent between 12 and 15, while only 3 per cent were aged above 30. The number of respondents who used Sundanese in daily life amounted to 60 per cent, while 35 per cent used Indonesian. Consistent with these figures, 61 per cent were of Sundanese background, 31 per cent were of mixed ethnic origins, and 8 per cent were of non-Sundanese background. The overwhelming majority of high school age spectators represented in this data (86 per cent of total visitor numbers) testifies to the outstanding success of the fdbs in attracting a younger generation audience. Combined with the 60 per cent of respondents who use Sundanese in their everyday lives, the data suggests that the anxiety about the future of Sundanese culture often expressed by the Sundanese elite is without foundation. Also significant is the number of non-ethnic Sundanese spectators, who make up 39 per cent of total audience numbers. This is partly explained by the phenomenon of school groups coming to support performances by their own schools, or the practice adopted by some teachers and tertiary lecturers of requiring their students to attend as part of art appreciation classes (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2011b). But even though it may be compulsory, these students generally enjoy the experience, not least because it is something they can share with their peer group. In this sense, the festival can be said to provide an open forum for a type of ‘crosscultural’ experience in art appreciation. In addition to the young spectators who make up the majority of visitor numbers, the festival also attracts visitors from a wide range of social groups, including market traders from the Kosambi market, a large shopping centre located opposite the Rumentang Siang theatre in central Bandung. A rough calculation of total audience numbers from the 2010 survey indicates that with approximately 400 visitors per day, around 8,000 people were being exposed to Sundanese language, culture and beliefs in the course of the

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festival performances. At the time of the second festival for students (fdbsp, Festival Drama Basa Sunda untuk Pelajar II) held on 1–20 February 2013, with 48 participating groups, 13.000 visitors attended.18 As Dadi Danusubrata states, the performance of theatre in Sundanese has proved to be an effective means of passing on many of the traditional aspects of Sundanese culture.19 In the words of the theatre group’s blog: Theatre is an effective medium for preserving a language and introducing a culture. Performers of theatre study cultural history, tradition, products of material culture and art forms as a matter of course. Similarly, through theatre, the community is drawn into an appreciation of culture and eventually a greater familiarity with Sundanese traditions and values.20 Seen in this perspective, the fdbs can be understood as a cultural event with historical significance. It not only functions to provide entertainment for an audience of largely young spectators, it is also an effective response to the pessimism often voiced by academics and other members of the Sundanese elite about the survival of Sundanese art, culture and language. As Dadi Danusubrata has written: The links in the chain of events sparked by the fdbs lead on the one hand to the emergence of new theatre groups, both in schools and the wider society, and the birth of a young generation of Sundanese playwrights. As a medium of instruction, it has stimulated participants, playwrights and audiences to observe and study the riches of Sundanese culture. In a context where the regional government has shown little interest in this undertaking, those who have worked to make the fdbs a success have in fact acted out a drama that fosters the survival of their mother tongue.21

18 19 20

21

This figure was quoted in a speech by a member of the organizing committee at the closing ceremony of the festival on 20 February 2013. Interview with Dadi R. Danusubrata, 10 February 2012. Teater merupakan salah satu media efektif dalam usaha melestarikan bahasa dan memperkenalkan budaya. Para pemain secara otomatis mempelajari sejarah kebudayaan, tradisi, alat, dan jenis kesenian, serta hal lainnya. Demikian pula masyarakat sebagai apresiator, pada akhirnya akan lebih mengenal tradisi dan nilai-nilai budaya Sunda (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2012). Mata rantai fdbs di satu sisi menumbuhkan tunas-tunas baru grup teater, baik di sekolah  maupun umum, juga melahirkan penulis naskah drama Sunda generasi baru. Sebagai media pembelajaran, fdbs telah menstimulasi para peserta, penulis naskah, dan

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Conclusion: Local Culture and Identity Formation among Sundanese Youth

The fdbs and its youthful followers can be seen as engaged in a process of identity formation based on the notion of the Sundanese person and Sundanese culture. It is not a process that confines language and culture within rigid boundaries, but an energy that has given rise to pride in the local cultural heritage among different communities all over West Java. In the 22 years and the 13 occasions on which it has been held, the festival has made a real contribution to cultural awareness and cultural knowledge among young people of the Sundanese speaking region. It provides a significant counter example to reports of declining interest in Sundanese language and culture among the young. By documenting the activities of fdbs, and thus augmenting the limited number of academic studies of contemporary developments in Sundanese language and culture, this chapter hopefully also makes a useful contribution to knowledge of this field. The process of local linguistic and cultural revival has been encouraged by the Post-Reform era socio-political climate, which has opened up opportunities for the expression of local consciousness without the fear of its being labelled ‘separatist’ or ‘anti-nationalist’. The voicing of local identity is no longer seen as a threat to the central government, as was the case during the New Order period. Yet government statements about the importance of regional language and culture that take the form of regional regulations (Perda, Peraturan Daerah) remain largely at the level of official rhetoric. This is evident in the lack of any concrete support for grassroots activities that encourage the expression of regional culture through art and performance. Despite this, with community support, culture has its own way of surviving and growing, as is evident in the enthusiasm which greets each new festival staged by the fdbs and its supporters. Ironically, it is the generation most thoroughly immersed in globalized youth culture that has provided the basis for the festival’s continued success. The support which young people have given the festival is an indication that local culture remains an integral part of identity formation among the present generation of Sundanese youth.

penonton, untuk melakukan observasi dan kajian terhadap kekayaan budaya Sunda. Di tengah rendahnya kepedulian pemerintah daerah, mereka yang bergiat di fdbs itu sejatinya telah melakoni drama memelihara keberlangsungan bahasa ibunya (Teater Sunda Kiwari 2012).

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References Alwasilah, Chaedar. 2006. Pokoknya Sunda Interpretasi Untuk Aksi. Bandung: Pusat Studi Sunda. Dewi, Eriyanti Nurmala. 2012. “Teater Sunda Kiwari: Ini Demi Sunda.” In Khazanah Special Edition, Pikiran Rakyat, March 19. Hardjadibrata, Rabin. 2003. Sundanese-English Dictionary. Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya. Interview with Dadi P. Danusubrata, 10 February 2012, by Mamat Sasmita, Rumah Baca Buku Sunda, Bandung. Kurnia, Ganjar and Arthur S. Nalan (ed.). 2003. Deskripsi Kesenian Jawa Barat. Bandung: Disbudpar Jabar and Unpad, 94–99. Lahpan, Neneng Yanti. 2008. “Teater Bolon dan Pewarisan Budaya Sunda.” kompas Jabar, 29 March. Mahatma, Masmuni (ed.). 2005. Sunda pun Bicara! Gairah Kesundaan dan Keislaman dalam Konteks Politik Kebangsaan. Bandung: Forum Panyawangan. Massardi, Noorca M. 2003. “Seni Teater Perjalanan Teater Modern Indonesia.” In Antologi Seni, ed. Agus Dermawan T. Jakarta: Yayasan Seni Cerry Red. Maulana, Soni Farid. 2005. “Suksesi Ala ‘Dalem Kuwung-Kuwung’.” Pikiran Rakyat, September 1. Accessed 27 January. Moriyama, Mikihiro. 2012. “Regional Languages and Decentralisation in Post-new Order Indonesia: The Case of Sundanese.” In Words in Motion: Language and Discourse in Post New Order Indonesia, ed. Keith Foulcher, Mikihiro Moriyama and Manneke Budiman, 82–100. Singapore: nus Press. “Naskah Drama Terpaksa Dilelang.” Accessed 27 January 2014. http://www.pikiranrakyat.com/node/108233 Rosidi, Ajip. 2010. “Gerakan Kasundaan.” In Mencari Sosok Manusia Sunda: Sekumpulan Gagasan dan Pikiran. Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya. Rosidi, Ajip, Edi S. Ekadjati and A. Chaedar Alwasilah (ed.). 2006. Konferensi Internasional Budaya Sunda (kibs): Prosiding. Suwarni, Yuli Tri. 2005. “Sundanese, a vanishing language.” The Jakarta Post 9 June. Teater Sunda Kiwari. 2008. Accessed 27 January 2014. http://teatersundakiwari .wordpress.com/category/profile-teater-sunda-kiwari/. —— 2009. Minim, Penulis Naskah Drama Sunda. Accessed 27 January 2014. http:// teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/minim-penulis-naskah -drama-sunda/. —— 2010. Festival Drama Basa Sunda XI Tahun 2010. Accessed 27 January 2014. http:// teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com —— 2011a. Kekayaan Bahasa Sunda Sangat Diminati Anak Muda Saat Ini. Accessed 27 January 2014. http://teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/kekayaan -bahasa-sunda-sangat-diminati-anak-muda-saat-ini/.

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—— 2011b. 300 Pelajar dan Mahasiswa Padati gk Rumentang Siang. Accessed 27 January 2014. http://teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com/2011/01/. —— 2012. Festival Drama Basa Sunda XII. Accessed 27 January 2014. http:// teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/festival-drama-basa-sunda-xii/. —— 2014. Festival Bahasa Sunda XIII. Accessed 27 January 2014. http:// teatersundakiwari.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/festival-drama-basa-sunda-xiii -tahun-2014/ The Jakarta Post. 2001. “Sundanese culture slowly disappear from home.” The Jakarta Post 27 August.

chapter 8

Two Stages for Performance in Aceh From State Conflict to Syariah Politics Reza Idria The overview given in this chapter cannot represent and interpret the entire dynamic of the performing arts in Acehnese history, nor portray the current situation in a detailed way. Rather it aims to set out the main factors explaining how two models of performance exist at the same time in present day Aceh. The chapter is also an attempt to analyse the condition of Acehnese arts, especially the performing arts, after the fall of the New Order regime, to allow readers to compare the situation with other areas of Indonesia. At a time when other provinces have begun to critically evaluate their forms of artistic expression, Acehnese artists are still struggling to claim space. The fall of the New Order and the special autonomy given to Aceh allowing the implementation of syariah Islamic law has given rise to two types of performance stage with very different aims. The following analysis is intended to provide some sense of the human and situational factors likely to determine which model becomes more dominant in Aceh in the future.

Stage 1

A direct broadcast from rri, Radio Republik Indonesia, the national Indonesian radio station, in Banda Aceh is in progress. However, it comes not from the radio transmitter but rather from the room referred to as the auditorium. A man wearing a ‘tangkulok’ cap who reminds me of Dokarim, a marginal poet during the colonial war period, is holding a microphone and is in continual contact with an ‘on-the-ground’ reporter. His voice fades in and out, possibly due to the poor functioning of the loudspeaker or in order to create the sense of an uneven signal from the scene. The man is encased in a cube-shaped box resembling a large television, complete with an antenna and loudspeaker. A sign ‘live’ is hanging in front of the screen. On top of the large box are printed the words: tv Eng Ong. Amongst the watching crowd a young woman in a black jilbab (Islamic female head-covering) carrying a microphone packaged in a plastic mineral water bottle acts as the on-the-ground reporter communicating with the ­tangkulok-wearing broadcaster. A teenage boy carrying a large camera on his © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_010

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shoulder is following the young reporter. But his camera is a fake! As it gets closer to the audience, it is evident that it is only a wooden box to which a red kerosene can funnel has been attached. There is a small light on top of the box representing the camera. As he comes closer and directs the light in the direction of the audience member being interviewed, I see written in small letters on the ‘camera’ the same words: tv Eng Ong. There is a question and answer exchange between the reporter and the audience in response to prompting from the broadcaster in the television set, which elicits much laughter from the audience. Several audience members are invited to enter the ‘television’. The broadcaster shouts out in Achenese Njoe tv aséli, Eng Ong, jeut teubiet jeut tamöng! “This is true television, Eng Ong, able to be entered and exited!” Then he continues, laughing and grimacing wryly, “Tonight we can see stimulating and entertaining expression, even though this is a story about the wounds of conflict, but another time males and females may not be allowed to appear on the same stage, and the performance may even be banned by the Morality Police.”1 The audience applauds. Needless to say the live broadcast I have been recounting is in fact a scene from a performance, an artistic performance. Although stages and performances in other parts of the archipelago and the wider world are unequivocally associated with entertainment, with art, this is not necessarily the case in Aceh. That is why I need to stress that the first stage was an art performance, since now I want to describe another form of performance. Another stage, which does not entertain at all.

Stage II

This stage is situated in front of the mosque, to the left-hand side, in front of a yellow-fringed marquee characteristic of events attended by Indonesian officials. There are rows of empty plastic seats that will be occupied as soon as people come out from the mosque. This is Friday; the day Moslem men in Aceh are required, in accordance with the regulations of syariah law (qanun),2 to attend the mosque. As the congregation comes out from Friday prayers, there is an announcement from inside the mosque that there is to be a caning of sinners. 1 The term used in the original Acehnese, wh, is an abbreviation of Wilayatul Hisbah, ­frequently referred to by Acehnese people as the syariah police. 2 In order to implement syariah Islamic law the Acehnese regional government regulates activities ranging from moral and religious questions, to regional government practices. See M.B Hooker and Virginia Hooker (2006),

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A number of people hurriedly exit and leave the mosque yard. Most of those leaving are those who have cars, including cars with red number plates, ­indicating the car of a government official. It is not clear why they do not stay to witness the performance that is to be held on the already prepared stage. Maybe they feel suddenly hungry, as they have not yet had lunch; maybe it is also that the spectacle is intended only for the ‘small-fry’ as it is one of their own who is to be exposed as a sinner; or perhaps they leave hurriedly in protest against such an event being staged, because they reject the use of caning. (Could that be the case?) However, there are still lots of people who have not left, all of them male, teenagers and adult men, maybe because women do not come to the mosque on Fridays. My friend James T Siegel, probably because he is a foreigner, becomes the centre of attention for the children. However, not for long, as an official is calling for the offenders to be brought to the stage. I see a group of women beginning to move in from the side of the square, and get the sense that they have been ordered to attend. A securely-closed paddy wagon approaches the fenced off stage, followed by an ambulance. On the side of the ambulance are the words General Hospital, Jantho, Aceh Besar, the location of the caning stage. I approach the doctor and nurse who get out of the ambulance. “This is the procedure we have to follow.” the nurse tells me. “We check the offender, determine that he/she is healthy before the caning and then treat the wounds caused by the punishment.” adds the young female doctor from within the ambulance, in response to my desire to know why they are here. An official from the courts comes onto the stage and reads out the judge’s disposition from the Jantho Syariah Court. It also details what ‘sin’ has been committed by those in the paddy wagon resulting in them having act out this ‘performance’. They are accused of committing adultery as they were caught in the act of kissing. They both are married to other people. On the basis of their transgression they are to receive eight strokes. Another official outlines what is going to take place on the stage. The caning will not hurt, he says, as it is only intended to shame. He then quotes several versus from the Koran. In order to shame, so this is indeed a performance stage that has been prepared to present a spectacle!3 3 The intended impact of the spectacle is clearly that of shaming, intimidating and ‘educating’ audience members, while some viewers voice enthusiastic satisfaction at the sight of sinners punished. Attempting to resist these effects through labelling the spectacle as comic is another possibility, a strategy adopted by socially-critical groups mentioned by Agus Nur Amal at the 2009 symposium on Indonesian performance discussed by Ugoran Prasad in chapter 12 of this volume. These contrasting responses to staged canings provide telling

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Two uniformed women get out of the front of the paddy wagon, the back of which is still securely closed. The female offender is first taken out of the paddy wagon; a morality police official escorts her onto the stage. The person administering punishment, who is holding a rattan cane about a metre and a half long, is already on the stage. He is wearing a ninja-like mask. But sadly this is not a film…The official with a microphone gives the flagellator instructions to begin, and counts from one to eight. The whip-wielding figure strikes in accordance with his instructions. The person beside me mumbles ka peulaku lom singoh mangat keunong lom.4 When the male offender is brought on stage many of the audience shout out. The mumbler beside me now also calls out, ordering the flagellator to strike as hard as he can and more than eight times. Someone else shouts out that the male ‘sinner’ should be struck with a bigger cane. The flagellator pays no attention to the demands for more punishment, as he delivers the same number of strokes, striking eight times. The performance is then declared over and everyone leaves. **** For me, the two very different stages described above reflect a classic tension between the understanding of performance from the perspective of local culture and humanistic values versus its interpretation from a religious perspective, against a background of politics and social problems. Both performance stages have their aficionados who feel entertained and both are designed as spectacles. Both models are rooted in the long experience of Acehnese history and have come to symbolise alternate preferences for interpreting what is appropriate to watch. The question then is which interpretation will dominate the fate of the performance stage in Aceh in the future. In this chapter I will briefly outline the origin of the differing perspectives that have led to the development of these two stages and how they exist together today.

The Legacy of War and the Politics of Syariah: The Face of the Performing Arts in Aceh in the Post New Order Period

The performance in the form of a television program on the first stage described above, which I saw along with other viewers in the auditorium of the Banda illustration of the split in contemporary Acehnese society between supporters and resisters of the syariah regime. 4 A phrase which translates loosely as “Do the same again, expect the same punishment.”

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Aceh rri station on 13 December 2010, was part of a night of theatre performances presented by young victims of conflict, in collaboration with a number of professional performers. The event was part of a Participatory Theatre Workshop (6–13 December 2010) organized by Komunitas Tikar Pandan, a cultural organization active in Banda Aceh since 2003. University students from a number of Acehnese tertiary institutions have been the driving force behind the organization’s rapid development. Nowadays it refers to itself as cultural league that produces all kinds of cultural activities in Aceh such as theatre and film festivals, painting exhibitions, and literary discussions. The group also publishes a cultural journal and the works of Acehnese writers, and has established a creative writing school, a bookstore and a mini cinema. It has been involved in various post-conflict and tsunami humanitarian projects.5 From 2007 Komunitas Tikar Pandan has held participatory theatre workshops involving conflict victims in collaboration with several local and international organizations.6 The activists involved in the organization believe in the important role that culture and the arts play in dealing with the post-conflict and post-tsunami problems in Aceh. As well as a medium for recovery from the trauma of the bloody conflict between gam and the tni, the children’s theatre workshops and the performance of tv Eng Ong are seen as a means of reconciling the past and the future of the children whose parents either participated in or were victims of the two warring sides in Aceh.7 Matters such as these often disappear from government attention so that civil society has to take up the role. In the performance in the Banda Aceh rri station’s auditorium there were also several Japanese watching in the front row. Some of them took part in the tv Eng Ong, assisted by a translator. They were Japanese theatre performers sponsored by The Japan Foundation, which was collaborating with Tikar Pandan in organizing the workshop. tv Eng Ong, as the focus of attention that night, was something new in terms of form as well as in representing a new mood in Aceh after domination by the terror of armed conflict. It was the idea of Agus Nur Amal, who was 5 Komunitas Tikar Pandan refer to themselves as a cultural league as they encompass several organizations such as Sekolah Menulis Dokarim, Jurnal Kebudayaan Gelombang Baru, Aneuk Mulieng Publishing, Institute Tukang Cerita tv Eng Ong, Metamorfosa Institute, Gallery Episentrum Ulee Kareng dan Toko Buku Dokarim. For more detail about Komunitas Tikar Pandan, see their website at: www.tikarpandan.org. 6 Komunitas Tikar Pandan’s archive indicates that they have worked with Teater Garasi (Yogyakarta), Care International, iom, Teater Embassy (The Netherlands) and the Japan Foundation. 7 Interview with M. Yulfan, Komunitas Tikar Pandan activist and the activities coordinator for the Participatory Theatre workshop, 13 December 2010.

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wearing the cap like Dokarim and acted as the broadcaster in the performance, to construct the stage in the form of a television. Agus reported that he had designed tv Eng Ong at the time he was with refugee children in the Pante Raja region, one of the areas in the Pidie district most affected by the tsunami of 26 December 2004. He thought hard about the best way to treat the trauma affecting the refugees. Agus tried to find a medium that would allow those in the surrounding area to tell their stories, particularly as Acehnese have many memories of conflict and natural disaster. However, they had real problems in telling their stories under normal conditions. In this context the tv provided a space with magical power. Everyone felt they were entering a different space. Everyone could go in and out and tell their stories. Moreover, the stage became a medium to connect the village leaders with the villagers, particularly important as the conflict and tsunami had created many problems between the village head and the rest of the community, which could not be solved in the community meeting hall (meunasah), as would be the case under normal conditions. Once the village head entered the tv Eng Ong space it was as if he became another person who was listened to more seriously by community members. Inside the television box the conflict victims were free to tell of their trials and tribulations throughout the war. Beforehand it was incredibly difficult to get them to talk. Agus dreams that tv Eng Ong might be established in every Acehnese village as a medium of communication between community members.8 Agus Nur Amal has long been famous in Jakarta as a person who uses classical Acehnese arts, combining story-telling and acting, in performances on stages in Java and overseas. But not in his own community. Not many people in Aceh knew of Agus in the past. It was only when he began to appear routinely every morning on the commercial television station TransTV, telling regional stories that he had learnt from a medicine seller in Aceh, that he began to get the attention of people in his home territory, from artists to politicians. The efforts of Agus and his tv creation Eng Ong during the post-conflict and tsunami rehabilitation period have evidently stimulated interest among community members in reacquainting themselves with Acehnese stories and narrative traditions. The practice of stage arts in Aceh had long been submerged beneath the turmoil of war and natural disaster. The following section will outline the manner in which the performing arts in Aceh have been influenced by the  succession of wars and natural disasters, how artistic activities and ­political and social conditions have been linked together throughout a long and calamitous history. 8 Interviews with Agus Nur Amal at several meetings in Banda Aceh and Jakarta, 2010.

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The History of War and the Collapse of the Performing Arts in Aceh

We have enough reports by adventurers, traders, missionaries and political emissaries who visited Aceh during the era of the Sultanate (1276–1904)9 to be able to conclude that the arts and entertainment were not forbidden.10 Writers describe the excitement of activities such as cock or bull-fighting and kite-flying competitions. These activities had been practised and handed down among the nobility and commoners, while at the same time resisted by religious leaders on the pretext of purifying the faith of their co-religionists. On another level several art forms such as dance, percussion and poetry were presented in a more ‘sacred’ form, as they were considered to have a strong connection to religious teachings or association with religious figures and revered proselytizers. The names of some of those proselytizers continue to be commemorated in the movements and sounds of performances which they are understood to have created, such as seudati, rapa’i and saman. Disaster struck in 1873 when the Dutch declared war against the Acehnese Sultanate. The war resulted in the curtailment of all forms of entertainment and the loss of audiences. We are somewhat fortunate that during this dire period Snouck Hurgronje – even though his name, until today, is still not liked in Aceh – was a source of information about all kinds of Acehnese games, dances and stories which he collected and documented during his time as an advisor to the Dutch colonial government.11 There are no specific notes about performance stages during the time Snouck was working in the district of Kutaradja (now Banda Aceh) or when he accompanied an expedition to the Gayo highlands, which he detailed in another later ethnographic study, as he focussed his attention on Acehnese interpretations of Islam. This is understandable given the climate of war and the relatively limited range and short duration of Snouck’s activities in Aceh. We do, however, have a complete picture of Dokarim (Abdul Karim), a popular troubadour of the time, who was photographed by Snouck and helped him transliterate the Hikayat Prang Goumpeni (The History of the War with the Company). Dokarim was a proto-troubadour who wandered from one district to another during the Acehnese war. He entertained the Muslimin soldiers (the nickname of Acehnese guerrillas) and at other times was able to safely visit the residence of the colonial governor. 9 10 11

The period of the Islamic sultanate in Aceh, extending from the time of Samudera Pasai to Aceh Darussalam up until the fall of the latter monarchy to the Dutch. Several eyewitness reports of the Acehnese sultanate and daily life of the people are included in Anthony Reid (1994). See Snouck Hurgronje (1906), in particular volume 2.

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After Dutch colonization, the next mention of the performing arts, in the narrower sense of acting, dates from the period after the Japanese occupied Southeast Asia and drove Western colonial powers from the region. This refers to the well-known travelling theatre troupe called Geulanggang Labu.12 Their show found a place in Aceh due to the Japanese need for propaganda to promote the notion of Greater East Asia along with hatred against Western colonialism. The Japanese government actively promoted this theatre form as a vehicle win the support of the community. Although the Japanese left the archipelago in 1945, Geulanggang Labu continued to perform in communities with active economies. The Darul Islam Rebellion in the 1950s, which spread throughout Aceh, may have caused the disbanding of the group as an organization, but individually the members kept performing in several districts while working as medicine sellers. Teungku Adnan pmtoh was famous in this field and became an important icon of theatre acting much-loved by Acehnese people.13 Nevertheless, their efforts were short-lived, cut short by the massacres of people accused of involvement in the Indonesian Communist Party in Aceh, which ushered in Suharto’s New Order regime. By the time of the outbreak of the Aceh Independence rebellion 10 years later, the art of travelling theatre was greatly diminished and soon became simply a memory. The declaration of the Aceh Independence Movement (gam) in 1976 by Hasan Tiro gave rise to a time of violence which has even more severe and long-term effect on the arts in Aceh. In the 1980s the rebellion resulted in the presence of the Indonesian military in numbers that were more than sufficient to wage war on the whole population of Aceh. The military approach and declaration of a war zone resulted in several areas of Aceh supportive of the gam guerrillas experiencing pressure and restrictions, including on the arts. The implementation of a night curfew in several areas such as North, East, and Central Aceh and Pidie,14 and the declaration of Aceh as a Military Operation Zone (dom) played a large part in extinguishing enthusiasm for the performing arts. Night is the most important time for performing arts such as Geulanggang Labu plays, seudati tunang, dangderia and rapa’i pasee, and for 12

13 14

Although there is not much written commentary about the history of Geulanggang Labu, an article by Fozan Santa titled “Genesis Teater Aceh: Geulanggang Labu” was published in two parts in the newspaper Serambi Indonesia Minggu 6 April and 13 April 2008. There is also another written piece by Sulaiman Juned titled “Sandiwara Gelanggang Labu Terancam Punah,” http://sjuned.blogspot.com/2009/01/sandiwara-gelanggang-labu.html, accessed on March 20 2014. However some of the information provided here is not accurate. For a brief discussion of Adnan pmtoh see Siegel (1979, 267–282). In order to limit gam’s room to manoeuvre and destroy its guerrilla fighters, Jakarta launched a military operation in Aceh code named Operation Red Net from 1989 to 1998

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mass religious rituals using rhythmic and artistic forms such as zikir chanting. The military operation throughout that time effectively eliminated these activities. At the same time, in Banda Aceh, the centre of government activity that was more easily controlled by Indonesia, in the period from the end of the 1980s up to the fall of the Suharto regime, a number of stage performers began to produce modern theatre. There were also occasional debus15 performances, as well as attempts to introduce contemporary dance in Aceh. The names of several stage performers and contemporary dancers/choreographers, such as Maskirbi, Hasyim KS, AA Manggeng, Junaidi Bola, Anton Setiabudi, T Januarsyah, and Yun Casalona, began to become well-known, although only among a very small segment of the public in Banda Aceh. Adnan pmtoh, who subsequently became Agus Nur Amal’s teacher, occasionally appeared on local radio and tv broadcasts. His Ratoh pmtoh competed with religious lectures broadcast on the same night. The New Order institutionalised the arts in order to control them. Arts councils were set up at the provincial and district/municipal levels but served to undermine rather than encourage artistic ­creativity. Several traditional rituals and dances, for instance, were identified as local assets, only to become exotica detached from any community ownership. The political reformation of 1998 that brought down Suharto and his New Order regime did not allow the performing arts in Aceh to regain their true place and devotees. Although the military area status (dom) was rescinded in the period following the fall of the New Order regime it was not for long, as gam used the reformation to increase their influence and activities. Indeed political tension and the frequency of armed violence became more evident than in previous decades. While other areas of the archipelago welcomed the benefits of reformation including in the field of artistic activity, Aceh was faced with a series of new conditions, such as military and civil emergency, while also starting to become recognized as a region of Syariah Law. In the heated atmosphere of the war between gam and the Indonesian Army (tni), themes about war and peace, hatred and suffering were represented instead in literature. Several of the artists mentioned previously chose to become poets and use the pen and words as a means of expression. At the

15

in those areas considered to support the guerrilla groups, that is North Aceh, East Aceh, Pidie and Central Aceh. Megawati Soekarnoputri implemented a large-scale military emergency throughout Aceh beginning in 2003. For information about the Acehnese conflict and its problems see Anthony Reid ed. (2006). A traditional performance in which the participants display their invulnerability to selfstabbing, cutting etc.

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same time performing arts such as dance, debus, and percussion parades that had previously been documented and institutionalised became little more than rites to promote the will of the powerful. Dances and percussion performances were found only at the governor’s residence and government ceremonial events. Occasionally they were also used as tools of political party campaigning, which is a Suharto era legacy throughout the archipelago. The art studios set up under the aegis of the power holders were more often than not dependent on the attention of the wife of the governor or mayor. During this time, the creativity of even those performing arts that were independent was in free fall. It was impossible for artists to move as the military emergency administrators had the right to suspect and arrest any group of more than five adults in the one place at the same time. That number was considered more than sufficient to institute a revolt, including from a stage. Although that was the situation during this time, there was one group that perhaps unconsciously played an important role in keeping alive the strong tradition of narrative-based performance in Aceh. The group consisted of the travelling medicine sellers alluded to previously who routinely performed in the most easily accessed venues for the population, the traditional markets. I see their efforts as probably unconscious, as they were inseparable from their economic activity of selling medicine. Their main profession was not that of performers. Reciting poetry, acting and percussion skills were important tools to attract the attention of potential buyers. And what interests me is that, whether because their activities escaped the notice of the military emergency administrators or for some other reason, they were not considered a danger in attracting the masses. Consequently, although even entertainment for a wedding celebration was sometimes subject to surveillance by the military, there were no significant restrictions on medicine sellers’ performances in traditional Acehnese markets. The 2004 earthquake and tsunami brought to an end the Indonesian military blockade and the emergency status. The impact of international aid and monitoring were as significant as the tsunami itself in overturning the existing situation. As part of the process of recovery from the trauma of the disaster, certain bodies developed the idea of using the arts as an effective medium to restore the passion for life of the Acehnese. A group of artists, who were temporarily based at the Banda Aceh Arts Centre, visited the refugee camps for several months in the early post-Tsunami period. They staged a type of ­performance they called Ubat Ate (medicine for the heart), consisting of zikir chanting alternating with story reading, and nazam poetry accompanied by traditional percussion from artists and refugees. The tsunami victims responded very enthusiastically to this activity, which combined religious messages with entertainment and reference to the suffering of the disaster.

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Volunteers from outside of Aceh and from overseas brought with them their own distinctive forms of entertainment and performance. However, the kinds of modern arts from outside that were introduced as part of well-intentioned rebuilding efforts, were not so readily received either by the tsunami victims or Acehnese in general. They had been too long marginalized to be able to understand and enjoy modern performing arts. Several colleagues and I experienced this situation ourselves in using modern theatre as medium of entertainment for victims living in refugee camps in Aceh. Our collaborative performances with Teater Garasi from Yogyakarta highlighted the different response to the same story from the victims of the natural disaster in Aceh compared to the response of the earthquake victims in Yogya. Modern theatre in this context refers to our attempts to introduce stories, staging and lighting that are not usually used with traditional travelling plays or the story-telling of medicine sellers, which perhaps are still part of the collective memory of Acehnese. We also included several participatory scenes in order to engage the audience in our collaboration. However, our efforts failed to mobilize the Acehnese audience to join in the performance and even to elicit applause. By contrast, audience members in Yogya who were victims of the earthquake disaster in 2006 got emotionally involved and became part of the performance. I interpreted these differing reactions to be a result of Acehnese exclusion from modern theatre, whereas the community in Yogya was already familiar with the kind of theatre we were using at the time. There have admittedly been efforts by several actors to introduce modern theatre to Aceh. Theatre groups such as Teater Mata, Teater Korong and Teater Bola are known to have been active at the Banda Aceh Arts Centre, along with two theatre groups from tertiary institutions, Teater Rongsokan (iain Ar-Raniry) and Teater Nol (Universitas Siah Kuala). However, these groups more often perform in theatre events staged outside of Aceh rather than presenting their work in their home environment. Perhaps because of the nonconducive political situation, theatre performances held at the Banda Aceh Arts Centre have been very poorly attended. Thus modern theatre remains alien to Acehnese society.

Syariah Politics and Efforts to Silence the Voice of the Arts

The euphoria surrounding peace in Aceh represented a blessing after the tsunami disaster and provided the opportunity to reinvigorate the Acehnese arts world. During the period of rehabilitation and reconstruction hundreds of arts competitions were held, in writing, poetry reading, theatre, music and story

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telling, celebrating peace. Even though disaster victims were somewhat ill at ease with the art forms ngos used in their competitions, the desire to rise from the abyss was evident in the number of people who joined in and followed them. In part, the numbers also reflect the large amount of aid circulating in Aceh during the post-tsunami rehabilitation phase. The model of interactive storytelling, which has been continually popularised by medicine sellers and professional performers working outside Aceh such as Agus Nur Amal, again found its audience during the period of socializ­ ing the peace process. Both local and foreign ngos used the medium of local storytelling to promote their programs. Unfortunately, however, community appreciation of the art forms associated with the post-disaster and conflict rehabilitation process did not last long. The subsequent implementation of syariah law by the government was a continuation of war in another form for the arts in Aceh. The formalization of syariah law in Aceh had actually begun in 2001. At the beginning it was a trial based on political compromise connected to the gam rebellion. However, post-military rule, the scope of syariah has become an inexplicable and uncontrollable force in limiting Acehnese freedom of movement. At the same time as Aceh was opened to the wider world the intensity of syariah law implementation dramatically increased. The fear of foreign influences, conversion to another religion, and radical ideas began to develop (or be incited) along with the reconstruction and rehabilitation projects in Aceh. The upholding of morality and waging war on all forms of immorality became the main agenda of syariah authority. Through legal regulation, syariah matters have been institutionalised into a government agency. Syariah Police have been recruited, and officials from the Syariah Agency have been integrated into civilian police units in order to increase the agency’s force to intervene. These are the officials who nowadays go on patrols to guard against anything considered a threat to syariah implementation. The conditions of war emergency continue under the guise of syariah. Spying, raids, detention and all kinds of prohibitions have been implemented by syariah authorities. Stages for the public caning of syariah violators have been set up. The formalization and associating of local law with syariah has led to a backlash from Acehnese. Many groups do not agree that what is being implemented in Aceh is Islamic law. There are those who consider that Acehnese syariah is already sufficient, and Islamic syariah is not needed. However, as Acehnese identity is so entwined with Islam, critical voices are subdued due to the fear of being labelled anti-Islam.16 16

For a study of this, see for example, the work of R. Michael Feener & Mark E. Cammack eds (2007).

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In the words of an important contemporary Acehnese writer, “the syariah regime hates festivity.”17 Resistance to the arts, wherever it has come from – initially it was thought to have begun in traditional religious schools (pesantren) in Aceh – has taken the form of rejecting any form of outdoor performing arts. For example, an invited band from Jakarta will be denied permission or else told to separate males and females in the audience. In other words, every performance in Aceh has to conform to what the authorities determine as Islamic syariah. However, the definition of what constitutes Islamic syariah is still unclear. As a result the local community can entertain itself by watching the absurdity of the different interpretations of how to interpret syariah. For instance, the performers Duo Maia, who came to Aceh in 2010 (24 May), usually perform in Jakarta and elsewhere in a funk or punk style. However, in Aceh they had to ‘falsify themselves’ by dressing in a traditional slendang scarf and long sleeve blouse. Or in the years before she was caught up in a pornographic video case, one could find billboards and posters of Luna Maya wearing a jilbab head covering promoting an Acehnese regional cellular telephone card. In the arts, as in Acehnese politics and the bureaucracy, interpretation of the syariah, in practice, stops at the level of symbols. In another context in the art world, the climate surrounding the implementation of syariah is used to assert its own authority by a body that should facilitate artistic activity, the Aceh Arts Council (Dewan Kesenian Aceh - dka), which is the organization that overseers the arts in Aceh. Although a New Order legacy, in my view it has become more rigid than its predecessor in transforming itself into a kind of new authority that takes delight in people coming to request permission. As a result, to hold a performance in Aceh requires passing through three hoops to obtain three different permissions. First, permission has to be obtained from the Police, second from the Islamic Syariah Agency and thirdly from the Aceh Arts Council. Failure to obtain permission from any one results in the event being declared illegal and able to be shut down. Various cultural communities such as Komunitas Tikar Pandan have protested against these layers of permission. The governor of Aceh at the time of writing of this chapter, Irwandi Yusuf, a man of liberal-minded views, refused to sign several regulations for the implementation of Islamic law in Aceh. Yet he also faced much pressure, as these laws and regulations are linked to religion. The pressure represents a type of inexplicable power that is essentially formless, yet has cultural resonance for Acehnese, as it is taboo and considered against the public good to oppose 17

Azhari Aiyub, personal communication.

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something that is linked to religion. Understanding the damage such action might cause to his position, the Governor often chose to let things pass. At the same time the syariah regime is subservient to the military, as was admitted to me by a Morality Police official who acknowledged that they are powerless against uniforms and weapons. If they see someone in uniform and with weapons breach syariah, all they can do is pray. Moreover, government or military performances are not subject to the same prohibitions that govern everyone else. The visit by the well-known rock band Slank in 2009 in which they used an open stage and allowed the sexes to mix obtained permission without any protest as they were sponsored by the authorities.18 Popular singers such as Ahmad Albar, Christine Pandjaitan and others have entertained the Governor and colleagues at the only five-star hotel in Aceh. No doubt the syariah police were ordered to patrol far away from the venue. However, as they still need to show they are carrying out their duties and guarding the status of Aceh as a syariah domain, the syariah police display their success in catching violators by staging caning performances and inviting the public to watch. While there are many people who come to watch, there are also some who refuse to accept anything decided by syariah authorities. Under certain conditions this protest is clear. On New Year’s Eve in 2010, for instance, thousands of people were on the streets to greet the New Year. Fireworks exploded in the air until dawn and trumpets were sounded, even though the Council of Religious Scholars and the municipal government of Banda Aceh forbade both. This situation was amazing and evidently not planned as people came out of their own volition to join the celebrations. I saw for myself the powerlessness of the syariah police in the face of so many people wanting to celebrate New Year with fireworks and blowing trumpets. It was as if they wanted to say that they need entertainment and festivities and are capable of choosing what to enjoy. And it certainly is not via the performance stages chosen for them by the authorities.

Closing Thoughts

The preceding account has traced the problematic history of the performing arts in Aceh, constrained by religious orthodoxy, repeatedly repressed during times of military conflict, cultivated under conditions of peace, then restricted again. In the contemporary period performance is imprisoned between two competing forces. The first is the emergence of the community’s awareness of 18

Interview by the writer with a syariah police officer, with the initials Sy, 28 December 2010.

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their history and culture that has come out of the post-war/ tsunami disaster recovery phase. The second is the hegemony of the power-holders who want to perpetuate their domination. The latter have found an effective new strategy in the power of religion. The odd, double standard approach to the performing arts of the current syariah regime in Aceh is evident in the caning stage I described in the introduction. Those who oversee the mandate covering syariah implementation are prepared to order the separation of males and females in schools and at wedding receptions. However, in my experience, that same demand is forgotten in the case of a public caning which they require to be viewed by the two sexes whom they (conveniently) forget to rigidly separate. Moreover, their desire to put on show and shame the offenders, inciting members of the audience to verbally abuse them, would seem to contradict their efforts to uphold morals and order in accordance with Islam. On the other hand there is the innovative performance stage of tv Eng Ong developed by local artists drawing on the wealth of their own traditions. This group have endeavoured to create a new medium of communication to help heal the various forms of community trauma, and imagine an Aceh free from the constraints and conditions of emergency. However, at every step the existence of groups that follow this second model is threatened if they do not fall in line with the demands of the syariah authorities. Whatever the eventual outcome, currently both stages are still competing, working to gather together their devotees. References Feener, R. Michael and Mark E. Cammack eds. 2007. Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia: Ideas and Institutions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School & Harvard University Press. Hooker M.B and Virginia Hooker, 2006. “Sharia.” In Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia, ed. Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker, 137–206. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Reid, Anthony. 1994. Witnesses to Sumatera: A Travellers’ Anthology. Kuala Lumpur: oup. Reid, Anthony ed. 2006. Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem. Singapore: nus Press. Siegel, James T. 1979. Shadow and Sound: The Historical Thought of a Sumatran People. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan. 1906. The Achehnese (Trans. A.W.S O’Sullivan), Leiden: E.J. Brill.

chapter 9

Representing Indonesia in Australia through Performance1 Communities, Collaborations, Identities Aline Scott-Maxwell Indonesia-related performance claims a modest but distinctive place within the wider panorama of performance forms that thrive in Australia. Australia’s geographical positioning as the closest ‘Western’ country to Indonesia and its immediate southern neighbour has been a unique influence on and frame for Australian-based Indonesian-inflected performance activity. With the advent of mass migration to Australia in the post-World War Two era, multiculturalism and increasingly easier, cheaper travel, this proximity has fostered direct person-to-person contact as well as other forms of cultural interaction, including diverse Australian-Indonesian creative encounters and endeavours mediated by performance. This chapter focuses on aspects of locally-produced Indonesia-related performance of the last decade. It presents case studies that show how contemporary performance creates meaningful connections between Australians and Indonesians, or informs connections between Australia and Indonesia. The case studies look at, respectively, gamelan performance in Australia; three Indonesianflavoured intercultural projects led by Australians of Indonesian descent or Indonesians resident in Australia; and the vibrant Indonesian student pop culture scene in Melbourne. In Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures (Crosby et al. 2008), an anthology of writings and art work, the editors’ preface describes the project as ‘an ongoing map of a shifting cultural network across Australia and Indonesia’. The case studies illustrate that performance activity is likewise part of a shifting Australian-Indonesian cultural network. In some instances, this network has a strongly transnational dimension; in others, it involves deep, long-term cross-cultural engagement; and in yet others, it is demonstrated by intense collaborative activity including both Indonesian- and non-Indonesian Australians. The case studies cover diverse performance media, genres and modes of representation: in some of the examples Indonesia is represented through a paradigm of authenticity, in others, of hybridity. However, in all instances performance creates ‘pathways’ between Australia and Indonesia. 1 A version of this chapter has been published as Scott-Maxwell (2013).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_011 .

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Within this framework, performance activities create communities and express identities in ways to be explored below. Since this process is an ­ongoing one, at some remove from the Indonesian political context, the impact of postNew Order change is not a major focus of discussion. Yet political shifts within Indonesia and in the Australian-Indonesian relationship clearly impact on performance activities and their reception, as will be noted. Occasionally, performance projects have arisen specifically in response to political developments in Indonesia. In the case of Indonesian student pop culture performance activity, engagement with the here-and-now of artistic and social developments within Indonesia is central. A further, broader dimension of this framework for understanding recent Indonesia-related performance in Australia and the Australia-Indonesia pathways that performance creates is, on the one hand, the strongly developing transnational linkages of many Indonesian artists in the highly globalized post-1998 cultural environment and, on the other, strengthening Indonesian diasporic linkages.2 AustralianIndonesian cultural interactions and encounters manifest in performance commenced much earlier than the twentieth century, however. For example, fishermen, pearlers and others from various parts of the Indonesian archipelago were active in northern Australia in the nineteenth century and earlier, leaving traces of a hybrid cultural legacy that survive to this day in such things as Torres Strait Islander musician Jerry Lewis’s song, Bada Kris, with its Malay lyrics, or the many diverse influences on music, dance, linguistic and other aspects of Aboriginal Yolgnu culture (MacKnight 1976:88–92).3 However, Australia’s notorious early twentieth century history, which saw anti-Chinese and Pacific Islander sentiment formalized in the so-called White Australia Policy (the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901), restricted opportunities for contact with people from the Indonesian archipelago on Australian soil. There was a hiatus during World War Two when about 6000 Indonesian seamen and political exiles from the Netherlands East Indies were evacuated to Australia. Indonesian cultural groups performed for themselves and local 2 These include the 2012 formation of a global Indonesian Diaspora Network, mentioned in Fridus Steijlen’s chapter in this volume, a branch of which was recently established in Australia. Another dimension of diasporic activity is the work of Australia-based artists from Indonesia or of Indonesian descent who interact with Indonesia-based artists and audiences. See, for example, Opal Vapour, a recent contemporary dance and music performance by musician Ria Soemardjo (whose music is discussed below) and dancer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, which was workshopped in Indonesia. 3 A recording of Bada Kris is on the cd, Sailing the southeast wind: maritime music from Torres Strait (2003). Other forms of early contact and exchange via performance include the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tours of major Indonesian cities by Australian professional theatre artists and musicians.

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supporters, including on the ‘gamelan Digul’.4 The gradual lifting of the White Australia Policy after World War Two, along with the Colombo Plan initiative that brought Indonesian and other Asian students to Australia in the 1950s, saw the beginnings of an Indonesian migrant community. Even in the earliest stages of post-war Indonesian migration some performance-mediated collaborations and exchanges took place. Perhaps the most notable was Ambonese Lou Casch (Lodewyk Nanlohy)’s seminal role as guitarist in the Dee Jays (Cox 1996), the band formed and led by Johnny O’Keefe, the widely ascribed founder of Australian rock ‘n’ roll. Subsequent growth of the Indonesian-Australian population together with increased ‘neighbourly’ contact and the adoption and institutionalization of multiculturalism as government policy have been central in making Indonesia-related performance a visible and celebrated part of Australian multicultural life. The recent examples of performance described in the case studies are drawn from a wide array of Australian-based, Indonesia-related performance activity and genres. Present-day Indonesian or Indonesian-influenced performance in Australia is both fragmented and diverse, ranging from Indonesian migrant community renditions of regional traditions and the gamelan groups that that are now ubiquitous in the Western world and beyond to intercultural performance experiments, contemporary dance, world music bands, jazz, hiphop, reggae and country artists, and pop music activity.5 It involves IndonesianAustralians and European or other Asian-Australians, either separately or together, encompasses formal, semi-formal and informal activity, and ranges from the strictly amateur and recreational to the professional or semi-professional in the sense that it is produced by identified artist-performers and generates income for them. The overall scale of activity is locally variable – sometimes dynamic and relatively intense and at other times less so – and it often depends on particular individuals who can be a catalyzing influence in generating activity.6 Various cultural sponsors and facilitators, both governmentfunded and private, contribute to the complex dynamics of Indonesian cultural performance in Australia, either by enabling local product, or touring artists or groups from Indonesia who in turn may play an influential role locally.7 4 This gamelan was evacuated to Australia in 1942 with the Javanese political prisoners who had made it in their jungle prison camp in (then) Dutch New Guinea (Kartomi 2002). 5 For an overview of Indonesian music and dance activity in Australia, see Scott-Maxwell (2003). 6 A notable example in Melbourne is Siswanto Wiropuspito, known locally as Sisco, or Pak E, a banjo-playing country and rock singer/musician, whose Blok M cafe in Prahran became a focal point for young Indonesian musicians for many years (see Scott-Maxwell 2004a). 7 Government or government-funded institutions that subsidize performance include the Australia Council, The Australia-Indonesia Institute, Asialink and Indonesian consular

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Mostly, however, Indonesia-related performance activity in Australia has a grass-roots community-level base and is not strongly tied to or consistently initiated by particular institutions. Moreover, much of this activity can be mapped over distinct though often overlapping communities of affiliation or interest with different relations to Indonesia. The Indonesian community itself, comprising Indonesian-born migrants, their families and other Indonesian nationals in Australia, generates a substantial amount of performance, most of which is directed at an audience drawn largely from this community. However, the community is not homogeneous, especially in the larger cities, where divisions according to ethnicity or regional origin, religion and (during the New Order period) politics create community subsets, each with associated performance activity.8 Performance also involves groups and individuals from beyond the Indonesian migrant community, though sometimes intersecting with this community. These source groups can also be labelled communities or, to use Slobin’s term, affinity groups (1993, 98), in that shared interests, skills or other commonalities draw them together, underpinned by social interaction and ‘strong expressive bonding’. Other more fluid ‘communities’ are formed from loose collectives, or networks, of artists, specifically, multiculturally-oriented artists who work together closely and collaboratively on Indonesia-related performance projects. Performance is therefore expressive of community in the various forms that this takes. And it is also expressive of the identities that are constructed or affirmed in the process of performance-making, whether through the communities that collectively produce, shape and/or share it or through the connections with Indonesia that individuals make via performance. As the case studies show, performers in Australia project their Indonesianness (their cultural roots), explore their Indonesian ancestral or other ties, or identify with Indonesia (as an adopted culture) through their performance activity. representatives in Australia. Arimba Cultural Exchange and Wot Cross-Culture, both in Sydney, are examples of private bodies that facilitate performance and tours. In relation to Fridus Steijlen’s discussion of the institution in 2011 of the Pasar Malam Indonesia by the Indonesian Embassy in The Netherlands, it is noteworthy that since the mid-2000s the Indonesian consulates of Sydney and Melbourne have organized an annual Festival Indonesia in each city to promote Indonesian culture, tourism and business overseas. 8 Indonesian-born migrants in Australia also include many of Dutch ancestry and Chinese-Indonesians, who mostly form separate communities. At times during the New Order era, separate performance activities were maintained by Indonesian community groups aligned with the Indonesian government, and others which wished to remain independent.

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Gamelan Over the last four decades, gamelan music has become a persistent element of Indonesia-related cultural activity around Australia. Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Cirebon-style or other ensembles are active in most Australian cities and some regional centres, with sets of instruments owned or hosted by universities, schools, state museums, and Indonesian consulates as well as some private individuals. From one perspective, this is simply the Australian manifestation of a near world-wide phenomenon that has seen the iconic instruments and sounds of the gamelan taken up and flourish beyond Indonesia’s borders, becoming as it were a non-Indonesian, or global, musical tradition that is largely unrelated to any pattern of outward Indonesian migration.9 Yet, notwithstanding obvious commonalities across localities, this ‘new’ gamelan tradition differs somewhat in each of the countries where it has taken root, developing at different times and in different ways in response to local environments and historical circumstances. Consequently, there are some notable features of gamelan activity in Australia which both connect it to other local Indonesia-related performance and also draw it into a wider Australia-Indonesia ‘cultural network’ in a way that is not necessarily the case elsewhere. Gamelan-playing is, by definition, a collective collaborative activity relying, moreover, on musical inter-dependency in close physical proximity. It, therefore, creates a ‘community’ bonded not just by a shared learning and playing experience and associated social activity, but by the musical necessity of close listening to each other, mutual trust and the sublimation of the individual to the group.10 Most gamelan players in Australia are non-Indonesians. However, unlike the situation that prevails in the United States and United Kingdom in particular, many groups include a scattering of players who are either Indonesian by nationality or birth or have Indonesian ancestry.11 Gamelan 9

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Outside Indonesia, gamelan groups are found in North America, the United Kingdom, Australasia, various European countries, and a growing number of Asian countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. In her study of Javanese gamelan in Great Britain, Mendonça (2002, 34) deploys Victor Turner’s concept of communitas to capture the intense, almost utopian, transformative sense of community that is characteristic of gamelan groups and facilitated by the blurring of social and musical aspects – ‘musical sociability’ and sociable musicality’ as she calls them. Exceptions that I am aware of include some student ensembles in tertiary education institutions, one of the two Javanese gamelan groups based at the Melbourne Indonesian Consulate General, and the two Balinese gamelan gong kebyar groups in Sydney, one of

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groups therefore become an arena for Australian-Indonesian social, musical and cultural interaction both within and beyond the specific music-making context: a space where cultural boundaries are crossed or blurred and shared identities are created. Gamelan-playing can also provide a pathway into or through Indonesian culture. The reasons that individuals choose to learn and play gamelan music are diverse. Some are initially attracted for musical or other non-culture specific reasons, such as the rich sonorities and intricate musical textures, the beguiling exotic-looking instruments, the group-based communal-type activity, the challenge of a new musical experience or gamelan’s musical accessibility. While for some of these individuals, playing gamelan may remain a purely musical pursuit or a short-term novelty; many go on to develop an interest in Indonesia and its culture that extends beyond gamelan music. This is facilitated by social interaction with Indonesian group members as well as with non-Indonesians who have Indonesian language skills and cultural literacy; the socio-cultural or performance context in which gamelan learning and playing are embedded, which includes such things as experiencing Indonesian food, wearing traditional Indonesian dress and even sometimes making ritual offerings; the relative ease of acquiring a modicum of Indonesian language; and the close geographic proximity of Indonesia itself. Yet other players come to gamelan music through a desire to extend and enrich an existing engagement with Indonesia, so reinforcing their identification with the country and its culture. For example, one of the groups I have played with includes a highly trained and experienced (non-Indonesian) dalang, shadow puppeteer, three teachers of Indonesian language, and four others who are fluent Indonesian speakers and have had long-standing contact with Indonesia. For those of Indonesian background, on the other hand, playing gamelan music can strongly reconnect them to Indonesia. In the words of one such performer, “playing gamelan makes me feel more Indonesian.” This is despite the fact that in Indonesia she and her friends regarded gamelan as ‘uncool’ (McIntosh 2009, 90–91). Another Indonesian who took up gamelan-playing in Australia has noted: “If you are an Indonesian currently living in Australia, this might sound familiar; you grew up abhorring Indonesian traditional arts which is all Australian (Sekaa Gong Tirta Sinar) and the other all Balinese (Sekaa Gong Dharma Bali) (see Watson and Dunbar-Hall 2002). Notably, the Perth group Langen Budoyo has a majority membership of Indonesians or Indonesian-Australians (McIntosh 2009). Possibly the only comparative national gamelan scene in terms of a high proportion of ‘mixed’ membership is that of The Netherlands. The situation in the United Kingdom is described in detail in Mendonça (2002).

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only  to find yourself more and more attracted to them once you’ve spent enough time away from them…After years of living in Australia, suddenly the sound of  the Sundanese zither and flute that we avoided like the plague in Indonesia, becomes the call of sirens, alluring, enchanting, treacherous” (Ambyo 2005,  13).12 For these gamelan-players, participation in traditional music has a distinctly different meaning and function in Indonesia to those which it has in Australia, where they are, in a sense, performing their Indonesian identity through gamelan. Significantly, this performed identification is primarily with Indonesia as nation notwithstanding that the vehicle is a regional cultural tradition. The important distinction here is between ways of being, or feeling, Indonesian as opposed to Australian. Australian gamelan groups under the guidance of their instructors mostly valorize traditional repertoire and practice, aiming to reproduce an ‘authentic’ product and audience experience, or at least a ‘staged authenticity’.13 Few groups experiment with the creation or performance of new, non-traditional style compositions that utilize the musical instruments, techniques, structures and processes of gamelan music as compositional materials. This is in contrast to the United Kingdom, for example, where new composition is a component of the repertoire of all gamelan groups and, indeed, is regarded as legitimating British gamelan (Mendonça 2002, 167, 521ff). In the two Australian groups that produced new work for the Javanese gamelan which I have been associated with, players of Indonesian background and non-Indonesians with longstanding Indonesia expertise (musical or otherwise) were notably absent from the membership. Further, the members of one of these groups, Dome Contemporary Gamelan Monash, included a significant number of experienced musicians and composers from other musical backgrounds, which distinguished it from most other Australian gamelan groups.14 I propose that it is partly deep engagement with Indonesia among many Australian gamelan-players, together with the participation of Indonesians in gamelan groups, that creates unease about or lack of interest in using the instruments of gamelan music in non-traditional ways. To some extent, 12 13 14

Similar observations are made in Winarnita (2009). This concept was introduced by MacCannell (1976) in relation to touristic experiences. Amongst works produced by members of Dome were Brigid Burke’s Nightlife for clarinet and gamelan, which incorporates a free improvisation section for the ensemble; Adrian Sherriff’s Blues in Slendro for gamelan and set drums and A Little Water Music for Gamelan, a piece that – controversially – exploits the pitch change effects resulting from the gradual pouring of water into repeatedly struck bonang gongs; and works by Nicholas Hansen for multimedia and gamelan.

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Australian gamelan groups see themselves as representing Indonesia to their audiences. Moreover, with Indonesia being a hugely popular tourist destination for Australians, many of the Australians in the audiences at gamelan performances in Australia have been to Indonesia, especially Bali, and had tourist or other contact with the performing arts there. The bulk of these audiences therefore have an expectation that they will experience something ‘traditional’ – sounds that correspond with the visual impact of traditional musical instruments. As well, the regular participation in these performances of dancers from the Indonesian community reinforces impressions that traditions are being maintained. Respect for and deference to tradition and authenticity in gamelan performance is not necessarily observed in the same consistent way in United States or Great Britain – nor indeed in Indonesia.

Intercultural Music-theatre and World Music

Audiences for world music and for intercultural theatre, on the other hand – even where there is substantial Indonesian content – are not necessarily connected to the Australia-Indonesia ‘network’ or familiar with Indonesian performance traditions. They are open to and, to some extent, expect experimentation – the creation of something new out of something old – while also wanting a flavour of the source culture or tradition, however hybridized. Those that produce this work are deliberately seeking to take culturally-specific performance traditions (or elements of those traditions) in new directions or into new contexts by juxtaposing or blending them with Western forms and practices, or perhaps other ‘non-Western’ traditions. Within the overall fields of intercultural music-theatre and world music in Australia, Australian-produced Indonesian-inflected work is relatively limited in quantity and sporadic in occurrence.15 Two notable examples from the 1990s were the One Extra Dance Company’s Dancing Demons, which was created in Bali with Balinese dancers and musicians (see Hough and Hatley 1995), and Wayang Kelly, a shadow-puppet play devised by Mike Burns based on the iconic Australian Ned Kelly story, which used specially designed puppets and music that combined gamelan with Irish and bush band music. Inter­ cultural ­theatre and, to a somewhat lesser extent, world music are necessarily 15

Contemporary theatrical productions and world, or ‘ethnic’ fusion, music performed in Australia by visiting groups from Indonesia have included Panji Sepuh (1994) and I La Galigo (2006), and the groups Krakatau, Kiai Kanjeng, Kua Etnika, Sambasunda, Seratuspersen and Gangsadewa.

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collaborative and process-based, underpinned as they are by exchange and negotiation between a group of artists or musicians who interact closely to find creative solutions, resolve differences and achieve a shared outcome. While issues of ethics and power relations are often central to analysis of this type of work, the discussion below of some recent examples focuses more on cultural representation, that is, how they inform Australian ways of knowing Indonesia, and how they express community and identity, specifically, the communities of artists that shape it and the identities of the individuals who create it.

The Butterfly Seer

The Butterfly Seer is a music-theatre production created by two Australian artists with Indonesian connections and interests, playwright/director/actor/ dancer Indija Mahjoeddin and composer/musician Adrian Sherriff, and performed by a team of Indonesian, Indonesian-Australian and Australian musicians and actors with diverse artistic backgrounds. Labelled a contemporary randai (West Sumatran folk opera), many of The Butterfly Seer’s components are adapted from the traditional Minangkabau randai theatre genre, for instance, the dendang poetic sung narrative with saluang (open-ended, endblown flute) accompaniment, the telling of a story segmented by live music and action with dialogue, and the short fast rhythmic sequence of interlocking hand claps, pants slaps and vocal calls (tapuak) that regularly punctuates the action. The story, which was developed by Indija from an episode in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, is about a young woman who has a mystical revelation and, clothed only by a swarm of butterflies, leads her village adherents on a journey into the sea in search of salvation. Indija also wrote the English playscript and performed in the production in the role of Osman the clown. Both the highly poetic text and her stage performance demonstrated her deep familiarity with the randai genre.16 Indija’s work with randai is both professional and also strongly personal. Her father is from West Sumatra and her mother from Australia, and she has spent extended periods in West Sumatra, including at Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (stsi) Padang Panjang, studying randai. Prior to The Butterfly Seer, she had produced other randai-based works and conducted randai workshops and community projects, initially with her troupe MusiK KabaU, so The Butterfly Seer supports her broader artistic trajectory. The majority of The Butterfly Seer’s performers had also participated in 16

The complete playscript is published in Batchelor (2000).

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other MusiK KabaU productions with Indija, consolidating a group understanding of randai and its Australian theatrical possibilities. For Indija, however, the project has also been about engaging with her Indonesian cultural roots. She says, “…in West Sumatra I am both outsider and insider, both home and not. I am not Minang…but I belong to them and they to me” (Leonard, Mahjoeddin and Sherriff 2004, 128). Adrian Sherriff’s path to creating and performing the music came via his diverse performance skills and studies in jazz, South Indian music, Japanese shakuhachi, and Javanese and Balinese gamelan, as well as various previous intercultural compositional projects, including for the Australian Art Orchestra. For The Butterfly Seer, he undertook two fieldtrips to stsi Padang Panjang, where he worked with Indija’s teacher, Admiral Datuak Rangkayo, absorbed Minang musical styles and learnt to play the notoriously difficult saluang as well as other Minang wind and percussion instruments. But besides this, Adrian shares with Indija something of a cross-cultural background, having grown up in West Papua. He therefore approached the project not as an isolated commission but as part of “my whole act of engaging with Indonesian culture” (Leonard, Mahjoeddin and Sherriff 2004, 129). Further Indo­ nesian   input into the production came from the inclusion in the on-stage band of musicians (alongside Adrian and jazz trumpeter Stephen Grant) of Admiral himself, who was brought from Indonesia for the project, and Gosford (nsw)-based percussionist and leader of the Rhythm Hunters, Rendra Freestone. Rendra, who has a part-Indonesian background (his mother is from Aceh), has also studied music in West Sumatra. The music Adrian composed for the show includes the evocative dendanginfluenced songs that carry the story – sung by versatile singer Elizabeth Sisson – and fully scored instrumental interludes employing diverse Indonesian, Western and other musical styles performed on an array of brass, wind and percussion instruments from West Sumatra, South India, Japan and elsewhere. Islamic elements in the story are brought out musically in a variety of ways, for example, a melodica cleverly evokes a harmonium, an instrument commonly used in coastal Malay styles. At times, the music veers unexpectedly into jazz and even contemporary atonal idioms.17 Use of different musical idioms, materials and instruments served to underline the structure and dramatic changes and introduce particular characters. The sophisticated and dramatically complex musical score is balanced by other aspects of the production that carry a strongly traditional, or quasi-traditional, 17

See Sherrif (2006) for a detailed account of the music for The Butterfly Seer by the composer.

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flavour: the rather heightened, anachronistic language and rhyming verse of the narrative text and dialogue, the ornamented timbrally-charged vocal style and the relentlessly repeated sequence of music, sung narrative and action that propelled the story forward. The story’s Indonesian village recontextualization and Islamic content were clearly rendered for a non-Indonesia literate audience but efforts were also made to enhance the show’s accessibility by such things as projection of the song texts on a screen behind the action. In the production I saw, budget and other constraints forced the loss of randai’s usual circular format as well as most of the circular pencak silat-based dance sequences that would normally frame the space (and that Indija would have preferred to retain).18 Nevertheless, the production was a compelling hybrid Australian translation of a traditional Indonesian performance genre, underpinned by multiple transnational connections with Indonesia and mediated by the creativity and cultural authority of its creators and the professional skills of its collective of performing artists.

Ria Soemardjo

Like Indija Mahjoeddin, singer Ria Soemardjo also has a part-Indonesian background – in this case a Javanese father and Australian mother – and she has been exploring her Javanese heritage through her music. Although Javanese music was a part of the soundscape of Ria’s family home when she was young, as a teenager she turned away from all things Indonesian and expressed herself musically in other ways. In fact, it was her experience of singing Bulgarian music in the Melbourne Bulgarian Women’s Choir that first brought her to Javanese vocal music. She subsequently studied the Javanese female vocal tradition of sindhenan in Solo (Surakarta) and is the pesindhen in the Melbourne Community Gamelan ensemble as well as a frequent guest pesindhen in the gamelan and wayang performances of other groups. However, she has also moved beyond the strictly Javanese music sphere and into world music, extending her studies to Indian vocal music, specifically, the North Indian drupad genre, developing her own personal Javanese-influenced vocal style and writing her own songs. In the process she has become in high demand on the Australian world music performance circuit and beyond. She collaborates with a range of other world music practitioners – a fluid community of local professional musicians who perform together in varying combinations and have expertise in different traditions, including Indian music, Middle Eastern and 18

The production was at the Carlton Courthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 21 February 2006.

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Japanese music – and she released her second cd with her current group, Fine Blue Thread, a trio that features tuned (North Indian) tabla drums, light hand percussion, baroque gut-stringed cello and voice.19 The music of this group can be categorized as world music but it is in a chamber rather than world beat style and has an almost classical sensibility. It is delicately meditative in quality, with very spacious textures. Ria’s vocals, in particular, have a rhythmic looseness, a floating improvisatory quality, an absence of dynamic change and a sometimes almost instrumental colour, all of which subtly connects them to the Javanese macapat and sindhen traditions that she brings to her music. A less subtle influence is evident in the extensive use of Javanese pentatonic scales, especially pelog-type scales, and Ria’s preference for singing seated on the floor alongside the other musicians rather than positioned front of stage. She sometimes sings passages in Javanese from macapat songs but these arise almost organically out of her original Englishlanguage songs and are not clearly distinguished as traditional material for the audience. “I have a sense that these old songs live inside of me,” she says. “I’ve lived in Melbourne all my life, but I feel that my connection to Javanese music has shaped my whole approach to my artistic practice.”20 Yet Ria’s music does not conspicuously or self-consciously flag its cultural otherness – rather, its understated character gives it authenticity and reinforces its integrity. Genggong Contrasting in orientation and style is the Indonesian-flavoured, Sydney-based world-beat band, Genggong, which was most active before 2005.21 Genggong was formed in 1999 by its leader, the very widely-known Indonesian rock musician, singer-songwriter and actor, Sawung Jabo. Jabo has been a part-time resident of Sydney with his Australian family since the 1980s and simultaneously maintains a career in Indonesia. Unlike the examples discussed above, Genggong plays popular music, foregrounding prominent, energetic and intricate rhythms and a strong beat for dancing. While the overall sound is heavily 19 20

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Fine Blue Thread’s cd is titled Red Mountain (2009). Ria’s first solo cd (with guest artists) is Sift (2006). Unpublished script for a lecture-demonstration given by Ria Soemardjo for ‘Indonesia calling: Indonesian arts today’, 2008 Asialink Annual Arts Public Forum, 18 July 2008 (courtesy of the author). This section of the article is drawn from a conference paper presented at the Asian Studies Association of Australia Biennial Conference (Scott-Maxwell 2004b).

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oriented towards drumming and other percussion, Jabo provides the main focus for the band with his compelling stage presence and vocals and his driving guitar-playing. Yet the band’s songs and music are very much a product of the group and the unique musical skills and extensive experience of its members. They comprize – besides Sawung Jabo – Indonesian-Australian drummer, Reza Achman, and two non-Indonesian Australians: Ron Reeves, a professional percussionist who has spent many years in Indonesia and is a highly regarded player of Sundanese kendang, among other instruments, and Kim Sanders, a Sydney-based Balkan music specialist who plays various Bulgarian and Turkish wind instruments or saxophone in the band (and who sadly passed away in late 2013). Drawing on this personnel, Genggong’s hybrid fusion style blends rock music with Indonesian and Balkan instruments and sounds. Genggong is part of a dynamic Sydney community, or scene, of Indonesian or Indonesia-connected musicians, artists and associates that has produced other world music bands involving some of the same or other musicians, such as former Genggong member, Dewa Permana. A major 2004 collaborative music-theatre project, Sawung Galing, involved Jabo (as musical director) and Sydney-based Sidetrack Theatre in a co-production that toured five Javanese cities. Genggong has also performed in Indonesia and Genggong’s cd credits demonstrate how the project straddles two countries, with ‘friends’ grouped according to city: Sydney, Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Jember and Bali.22 Jabo himself exemplifies the transnationalism of someone who “lives in or connects with several communities simultaneously” (Yeoh 2003, 3). But he positions himself very differently in each. In Indonesia, Jabo’s identity is bound up with his role as a popular expressive artist who speaks emotionally to his audience through his song lyrics and his impassioned singing and guitar-playing. In Australia, however, where the Indonesian lyrics of his powerful and evocative songs are unintelligible to the vast majority of his audience and the social and other issues with which he engages mostly have no immediacy or particular resonance, Jabo identifies and is identified as an Indonesian and he has also adopted this identity in his music. His place in Australia is multicultural Australia and, similarly, his musical vehicle is a multicultural, or world beat, format where ethnicity and otherness are foregrounded. Australian multiculturalism is signalled by the ubiquitous Balkan musical components and an Indonesian form of multiculturalism is evident in the band’s songs, which are either arrangements of traditional tunes from various Indonesian regional cultures such as Madura or South Sulawesi, or original compositions that draw on Indonesian regional music traditions. Jabo’s intense, often raw vocal style is 22 The cd is Genggong: Not Just Music (2000).

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retained in Genggong. However, lyrics have become minimal and song words function principally as sounds. In some songs, the vocal line consists primarily of repeated rhythmic riffs or patterns using the onomatopaeic syllabic vocalizations of instrumental sounds that are part of traditional music practice in Indonesia (for example, repetitions of the vocalized gamelan sounds, ‘ning nong ning gung’) or word play that hinges on sound.23 Indeed the band’s name is the onomatopaeic Indonesian term for the jew’s harp. Equally important as the music in Genggong is the presentation, which includes dance and movement, mask work, modified traditional dress, textiles and other Indonesian iconography, and is captured in the band’s slogan, ‘not just music’. Lyrics and semantic content have been discarded for other aural and visual carriers of meaning: sounds, gestures, props, and instruments. Individually, the various elements are all rich in signification, not least due to their regional references, but the cumulative effect – especially for non-Indonesian audiences – is more one of abundant markers of ‘exotic’ Indonesianness. While Genggong’s version of Indonesian music has been received in Australia principally within an imagining of Indonesia as culturally rich, exotic other, many Australians continue to hold another image of Indonesia: that of the colonizer and subsequently destroyer of East Timor following the vote for independence and, more recently, the source of militant Muslim fundamentalists and terrorist attacks against Australians. Within this context, Sawung Jabo has been able to regain something of the broader social activist, or advocacy, role he has had in Indonesia. At the time of the East Timor referendum crisis in 1999, for example, his Australian performances with Genggong became, a means for him to publically declare his support for an independent East Timor, thereby demonstrating that not all Indonesians agreed with their (then) government’s actions.24 All three intercultural projects discussed above arise directly from the consequences of Indonesian migration to Australia, are the product – in various ways – of ongoing deep engagement with Indonesia and demonstrate transnational aspects. Notwithstanding substantial differences in medium, degree of hybridity, intercultural process, intention and outcome, they are all culturally and personally meaningful projects for their principal artists and vehicles for the construction of identities. They also involve groups of artists who collaborate together within contingent ‘communities’ but who also belong to looser local and other networks, including the Australia-Indonesia ‘cultural network’. 23 24

These can be heard on the cd in the tracks, Ning Nong Setan and Orak Arik. This occurred at Genggong’s 1999 Bellingen Festival performance and at a benefit concert for East Timor that Sawung Jabo organized at the Basement, Sydney.

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The hybrid content of the work they produce is strongly localized within an Australian multicultural context with the Australian content marked conspicuously as multicultural, “the intercultural impulse mingling with the migrant multicultural impulse,” as Indija states of The Butterfly Seer (Leonard, Mahjoeddin and Sherriff 2004, 128).25

The Indonesian Student Pop Culture Scene

The Indonesian student pop culture scene represents another, more focused and bounded arena of community-based contemporary Indonesian performance activity in Australia, as well as a significant site of collaboration and identity construction. In the last decade and a half, the Indonesian population in Australia has been swelled by large numbers of students arriving to study in tertiary institutions. Mostly, the students are temporary short-term residents, although some who come for education purposes end up staying in Australia permanently. They form a sub-set of the wider Indonesian community in that they are an in-group that socializes overwhelmingly with fellow students from Indonesia and has its own student organizations and networks, including virtual shared spaces and internet forums. These students – who are mostly from Jakarta or other big Indonesian cities and include many Chinese-Indonesians – engage with a diverse array of pop culture forms, including film, multimedia, photography, graphic design, music, dance and fashion. Film-making activity has resulted in the production of a number of local, student-made independent films, often with sound tracks employing the music of local Indonesian student bands or musicians. Musicmaking includes extensive band and song-writing activity and cd production. Various large-scale events incorporating live music, dancing and visual media take place regularly throughout the year, organized and run by student groups 25

Two examples of somewhat contrasting forms of Australian/Indonesian intercultural activity include the Australian-Balinese experimental wayang production, The Theft of Sita (2000), and the art-punk rock project Punkasila (2006). These were both artist-led, organized as funded art projects, and somewhat controversial in explicitly parodying or critiquing New Order ideology and its development agenda. Both involved Indonesian participants in the collaborative creative process and the performances but, ultimately, were more about artistic outcomes and furthering the Australian artists’ own goals than about cultural exchange as such. Ongoing engagement with Indonesia, or the projection of hybrid identities through performance were not a particular focus. For further information regarding these projects see Laurie (2000), Millie (2007) and the Punkasila cd, Acronym Wars (2006).

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from the various tertiary institutions usually under the umbrella of the Indonesian student association, Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia Australia (ppia), or by independent student and ex-student collectives or local for-profit promoters. For example, the ppia at rmit University organizes an annual event called Kafe Art. In 2008, Kafe Art was held in a Melbourne inner-city hotel venue and attended by around a thousand people. It featured a ‘battle of the bands’ and some special band performances; an art exhibition and competition; photography, multimedia and digital design; a display of fashion and modeling and a ‘magic performance’. Music activity within the scene is characterized by fluidity and collectivity. The Indonesian student community in Melbourne supports a remarkably large number of bands and they have a very high turnover. Bands constantly form and re-form in different combinations with interchange of membership as student musicians arrive from or leave for Indonesia. Ex-Melbourne student musicians often maintain contact after they have returned to Jakarta and some Melbourne bands have even re-formed there, so the scene has a strongly transnational dimension. Sometimes musicians even return to Australia for further study or work experience and rejoin the Melbourne scene. Music contests are a particularly popular type of event and a battle of the bands contest is held most years, either as part of a ppia event, or as a standalone. The winning band is usually decided by judging panel plus audience vote and, besides substantial prizes, gains recognition within the scene and further opportunities to perform. For example, the winner of the 2009 Kafe Art ‘battle’, the Nu-Bees, opened the tenth anniversary Kafe Art in 2010. The winning band of a 2003 battle, Playground, even became one of the support acts for the Melbourne appearance of Indonesian top pop group, Dewa, in 2005. In 2006, there was an Idola Melben contest, picking up on the worldwide Idol craze that included Indonesian Idol and Australian Idol. These various competitions constitute a shared activity and experience that expresses and affirms group identity. While the aim of the contests is to produce a winner, the focus of these events is as much on process as outcome, and the collective process produces a result that belongs to and can be claimed by the entire group. The importance of process was also apparent in a 2004 compilation cd production project, titled Pengamen Melbourne. The two producers intended the cd as a group rather than an individually-owned project. Each band or group was asked to contribute one pre-recorded track, the only stipulation being that it was original material. The fourteen bands ranged from well-established Melbourne-Indonesian student bands to groups of musicians who came together specially for the project. Some bands realized their tracks in home studios, but at least two made studio recordings in Jakarta. By the time the cd

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was produced, however, most of the musicians represented on it had already returned to Indonesia, having concluded their studies in Australia. The music on the cd spans most of the range of popular styles that are heard in the broader Melbourne Indonesian student scene, from pop to rock, including progressive rock genres, but with more emphasis on innovation and creativity in both music and lyrics than is normally encountered at live events. Song lyrics are mostly in Indonesian with a few songs in English.26 The music is arguably authentic in neither mediating its ‘Indonesianness’ in any way, nor representing or translating Indonesia for others. Yet it is representational of Indonesian students’ relationship with Australia. The cd contains various references to specific sites or landmarks of the musicians’ lived spaces and lives in Melbourne. These include, besides the cd title, the names of two of the bands (the Latrobes and Asian Groceries), various track titles and references in the lyrics, and the cd artwork, which comprises photos of familiar Melbourne architectural and sculptural icons and city bars, cafes and clubs that fall within the students’ ‘territory’. The images highlight both the scene’s connectedness to its Australian locality and also the nature of the relationship, which is more with a physical place than with its people or cultural aspects. Hence, perhaps the name the students give themselves: IndoMelbournian rather than, say, Indo-Australian. Notably, the cd, the musicmaking and the students’ wider pop culture scene point to the unengaged nature of their association with Australia. The students are nomads rather than migrants, without families and the obligations and constraints that go with them and without much commitment to the place where they live. Both the transitory nature of their residence in Australia and the intense and participatory nature of the in-group scene generate a self-contained social and cultural world not requiring much in the way of interaction with the host nation. The students’ identities are constructed through the group rather than the locality. Melbourne and the other Australian cities where they live provide new, exotic sites for their activities and a frame for their social space and scene, but it is a ‘borrowed’ space – captured by the ‘buskers’ concept of the Pengamen Melbourne cd. These sites do not act in a transformative way on the music and the students’ other creative activities. The students’ pop culture scene is informed only superficially by its Australian context. This contrasts with the other examples of Australian-based, Indonesiarelated performance discussed above which, in diverse ways, are strongly marked by both Australianness and Indonesianness. It also contrasts with the function of performance for many longer-term, more acculturated Indonesian 26

See Scott-Maxwell (2008) for further discussion of the cd content.

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residents in Australia, who become involved in Indonesian performance activities – often after a long period of non-involvement or sometimes even for the first time – precisely because of their growing connectedness to and identification with Australia and their distance (in every sense) from the homeland. They use their participation in Indonesian-identified performance genres as a means of self-consciously expressing their Indonesian roots, as a marker of their Indonesianness. Distance from Indonesia is also a factor in the students’ performance activities, especially the intensity of the scene which, together with study, fills an almost liminal space and time in their lives – a space and time that precede their return to Jakarta or elsewhere to re-enter the ‘real world’. But their pop culture expressions also articulate the transnational Australian/Indonesian space that they inhabit, the social meanings of their collective, participatory creative activity (whether as producers or consumers) and their Indonesian – rather than Indonesian-Australian – identities. Conclusion Through various case studies, this article has demonstrated how much Indonesia-related performance in Australia comes out of and reinforces a ‘shifting cultural network’ involving multiple pathways across and between Australia and Indonesia. This network has a geographical and historical dimension, being underpinned and fostered by Australia’s proximity to Indonesia as well as by post-war mass migration and Australian policies of multiculturalism, but it is also increasingly informed by the transnational fluidity that characterizes the present globalized era. It is given social substance and symbolic meaning through the various communities that generate performance, the collective collaborative processes involved in performance-making, and the identities that performance expresses. Australian gamelan groups are communities of affinity or interest: groups of individuals with diverse musical and sociocultural backgrounds who are bonded by their shared experience of musicmaking and who construct identities through their gamelan-playing that connect them to Indonesia. The more contingent groups of artists who collaborate in the creation of new, hybridized Indonesian-flavoured performance work with professional or semi-professional skills and concepts in their project-centred ‘communities’. However, their collectively-produced performances also demonstrate Indonesia-inflected identities as well as the Australian-marked multiculturalism that strongly informs the work. The Indonesian student pop culture and music scene is centred on a much more demarcated and bounded community. The students’ Australia-Indonesia

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cultural network is a distinctly transnational one, with a defined two-way pathway between the two countries. At the same time, their contests, music-making and other participatory pop culture activity are strongly process-focused and, through these processes, they affirm their shared group identities. Indonesia is represented performatively in Australia through diverse media and modes, bringing an engagement with Indonesia that variously projects authenticity (whether via the traditional sounds of the gamelan or the contemporary medium of pop) or the hybridity that explicitly fuses elements of Indonesian performance genres with others from elsewhere. Notwithstanding these diverse approaches, all performance engages with Indonesia through a specifically Australian frame, whether this constitutes the interaction of Indonesians and non-Indonesian Australians in gamelan performance, the specifically Australian cultural context for intercultural theatre and world music, or the Australian places and spaces in which the students create their pop scenes away from home. Whereas the identities embodied in performance in Indonesia seem to be increasingly varied and locally-focused rather than expressive of a unitary Indonesian identity, the foremost identifier for most Indonesia-related performance in present-day multicultural Australia is its Indonesianness. Historically, Indonesia has mostly represented a largely undifferentiated ‘other’ for Australians. In many ways, recent Indonesian performance in Australia also evokes for its audiences a uniform exotic Indonesianness, as noted in relation to some of the case studies. The complexities of Indonesia’s diverse cultural formations and identities tend to be appreciated only in the context of ethnic or religious-based political problems that occasionally ensnare Australia, such as the events surrounding East Timor’s independence from Indonesia or the current struggles of the West Papuan Independence movement. In the Australian context the identities expressed through Indonesia-related performance are primarily understood, subsuming any regional inflection, as ‘Indonesian’. Nevertheless, this ‘Indonesianness’ is nuanced by the specificities of the widely divergent forms presented to audiences, the contexts of the performances and the subjectivities of the performers. Thus, gamelan-playing can project an archetypal, almost essential Indonesianness, also for its IndonesianAustralian performers. For them it provides an embodied sensory connection with their Indonesian origins and a marker of Indonesian national identity, regardless of the ethnic and culturally-specific music and associated traditions that are performed. Somewhat similarly, the ‘Indonesian’ sounds and visual elements in world music bands such as Genggong perform an emblematic function as markers of an almost generic Indonesianness. This contrasts with

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the highly defined hybridized identities of artists like Ria Soemardjo or Indija Majhoeddin, which are expressed in their work and the discourse surrounding it, or the localized markers of Indonesian-Australian belonging in the pop culture of the mobile, globalized students, who themselves are the products of the post- New Order era. The overall field of Indonesia-related performance in Australia is fluid, variable and relatively low profile, largely sustained by and dependent on strong interpersonal associations or ties within and across communities and expressive of the subjectivities of its performers. As a site for significant Australian/ Indonesian interaction and cross-cultural engagement, performance communicates diverse meanings about the transnational and other connections that exist between Australia and Indonesia and the communities and identities that are constructed or reinforced through it. Beyond the borders of Indonesia, both Indonesians and Australians use performance and performance- associated creative processes as vehicles for identifying with Indonesia in various ways and, in the process, leave a strong social and symbolic Australian-Indonesian cultural legacy. References Ambyo, Arsisto. 2005. “Indonesian arts in diaspora” Swara Bendhe 7: 13–14. Batchelor, Don. 2000. Three plays by Asian Australians. Brisbane: Playlab Press. Cox, Peter. 1996. “The Ambonese connection: Lou Casch, Johnny O’Keefe and the development of Australian rock and roll” Perfect Beat: the Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture 2(4): 1–17. Crosby, Alexandra, Rebecca Conroy, Suzan Piper and Jan Cornall (eds). 2008. Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia creative adventures, Newtown, nsw: Gang Festival. Hough, Brett and Barbara Hatley (eds). 1995. Intercultural exchange between Australia and Indonesia. Clayton, Vic.: Monash Asia Institute. Kartomi, Margaret. 2002. The gamelan digul and the prison camp musician who built it: an Australian link with the Indonesian revolution. Rochester University Press. Laurie, Robin. 2000. “The Theft of Sita” Inside Indonesia 64(Oct-Dec). Accessed 17 January, 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/the-theft-of-sita. Leonard, Doug, Indija Mahjoeddin and Adrian Sherriff. 2004. “Mata Hari and the missionary position: Australian double agents in the seduction of randai” Australasian Drama Studies 45: 119–36. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. New York, Schocken Books.

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McIntosh, Jonathan. 2009. “Indonesians and Australians playing gamelan in Perth, Western Australia: community and the negotiation of musical identities” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 10(2): 80–97. MacKnight, Campbell. 1976. The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mendonça, Maria. 2002. “Javanese gamelan in Britain: communitas, affinity and other stories.” PhD thesis, Wesleyan University. Millie, Julian. 2007. “M16s for punks” Inside Indonesia 90(Oct-Dec). Accessed 17 January, 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/m16s-for-punks. Scott-Maxwell, Aline. 2003. “Indonesian traditions.” In Currency companion to music and dance in Australia ed. John Whiteoak and Aline Scott-Maxwell, 346–7. Sydney, Currency House. —— 2004a. “Imaging the west from the east: the Sisco Kid, an Indonesian-Australian cowboy and his music.” Paper, 3rd Australian Country Music Conference, Institute of Country Music, Gympie, Queensland. —— 2004b. “The perils and possibilities of border crossing: Sawung Jabo’s transition from Indonesian rock star to Australian multicultural artist.” Paper, 15th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, National Convention Centre, Canberra. —— 2008. “Making music to feel at home: the Indonesian student music scene in Melbourne.” In Music on the edge: selected papers from the 2007 iaspm Australia/ New Zealand Conference, Dunedin, ed. Dan Bendrups, 149–154. Dunedin: iaspm Australia/New Zealand. —— 2013. “Creating Indonesia in Australia: bridges, communities and identities through music”, Musicology Australia 35(1): 3–19. Sherriff, Adrian. 2006. “The essence of Minang: the musical score for ‘The Butterfly Seer’” Swara Bendhe 10: 16–18. Slobin, Mark. 1993. Subcultural sounds: Micromusics in the West. University Press of New England. Watson, Gary and Peter Dunbar-Hall. 2002. “Ethnicity, Identity and Gamelan Music: A Contrastive Study of Balinese Gamelan Music Practice in Sydney” Asia-Pacific Journal for Arts Education, 1(1): 51–9. Winarnita, Monika Swasti. 2009. “Dancing the nation in migration: Indonesian women in Perth perform a ‘uniting’ dance” Inside Indonesia 97(Apr–Jun). Accessed 17 January, 2014. http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/dancing-the-nation -in-migration. Yeoh, Brenda, Michael Charney and Tong Chee Kiong eds. 2003. Approaching transnationalisms: studies on transnational societies, multicultural contacts, and imaginings of home. Boston, Kluwer Academic.

chapter 10

Indo-European Pasar Malam, Identity and Performance in the Netherlands Fridus Steijlen Since Indonesian Independence, Indonesia-related performance in the Netherlands has played an important role in expressing a sense of identity and community, in ways strongly shaped by the colonial past but also changing in response to new political and cultural developments. For the waves of migrants from Indonesia who came to the Netherlands after the Second World War, social get-togethers and pasar malam (night fairs), where Eurasian bands played a mixture of Western, Indonesian and Hawaiian music and dance groups performed medleys of Indonesian dances, celebrated their mixed Indonesian/European Indisch identity and evoked nostalgic connections with a lost ‘home’. Beginning in the 1970s, increasing numbers of Indonesian artists came to the Netherlands to perform at the biggest pasar malam, reflecting strengthened networks between the Eurasian community and Indonesia, and improved political relations between Indonesia and the Netherlands. During the 1990s, in a climate of encouragement of multiculturalism, the Eurasian community began to express its hybrid cultural identity in a more sophisticated, nuanced way. Indonesian and European artists performed collaborative, experimental cross-cultural works, while pasar malam events also continued to sustain ongoing Indisch cultural nostalgia. Then, in 2010 and 2011, the Indonesian Embassy in the Netherlands, in collaboration with regional governments and business interests from various parts of Indonesia, staged a rival all-Indonesian Pasar Malam Indonesia, two months before and in exactly the same location as the main Eurasian pasar malam, the recently-renamed Tong Tong Fair. Traditional, conventional performances aimed at attracting tourism and investment predominated in the first year; in the second year the program was more modern and widely appealing. Now two types of festival, each drawing in its own way on contemporary Indonesian performance, promote competing aims and cultural visions. This chapter will describe the various stages in this story, analysing the social events and cultural performances which have given expression to IndoEuropean identity in the Netherlands through the decades, and the opportunities and challenges of the contemporary scene.

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Migration and Identity

Between 1945 and 1963 a total of more than 300,000 migrants from Indonesia and the Netherlands East Indies arrived in the Netherlands. In accordance with the turbulent political developments of the time they came in waves. The first group came directly after the end of the Second World War to recuperate from the hardships they had suffered as internees during the Japanese occupation. The majority thought that they would go back to the Indies after a time; some indeed did so. A second large wave came in 1950 and 1951 after the formal ending of the Dutch colonial presence in most of the archipelago, with only Netherlands New Guinea remaining a Dutch colony. A third tranche of migrants came between 1952 and 1957, most of them unable to migrate earlier because of financial and other reasons. A fourth wave came between 1958 and 1963, pushed by growing tensions between Dutch and Indo-European residents and Indonesians over Netherlands New Guinea. Among the migrants in this period were many Indo-Europeans who had opted for Indonesian nationality in 1949, but now regretted this choice because of worsening living conditions and discrimination in Indonesia. A last wave of migrants came after the final transfer of Netherlands New Guinea to Indonesia in 1963, most from New Guinea (Ellemers and Vaillant 1985). The story of the reception of the new arrivals from Indonesia was not a joyous one. They did not feel welcome, understanding that they had to keep silent about their experiences in the colonial Indies and Indonesia, and integrate as soon as possible. While acknowledging that the Netherlands in the 1950s was preoccupied with recovering and rebuilding after the war, we can see that its cold reception of the migrants, combined with the climate, resulted in a twofold experience of coldness for the new arrivals. Notwithstanding their sense of marginalization, the migrants were called ‘repatriates’, to express the idea that they had a right to return to the Netherlands, even though the vast majority had never set foot in the Netherlands before. An important characteristic of these migrants was that they had lost their homeland. Home used to be the Netherlands East Indies, which had ceased to exist because of decolonization, while in Indonesia they were not seen as belonging to the new nation. Culturally speaking the migrants from Indonesia formed a broad spectrum. There were families who had lived in the Netherlands East Indies for generations, but always married among white Dutch or other Europeans. They were referred to as totok, meaning pure. Meanwhile the vast majority were IndoEuropeans with ancestors from all kinds of Indonesian ethnic groups, as well as from Europe. In 2001, the total migrant population from Indonesia was estimated at 424,000; 11% totok, and the majority Indo-European or with Indo-European

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ancestors (Beets, Huisman, van Imhoff, Koesoebjono and Walhout 2002, 89). Their diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds made it difficult to identify a shared culture. What they had in common was their mixed family background and the cultural experience of the colonial elite in the Netherlands East Indies. In the 1950s and 1960s the Netherlands was not yet a multicultural society and the migrants from Indonesia were expected to integrate and become Dutch. To a large degree they did so without complaining. This led to observations in reports on migration to the Netherlands that the migrants from Indonesia had set an example of successful integration. It was only in the 1980s that the second generation started to question this image of harmoniously integrated migrant, suggesting it was a role that their parents had been forced to play (Leeuwen 2008, 142). They started to claim their position as an ethnic group within the emerging Dutch multicultural society, although recognizing the difficulty of defining their shared culture. Interestingly, the first generation, regarded as having integrated silently and smoothly, organized several platforms to celebrate what they called Indisch culture, using Indisch as an adjective to refer to the Netherlands East Indies. One form of such activity is kumpulan, gatherings where Indisch people come to dance, play bingo and enjoy a rijsttafel (literally ‘rice table’), a meal with rice and a variety of Indonesian side dishes. The other consists of pasar malam. These are fairs with commercial stands, food stalls and a cultural program. All over the country pasar malam are organized on a local and regional level. Some of them are initiated as a benefit for a club or association or to support a project such as assisting the victims of an earthquake or tsunami. Others are commercially organized by (semi) professionals, who frequently also donate to a good cause. A pattern of different sizes of pasar malam has developed from the 1950s onwards. The smallest are the fairs organized to benefit local organizations, or by local restaurants. Then there are several series of pasar malam each organized by the same person or event bureau in five to ten different towns. The largest pasar malam, the Pasar Malam Tong Tong, or Tong Tong Fair as it is called today, is organized once a year in The Hague and can be seen as the mother of the pasar malam. And a new and very different shoot of the pasar malam tree is the Pasar Malam Indonesia, organized since 2010 by the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague.

Performances at Pasar Malam

There are considerable similarities in the cultural programs of the regular pasar malam. First of all, most of the artists have an Indo-European or

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Moluccan family background. The repertoires of the bands vary from Indorock, the rock music played by Indo-European bands in Europe in the 1950s, kroncong, Indonesian popular music originally derived from Portuguese songs, Hawaiian and Western music and easy listening pop music. For Indisch visitors to pasar malam and kumpulan, Western music combined with line-dancing is a favourite, along with evergreen tunes to which listeners may dream away nostalgically. Among the solo artists there are some real celebrities who express feelings of belonging to the old Indies. The most well known are Tante Lien (Aunt Lien) and Aïs Lawalata. Aïs is a Moluccan singer and Tante Lien is a nostalgic figure: the old Indisch aunt with her typical misspronunciations of Dutch, performed by the actress Wieteke van Dort.1 A few solo artists also come from independent Indonesia. This is the case for example with Melanie Foeh who was born in Surabaya and became a singer in a church choir, after which she made a career singing in Surabaya bars and hotels before coming to the Netherlands. Sometimes wayang shadow puppet theatre and gamelan music are also performed at pasar malam.2 Another example of an artist from post-colonial Indonesia is dancer Ketut Edi Sugianto, born in Singaraja, Bali. Ketut started to dance at five years of age. After attending the Institute of the Arts in Denpasar he performed at parties and on cruise ships. When he attended an International Dance School in Rotterdam he met two women with whom he started a Balinese dance group ‘Indonesian Paradise’. The dances they perform are not classical, they are combinations of classical and modern dance forms, ranging from ballet, jazz, hip hop to street dance.3

1 There are also simulated travel programs to Indonesia where one visits places connected to the colonial era, accompanied by Tante Lien or a younger Indisch singer-songwriter Wouter Muller. 2 As in Australia (see Aline Scott-Maxwell’s chapter in this volume) there are several gamelan ensembles in the Netherlands. Post-colonial performances of gamelan started in 1966 when ethno-musicologist Ernst Heins began to play the old gamelan that was exhibited in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. At the end of the 1970s another ethnomusicologist, Elsje Plantema, who studied in the Netherlands and Indonesia, started to play gamelan with different ensembles and orchestras. She now teaches gamelan at the conservatory in Amsterdam. The gamelan house in Amsterdam is a combination of seven gamelan ensembles, led by Dutch and Indonesian musicians. They play traditional as well as modern pieces, and compose their own music. This chapter does not discuss these gamelan ensembles, as its focus is the performances of Indonesian artists and pasar malam. 3 Personal introduction by Ketut Edi Sugianto on the website of his dancing group: http:// balidanceart.weebly.com/over-ons.html. Accessed 22 January 2014.

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Most dance groups perform traditional Indonesian dances and, reflecting the popular culture tastes of the Indisch public, include also Hawaiian and Tahitian dances. Few groups include members originally from Polynesia or Tahiti. An exception is Hawaiian Treasure that started as ‘Mata Hari’ performing Indonesian dances in the 1980s, then continued under its present name after it included Polynesian dances. One of its members comes from Tahiti where he already was a dancer.4 Many other groups, such as Dancing Group Orchid and Bunga Melati were founded within family circles. Orchid was formed back in the 1950s and Bunga Melati in the 1980s. The core dancers are still from the original families.5 The groups try to include dances from different Indonesian regions to show the variety of the Indonesian culture. They attempt to illustrate the culture of each island (Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Moluccan Islands) within a half hour, using original music and traditional dancing costumes. All groups promise their public to bring them back to the old times: tempo doeloe. Most of the artists at pasar malam are not professional in the sense that they earn a full-time living as performers, with the exception of figures such as Tante Lien and Aïs Lawalata. Their repertoire in most cases is broader than the acts they usually present at pasar malam. The group Orchid is an interesting example. Besides Indonesian, Tahitian and Hawaiian dances it offers a Michael Jackson tribute which can be hired for all kind of events. On occasion the Michael Jackson tribute is also performed at pasar malam. For example in the village of Dieren, hometown of the Orchid dance group, the audience experienced a Michael Jackson medley with songs like Thriller and Annie and dancers performing Michael Jackson’s steps and moves in front of a cardboard cut-out of a Balinese temple entrance.6 Another remarkable participant in the pasar malam and kumpulan circuit is Mambesak, a Papuan group performing traditional Papuan dances and songs. The group formed as the dancing group Sandiki but decided to change its name in 2003 to Mambesak, meaning Bird of Paradise. In so doing they were following in the footsteps of the Mambesak group that was formed by the Papuan anthropologist Arnold Ap in 1978 in Jayapura to conserve Papuan 4 Background information on the composition of the group from the website of Hawaiian Treasure: http://polynesian-show.nl/page11.php. Accessed 22 January 2014. 5 Background information on the website of Bunga Melati: http://dansgroepbungamelati.nl/. Accessed 22 January 2014. 6 See http://www.webstars.nl/ArtistHome.aspx?nickname=Dansgroep%20orchidee and http://www.webstars.nl/ArtistHome.aspx?nickname=Dansgroep%20orchidee. Accessed 22 January 2014.

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culture. In 1983 Arnold Ap was arrested by the Indonesian military and was found shot dead April 1984. His disappearance and death was seen as a result of his mission to preserve Papuan culture and its perceived links with the call for separatism by Papuan political organizations. Wherever this Papuan group performs, the Morning Star, the flag of an independent Papua, is part of the décor. Merchandise in the same colours is offered for sale. Goods in the colours of the Moluccan separatist movement, the rms, are also often displayed in the commercial stands, while otherwise the pasar malam are politically neutral.

The Phenomenon of Pasar Malam Tong Tong

The Pasar Malam Tong Tong is the largest and oldest pasar malam event in the Netherlands. It advertises its activities with the slogan that it is the largest Eurasian Festival in Europe. Pasar Malam Tong Tong is certainly a phenomenon in itself. It used to be organized in an event hall but moved to an ‘archipelago’ of tents in the 1980s. To get an impression of the size and complexity of the event, I will start with a thick description of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong, taken from a research report in 2005, before focusing in on its history (See Steijlen 2006). Coming from The Hague Central Station the first thing visitors to the Pasar Malam Tong Tong see are the contours of the largest tents in Europe and, on the open field in front of them, waving banners and cheerful musical windmills from Bali. The clattering of the windmills mixed with the flapping sound of the banners sounds like a welcome. What the visitors probably do not realize is that two weeks before the opening of Pasar Malam Tong Tong the field was empty. At that time a truck had arrived carrying the parts of the first tent to be erected. The first to be built is the central tent, twenty metres high at the corners, and then the other tents follow. The construction must be done with precision because everything has to fit. Discussions on the exact location of the tents and mapping of facilities had begun three months earlier. At this time Ferry, who is responsible for the technical aspects of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong, examines the plans of the layout with the builders. They decide how the tents will be located in relation to each other, where the emergency entrances should be, and what adaptations must be made because of new safety regulations: where the generators will be located, the garbage collectors, the first aid, the atm and the toilets. The toilets can only be stationed at certain spots on the field, in the two places where they can be connected to the sewer. At a later stage the requirements of the

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booth owners will be included into the discussion: where do they need electricity, lights, and water? Few visitors to Pasar Malam Tong Tong will take note of the infrastructure that has been worked on for months. They might easily find the atm and maybe think the toilets are too far away. They probably do not see the processing of the garbage. Yet in terms of size the Pasar Malam Tong Tong is equivalent to a small village. For instance, its electricity usage is comparable to that of a village. There are 5  km of electricity cables, some 1.2 million litres of water are consumed and 70 tons of garbage are disposed of. Its public administration is also like that of a village, as there is a sort of city hall dealing with permits, security and welfare. There is a department of public relations and people who make the decisions, with whom you can negotiate. And as in a village, there are people walking in the streets, buying things from the shops, visiting the theatres and bars. As in every village there is a combination of pure commercial ventures and more idealistically-oriented activities. The main difference between a village and Pasar Malam Tong Tong is that nobody lives or even sleeps at Pasar Malam Tong Tong, and that it is open only 12 days a year. Pasar Malam Tong Tong started in 1959. The initiators were members of the Indisch Cultural Society of The Hague, among them the famous Jan Boon (Tjalie Robinson) and Mary Brückel-Beiten.7 They organized the Pasar to raise funds for the society. Due to its tremendous success they decided to organize the event again the next year, without realizing that they were starting a long tradition. The first Pasar Malam Tong Tong were held in a small event hall and consisted of a kind of a funfair and a market. In 1963, it moved to a larger location, the Houtrusthallen, a sports hall in The Hague. In the meantime, the Pasar had already grown from a funfair and market to a bigger event, with the addition of an expanding cultural program of performances and fashion shows. The name ‘Tong Tong’, meaning a wooden drum used to send messages, was taken from that of the Tong Tong magazine published by Tjalie Robinson, with which the pasar was connected in its early years. At the end of the 1960s the organization of the Pasar was transferred to a special foundation: by that time the leading figures were Rogier Boon, a son of Tjalie Robinson, and his wife Ellen Derksen. In 1972, the name Pasar Malam Tong Tong was changed to Pasar Malam, and in 1976 the word besar (big) was added, creating Pasar 7 Tjalie Robinson (1911–1974) was a writer, journalist and spokesman for the Indisch community in the Netherlands. He called upon the Indisch community to keep their culture alive. (Willems 2008). Mary Brückel-Beiten (1904–1992) is seen as the key person for the distribution of Indisch cuisine in the Netherlands (Captain 2005).

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Malam Besar ‘the big pasar malam’ (Koning 2009, 266–267).8 In 1988 the Pasar Malam had to leave the Houtrusthallen. Instead of looking for an indoor location, the organizers decided to create their own archipelago of tents on the central field in The Hague: Malieveld. There they could construct a chain of tents with theatres, a street of food stalls and a market. Not only was the size of the festival expanding, the cultural program also expanded. In 2009, when the event celebrated its 50th anniversary, it had five different theatres, a food street, several bars – among them an ‘Indo-rock café’ – and a large central market. In the variety of theatres, different cultural programs were presented: the small Bengkel (workshop) was used for small-group activities and workshops; the Bibit (seed) theatre was for lectures and discussions; in the large Bintang (star) theatre a variety of larger acts were programmed; there was a cooking theatre with demonstrations of Eurasian cuisine; a central stage in the market; and the Tong Tong stage, for popular acts (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). In her opening speech the director of the then Pasar Malam Besar announced that the festival was to change its name the following year to Tong Tong Fair. For the majority of the public this decision came as a shock because ‘Pasar Malam Besar’ stood for an important Indisch cultural institution. The organizers, however, were looking for a way to emphasize their cultural program and distinguish their event from all the other pasar malam; the word pasar malam was already so far integrated in the Dutch language that the dictionary defined it as a ‘nostalgic Indonesian annual market’. This was not the image the people behind the Pasar Malam Besar wanted for their festival. By reclaiming the name Tong Tong, which had been associated particularly with the cultural program, they emphasized the continuity of their cultural tradition and at the same time referred to the origin of the festival (Koning 2009, 234). The visitors to the Pasar Malam Tong Tong come with different backgrounds and expectations. First and foremost it is a group happening; most people come with family or friends. First generation Indisch people come to sniff the Indisch atmosphere and meet old friends. Their children and grandchildren expect to find something of their Indisch history and culture. Food is an important identity marker for them. But also veterans, who were sent to fight the Indonesian independence movement after the Second World War, frequent Pasar Malam Tong Tong to experience sights and smells and a general ambience that reminds them of their days in Indonesia which have left such an imprint on their personal history. A substantial group of visitors will visit Pasar

8 For convenience I will continue to use Pasar Malam Tong Tong instead of the successive names.

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Figure 10.1

Figure 10.2

Art, craft and food stalls at Pasar Malam Besar, The Hague, 2004 Photo: Fridus Steijlen

Musical performance at Pasar Malam Besar, The Hague, 2004

Photo: Fridus Steijlen

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Malam Tong Tong more than once during the twelve days it is open (Steijlen, 2006).

Indonesian Acts at Pasar Malam Tong Tong

There seems to be some tension between the motives of the visitors who frequent Pasar Malam Tong Tong and the ambitions of the organizers, a discontinuity between presenting a creative cultural festival and at the same time a fair which sustains and celebrates Indisch culture. This tension seems in a way inherent to Pasar Malam Tong Tong. Often the question arises as to whether the event is primarily an exercise in nostalgia. The Pasar Malam Tong Tong itself encourages such discussion, as its ambience exhales reference to ‘old times’. One of the first objects visitors encounter is a replica of the front of a colonial house where they are invited to take photographs, whilst all the lanes in the site are named after well-known Indisch people. One could argue that the visitors with Indisch backgrounds, enjoying nostalgic memories, seeking a sense of identification and belonging, are themselves an essential part of the festival. Today’s organizers think of Indisch culture explicitly as a hybrid culture, including Dutch and Indonesian or, more broadly, European and Asian components. In recent decades they have developed intercultural projects in which artists from Asia and Europe have collaborated to present a new hybrid Eurasian culture. However, this understanding and its appropriate artistic expression differ significantly from the approaches taken at earlier stages in the history of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong. From the start Indonesian dances and kroncong music were central to the cultural performances at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong; kroncong is seen as typically Indisch in its hybrid blending of Indonesian and Portuguese influences (Stichting Tongtong 1982, 2–11). Hawaiian music was also popular. The program for the 1965 Pasar Malam indicates, for example, that there were performances by the Kilima Hawaiians and the teenage singer Trea Dobbs, as well as a band playing country and western and Mexican music. Hawaiian and country and western songs fitted the popular culture tastes of the Indisch audience, while Mexican numbers suggested an interest in what we would call today ‘world music’. In 1971, at the 13th Pasar Malam Tong Tong, two of the main acts were from the former Dutch colony of Suriname: the Kawali Band and the singer Max Woiski Jr.9 Max Woiski Jr. was introduced as the dark man 9 In 1971 Suriname was still part of the Netherlands. It became independent in 1975.

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of warm song who leaves his nightclub in Amsterdam to play at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong (Stichting Tongtong 1971, 2–5). Over time the eclectic blend of Indonesian, European and other cultural forms shifted in the direction of a stronger focus on Indonesia. In 1973, the first Indonesian artist to perform at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong was Djoni Ginsir, a wood carver and dancer from Bali. In his footsteps came a series of performers and artisans, including wayang golek puppeteer Engkin Tua from West Java, weavers from Sumatra, Kalimantan and Timor, and Mpu Praptowihardjo a keris smith from Yogyakarta. In 1977 six artisans from Kotagedé displayed their skills in silver work and shadow puppet making (Slootweg 1988, 90). Slowly the number of Indonesian stallholders increased. A key figure in the Indonesia connection was Rogier Boon, who settled in Indonesia in 1973 after becoming divorced from Ellen Derksen. He was still involved in the Pasar, actively contracting artists and performers from Indonesia to appear there. Ellen Derksen also started to visit Indonesia regularly looking for people who could contribute to the Pasar Malam Tong Tong. Alongside the Pasar’s expanding artistic links with Indonesia, relations with the Indonesian authorities also grew stronger, as reflected in the fact that from 1975 on the event was often opened by the Indonesian Ambassador for the Netherlands (Koning 2009, 93). In 1982 two Indonesian acts appeared on stage twice a day for ten days: Saung Angklung, led by Pak Udjo, and Ritta Rubiyana and Dhian Hermina performing Sundanese songs and dances. One year later Prince Hadinoto from Yogyakarta had the honour of representing Indonesia as a main act performing classical court dances, and the Himpunan Seniman Muda Indonesia (Indonesian Young Artists Association) staged music and dance from diffe­ rent Indonesian regions, dressed in the traditional costumes of the respective regions. The Indonesian Ministry of Tourism was present at this 25th Pasar Malam Tong Tong with a large contingent of staff dispensing information, and four regional tourist authorities also attended (Stichting Tongtong 1983, 2–13).

A New Generation in Power

At the beginning of the 1990s, Siem Boon, Rogier Boon and Ellen Derksen’s daughter, who had participated for a decade in the cultural program, took over responsibility for its operation. She wanted to make changes to the Indonesian content of the program, to move away from its traditional approach. The audience had started to think of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong as an Indonesian instead of an Indisch event (Koning 2009, 182). The Indonesian acts were mainly sponsored

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by the Indonesian government; they were widely viewed as simply folkloric displays, as ‘dancing postcards’.10 In 1991 a dance ensemble of 85 people closed their performance exuberantly chanting Merdeka (Freedom!) while waving the red and white Indonesian flag (Koning 2009, 161). This was a painful experience for many viewers because of the association with the violent start of the anti-colonial Indonesian revolution in 1945. With Siem Boon a new generation of Eurasians started to influence the program.11 They wanted to articulate and respond to questions from their own generation concerning Indisch history and culture: as the Pasar Malam Tong Tong was, at this time, moving from the indoor hall to the tents on Malieveld, there was space to try new things at the festival, like additional theatres and stages. New elements included an extensive film program, discussions about literature, and lectures about Indisch culture and history, as well as about Indonesia. There was even a special wayang theatre where wayang golek and kulit were performed and explained. Later the wayang would be transferred into the Bengkel, the workshop, as part of an interactive cultural program. Indonesian participation became broader. Not only kroncong and traditional dances, but also raunchy dangdut popular music was programmed. In 2000, for example, Inul Daratista from Surabaya performed on each of the twelve days on the central stage with a band called Dangdut Bule (Whitey Dangdut). With Inul, Pasar Malam Tong Tong had contracted a rising star in Indonesia. A few years later a huge controversy erupted in Indonesia over Inul’s sensual way of moving. In 2008 a younger generation of dangdut performers were involved: Maya KDI performed on stage with her band Sadewa and there was also a karaoke-style dangdut workshop with her in the Bengkel. One of Siem Boon’s ambitions, when she started to take over programming in the 1990s, was to create her own productions. This of course took some time because ideas had to be developed and funding obtained. The idea behind her own productions was to explore and celebrate the hybridity of Indisch culture. Indisch culture is not just a random mix, with bits of European, Indonesian, and other Asian cultures thrown in; there should be a thoughtful blending and chemistry. One beautiful example was the programming of Balinese guitar player, I Wayan Balawan, and his Batuan Ethnic Fusion in 2008. I Wayan Balawan had already played at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong some years earlier. He fitted in the hybrid culture project because he combined a classical Jazz setting using drums and guitar with gamelan instruments, creating a fresh 10 11

Interview by author with Siem Boon, 16 October 2008. Ellen Derksen was still involved as director.

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kind of world jazz. Like Maya KDI, I Wayan Balawan held workshops in the Bengkel. Ensembles performing traditional dances and music and promoting Indonesia’s cultural and folkloristic diversity still participate in the Pasar Malam Tong Tong. Perhaps, however, more important are groups and performers presenting modern fusion culture because they contribute to the hybrid cultural focus of the event. The focus of Pasar Malam Tong Tong was never solely on Indonesia. As we have seen Surinamese, Hawaiian and Mexican cultures were featured in the 1960s and 1970s. But in the present day, the Pasar Malam Tong Tong programmers are more consciously in search of the hybrid, as well as the roots of the Indisch mixture. In 2000, for example, side by side with Inul’s dangdut performance, Portuguese fado was programmed as one of the original sources of kroncong. In 2007 the program offered a Melayu Orchestra from Singapore and a form called ‘krontyoung’, modern arrangements of kroncong. While the Melayu Orchestra and krontyoung represented fusion, other groups evoked the roots of Indisch culture, and staged more traditional Indonesian performing arts. A very special fusion production Wayang Willem was performed at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong in 2011. The story of the founding of the Dutch Kingdom, the war against the Spanish and murder of the leader of the resistance, Willem of Orange, one of the ancestors of the present queen, was played out through wayang kulit. The 71-year-old dalang (puppeteer) Ki Ledjar Soebroto and his grandson Nanang played Wayang Willem several times for a full house. The story was performed with specially-made puppets in Javanese language with subtitles in Dutch beside the wayang screen. According to Hedi Hinzler, a specialist in Balinese art and initiator of the project, Ki Ledjar had learnt the story of Willem of Orange at school: he showed her an old schoolbook with the story.12 In Ki Ledjar the Pasar Malam Tong Tong had managed to find another Indonesian performing artist who was exploring outside traditional spaces in his art. Ki Ledjar had created new wayang figures based on contemporary Japanese samurai comics and on old stories of the mousedeer trickster, Kancil. He had also developed a wayang Sultan Agung depicting the struggle of the sultan’s forces against the Dutch and a wayang revolusi, representing figures in the 1945 Indonesian revolution (Sudiarno 2009). Ki Ledjar fitted seamlessly into the innovating, hybridizing project of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong.

12 See http://tongtongfestival.nl/staande-ovatie-voor-poppenspelers-van-wayang-willem. Accessed 22 January 2014.

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Pasar Malam Indonesia

A striking new development on the pasar malam scene was the institution in 2010 of the Pasar Malam Indonesia. In the preceding years Indonesian officials had shown great interest in the Pasar Malam Tong Tong. While there had been tensions with the Indonesian Embassy at the end of the New Order – the Embassy had tried to influence the programming of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong and in 1996 boycotted the event in protest at the showing of a film about Pramoedya Ananta Toer – relations improved in the post-Suharto reformasi era (Koning 2009, 177, 180). Then in 2007, Ambassador J.E. Habibie proposed to the directors of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong that the Embassy take over the organization of the Indonesian pavilion at the fair. The proposal was refused in keeping with the policy of independence of the Pasar Malam. So in 2010 Ambassador Habibie started his own Indonesian pasar malam to promote Indonesia culturally, commercially and to attract investors.13 This initiative in presenting Indonesia to the ‘wider world’ abroad clearly reflects political changes in post-New Order Indonesia. The decline in central political power has resulted in less need for one central national Indonesian representation to the outside world and created space for other representations. It has encouraged a re-orientation of Indonesia’s relations with foreign countries as well as its connections with people living abroad who have family ties to Indonesia.14 At the same time the introduction of the Pasar Malam Indonesia also reflects shifts in economic and political power structures within Indonesia in the postNew Order, regional autonomy period, as influential regional government and business interests collaborate actively with the national government in presenting themselves abroad. The Embassy rejected suggestions that by holding the new pasar malam in exactly the same location and almost the same time as the Pasar Malam Tong Tong they were attempting to compete with the long-established event. A spokesman described the Pasar Malam Indonesia as compatible with, and at the same time less commercial than the Pasar Malam Tong Tong (Jansen 2009). 13 14

As stated by Habibie on the Pasar Malam Indonesia Website: http://www.pasarmalam indonesia.com. Accessed 22 January 2014. A noteworthy development in this post-New Order orientation to the outside world is the Indonesia diaspora network, connecting people of (partly) Indonesian descent that was established in 2012. The aim of the Indonesian diaspora network, as stated on their website http://www.diasporaindonesia.org/, is to inspire Indonesian diasporic communities to connect and unite into one big community and create a tangible force in order to achieve a better Indonesia.

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Yet these direct comparisons with the Pasar Malam Tong Tong arguably indicate a sense of competition with the older event. Reports in the Indisch media suggest a critical reception for the new comer. Although people were confused about the fact that there already was a pasar malam in April in The Hague, visitors experienced the event as Indonesian and not Eurasian or Indo.15 The program of the first Pasar Malam Indonesia was modest and fairly traditional, and attracted criticism for being too predictable. In a comment on a YouTube clip of Sumatran dance somebody wrote: “Funny, but a bit corny. Indonesian Embassy, keep up with the times.”16 In 2011, the programming of the Pasar Malam Indonesia was much more dynamic. There were daily discussions about contemporary Indonesia with topics ranging from investment prospects to democratization and religious harmony. The cultural program was broader and more exiting. Putri Ayu and Hudson, respectively number two and number three in the 2010 Indonesia mencari bakat (Indonesia looking for talent) competition, performed twice solo and twice with other artists. Hudson, whose act is to dress half as a man and half a woman while singing songs like Sinatra’s New York alternately as ‘female’ and ‘male’, evoked colonial nostalgia with a rendition of the Dutch song ‘Geef mij maar Nasi Goring’ (I prefer Nasi Goreng). The dancing ensembles were also modern and innovative, including groups like Funky Papua Rumingkang. In the music section appeared famous old singers like Bob Tutupoly, well known in the 1970s and 1980s, but also Lia Emilia a dangdut performer famed for her sexy dancing.17 Emilia had already performed in the Netherlands for the Indonesian Embassy at its party for the 64th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence in 2009.18 The more exciting program and discussions, along with a direct invitation to attend from the Acting Ambassador Umar Hadi to third generation IndoEuropeans, resulted in a more positive reception for the second Pasar Malam Indonesia than the first. When interviewed by the third generation website Indisch 3.0, Umar Hadi stated that he wanted the Pasar Malam Indonesia to be institutionalized, like the Tong-Tong Fair which everyone knows in Jakarta. 15 16 17 18

Personal communications from several visitors. See: http://www.indisch3.nl/2010/04/19/ pasar-malam-indonesia-de-cicaks. Comment by Eric Nolten, uploaded 5 April 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZAe _O8V0vE. Accessed 22 January 2014. In some of her performances Lia Emilie plays with a whip in sado-masochistic style. See the clips uploaded to YouTube by ‘Duice49’ on 11 and 12 April 2011, by ‘Londoireng’ on 3, 4 and 7 April 2011 and by ‘Pakubuono Buono’ on 22 Oktober 2012. All accessed 22 January 2014.

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Concluding Thoughts

The several waves of migrants who came to the Netherlands between 1945 and 1963 as a result of the decolonization of Indonesia for the most part assimilated smoothly into Dutch society as was expected of them. However, they were still able to preserve some of their own hybrid culture and identity. Frequent meetings at kumpulan and pasar malam created an ethnic niche for Indonesian performing arts. Most of the performers belonged to the Indisch migrant community itself. They played Indo-rock, Hawaiian or kroncong music and performed traditional dances. While there was some room for artists coming from contemporary Indonesia, overall the Indonesian performing arts at the pasar malam and kumpulan remained the domain of Indisch performers. The Pasar Malam Tong Tong as the largest and oldest pasar malam in the Netherlands has a different history. It has grown into a phenomenon, an institution that stands for Indisch culture writ large. In the 1970s the Pasar Malam Tong Tong started to feature Indonesian performing artists in programming which fitted with the priorities of the Indonesian authorities. Given the feeling in the Netherlands concerning Indonesia at this time, this was a major achievement. Perhaps it involved also a significant personal and cultural as well as political adjustment: a closer and more positive contemporary identification by Indo-European migrants with their Indonesian heritage. An important change came with the taking over of the Pasar Malam Tong Tong programming by the third generation Indisch migrants. New ambitions were set, engagement with modern Indonesian art and innovative fusion projects. Performances involving Indonesian artists also exploring cultural mixture and fusion in their work were a major focus. Such programming allowed the Pasar Malam Tong Tong to move away from the traditional pasar malam format, offering a forum for Indisch people in the Netherlands to interrogate and develop their own contemporary culture. The change of name to Tong Tong Fair in 2009 was intended to distance the event from other pasar malam, emphasize its cultural dimension and signal a more cosmopolitan approach. At the same time, its overall format allowed continuing nostalgic celebration of traditional Indisch identity. The position of the Indonesian Embassy and other Indonesian authorities towards the Pasar Malam Tong Tong has changed with political shifts in Indonesia through the years – from facilitation and support of invited Indonesian artists during the early New Order period, to demands and restrictions on programming as political tensions rose in the later years of the regime, to rapprochement since reformasi in 1998. The more outgoing and initiativetaking attitude of the post-reformasi Embassy has caused another dilemma,

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however. The liberalization that has fostered rapprochement has also given rise to rivalry. The Embassy started to organize its own pasar malam, putting itself in direct competition with the Malam Tong Tong. Although the stated aim of the Ambassador was to create a complementary event, the Pasar Malam Indonesia resembles the Pasar Malam Tong Tong very closely because of its location and the use of tents. The competition is not equal. The Pasar Malam Tong Tong/Tong Tong Fair is an independent enterprise that draws on income from the market and small subsidies to support its cultural program. The Pasar Malam Indonesia is heavily sponsored by the Indonesian authorities. What will happen in the future is unknown – whether successive Indonesian ambassadors will continue to support the Pasar Malam Indonesia;19 whether the Tong Tong Fair will be able to withstand the competition; whether the Pasar Malam Indonesia will develop its own community base. For the present the public is the winner in the competition, being presented with top quality contemporary Indonesian popular culture at the Pasar Malam Indonesia, and innovative explorations of Indisch cultural hybridity at the Pasar Malam Tong Tong. As in previous decades, Indonesiarelated performance in the Netherlands expresses and contests identity in ways closely connected with its contemporary social and political context. References Beets, Gijs, Corina Huisman, Evert van Imhoff, Santo Koesoebjono and Evelien Walhout eds. 2002. De demografische geschiedenis van de Indische Nederlanders. (The demographic history of the Indies Dutch.) Den Haag: nidi. Captain, Esther. 2005. “De Indische mens in Den Haag.” (The Indisch people of The Hague.) In Esther Captain, Maartje de Haan, Fridus Steijlen and Pim Westerkamp De Indische Zomer in Den Haag: het cultureel erfgoed van de Indische hoofdstad. (Indian Summer in The Hague: the cultural heritage of the ‘Indisch capital city’.) 193–201. Leiden: kitlv. Ellemers, Jo and Rob Vaillant. 1985. Indische Nederlanders en gerepatrieerden. (Indies Dutch and returnees.) Muiderberg: Coutinho. Jansen, Herman. 2009. “Indonesische ambassade kondigt ook markt aan op Malieveld” (Indonesian Embassy also announces market at Malieveld) Algemeen Dagblad, 22 December. 19

In 2014 the Pasar Malam Indonesia was cancelled. According to the Indonesian Embassy, this was because the Embassy was preoccupied with many other activities, and was in the process of re-evaluating the best way to promote Indonesia.

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Koning, Florine. 2009. De Pasar Malam van Tong Tong. Een Indische onderneming. (The Pasar Malam of Tong Tong, an Indisch Enterprise). The Hague: Stichting Tong Tong. Leeuwen Lizzy Van. 2008. Ons Indisch Erfgoed. Zestig jaar strijd om cultuur en identiteit. (Our Indisch Heritage. Sixty years of struggle for culture and identity.). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Slootweg, Dick. 1988. Boekoe Pienter Besar. 30 Jaar Pasar Malam in Den Haag. (The Anniversary Guide Book. 30 years of Pasar Malam in The Hague.) Den Haag: Stichting Tong Tong. Stichting Tong Tong. 1971. Boekoe Pienter. (Annual Guide to the Pasar Malam). ——  1982. Boekoe Pienter. (Annual Guide to the Pasar Malam). ——  1983. Boekoe Pienter. (Annual Guide to the Pasar Malam). Steijlen, Fridus. 2006. “In de Indische stad op het Malieveld: de Pasar Malam Besar. Een antropologische verkenning.” (In the Indisch city on Malieveld: the Pasar Malam Besar. An anthropological visit). Unpublished paper, presented at Pasar Malam Besar 2006. Sudiarno, T. 2009. “Ki Ledjar Soebroto: pupper master left in the shadows.” Jakarta Post, 30 March. Willems, Wim. 2008. Tjalie Robinson: biografie van een Indo-schrijver. (Tjalie Robinson: biography of an Eurasian writer.) Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker.

chapter 11

Audiences and Arts Spaces in Jakarta Post-1998 Alia Swastika The study of audiences has attracted my interest over the last few years. Although the audience plays an important role in the development of performance, it has generally received little attention in discussion of the history of Indonesian performing arts, apart from journalistic accounts, which tend to represent without research or discussion with them the opinions of audience members concerning the performance. My study of the audience began with research on Teater Garasi’s Waktu Batu (Stone Time) in Yogyakarta that sought to compare how the audience was represented in the local mass media with the comments of audience members themselves about the performance they had observed (Swastika 2004). That preliminary study prompted me to reassess the nature of the arts audience in Indonesia, especially in the post-1998 reform period. The change of political climate not only had a big impact on the freedom of expression of artists as creators, but also influenced audience reception of the works created during the period. Apart from the radical political changes, the influence of the economic situation along with the increasing impact of global culture represent other factors directly altering the relationship of audiences with arts spaces as well as with the artists. This chapter presents a rudimentary mapping of audiences or visitors to arts events in the city of Jakarta in the decade between 2000 and 2010. It uses ethnographic and cultural studies approaches to assess several cultural enclaves in Jakarta, including venues which in the preceding period were already known as cultural centres, along with new ones that provide alternative spaces and feature ‘non-mainstream’ forms. My analysis aims to examine the three factors – political change, economic development and the increasing spread of global culture – that are influencing the changing profile of audiences and landscape of arts/cultural spaces in urban areas. The questions which I aim to address through this research are: what are the demographic and cultural features of the cultural enclaves in Jakarta after the reformation of 1998? What kinds of aesthetic characteristics can be mapped on to each cultural enclave as viewed by audience members? What is the relational dynamic between the audience’s perceptions and the conception of managers in the wider arts context?

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_013

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Studies of Performing Arts Audiences

As mentioned above, audience reception studies are few and far between in the performing arts field. Susan Bennet notes that audience research began to emerge at the beginning of the 1980s, via studies which sought to plot the relationship between theatre artists and their audiences, as part of a growing awareness of a performance as a social event rather than simply an aesthetic one (Bennett 1997). This approach was pioneered by studies in the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology, for instance by Victor Turner and Erving Goffman.1 In their view, drama is an art form in which subject, structure and action represent social processes. Richard Schechner, who initiated the field of performance studies, saw that the increasing growth of experimental performance and performance art prompted new studies about the audience.2 Performance arts, in Schechner’s view, highlighted the endeavour to make both performers and audience aware of their interconnection yet conceptual separation by the reality of ‘drama’. Performance theory enhances understanding of the contribution of the audience to a performance, something which had been previously little considered. The majority of reception studies in the arts and literature fields have been quantitative ones, designed to measure such issues as the demographic characteristics of the audience, or their opinions of the quality of the performance (what percentage of the audience liked the performance, what elements did they like, and so on). There is little research or writing that discusses the audience’s views or tastes in a narrative format. In this study I focus on the attitudes and opinions of the public, making reference to the personal histories of audience members, so as to be able to place an arts space or a performance in a broader social landscape. The following data is based on private discussions with audience members at the performance venue and their comments expressed on websites, email networks and Facebook. Quotations from direct, face to face conversations are followed by a brief note about the background of the speaker; when citing statements from internet communication I indicate this in a general way but have not included the exact site names for privacy reasons.

The Cultural Landscape of Jakarta 2000–2010

The wide-ranging economic crisis that overwhelmed many Asian countries in 1997–1998, and subsequently led to momentous political change in some, 1 For example in Goffman (1959, 1967), Turner (1974, 1982). 2 This idea is developed in Schechner (2004, 2006).

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including Indonesia, was a major factor marking entry into this new century. It gave rise to deadly riots, conflict that pitted the state apparatus against civil society, and great suffering among the population as they attempted to fulfill their basic daily needs. It took four to five years for the economic situation to return to normal. In relation to the cultural environment, the changes did not impact significantly on national policy towards arts and culture, resulting, for instance, in a large budget cut or shift in the function of the arts infrastructure. There was no radical change to the conservative national cultural policy which existed during the 32 years of the New Order, especially concerning the development of arts and cultural infrastructure and superstructure. One notable alteration in cultural policy post-1998, however, was the lifting of the ban on the dissemination of Chinese culture by President Abdurrahman Wahid. This allowed the emergence of new types of arts events that incorporated forms such as barongsai lion dances and Chinese puppetry in public spaces. The change of policy had a significant impact in the environment of Jakarta, where middle class people of Chinese descent constitute a particularly prominent social group. A wider cultural trend that has come out of the post-1998 new economic growth has involved the increasing role of the middle class, including in the field of arts and culture. The rapid growth of the middle class during the New Order period, as a result of economic liberalization and industrialization, is well-documented. Academic studies report the very visible signs of increasing domestic wealth, the mushrooming of new housing estates, multi-storied shopping malls and crush of private cars on city roads, as well as measures such as rapid growth of credit card use and rates of urban construction (Robison 1996, 80). While some analysts have debated the use of a single term ‘middle class’ to describe a diverse population with differing relations to capital and the state (Robison 1990; Young 1990) the political, economic and religious significance of this group is widely discussed (Tanter and Young 1990; Rahardjo 1999). Its distinctive consumption habits have attracted special attention (Dick 1985). Although not specifically documented in academic studies, another related development in this period is the predominance of middle class people as ‘consumers’ in the cultural field, setting standards of good taste, determining what should be considered highbrow or trend-setting. Post-1998, after the economic meltdown, in the middle of the 2000s there was a significant return to real economic growth amongst the population. The rate of consumption rose dramatically once more, promoted by the booming advertising industry, and evidenced by the constant construction of glamorous shopping centres. With 170 malls in greater Jakarta and 130 in the city proper, in 2011 the Indonesian capital was cited as the city with the greatest number of malls in the world (Tsao 2012). Avid consumption of computer technology,

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particularly by the middle class, is accompanied by huge involvement in social media,3 and mobile phone use is likewise booming.4 Indeed both mobile phones and internet use can be seen as vital secondary ‘necessities’ for this new middle class. In conjunction with this rapid economic growth there has also been increasing development of arts infrastructure, mainly at the initiative of nongovernment groups or individuals.5 More alternative performance venues have opened, galleries sprung up, there are more diverse film festivals, and greater connection between art praxis and the wider domain of popular culture. Members of the middle class constitute the majority both of cultural practitioners and urban arts audiences: they also represent predominantly the new generation who have wide access to information and are enthusiastic consumers. The confluence of these trends can be seen to have both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, access to information and habits of consumption are not accompanied by efforts to cultivate critical attitudes. As a result, audiences for the performing arts are made up largely of young people used to sudden visual assaults and sensational ‘happenings’; consequently they seek the same experiences in watching performances. But there are also other qualities of these new audience members that present a more positive picture. What is the role and influence of the middle class in the development of contemporary arts in Indonesia? This modest study explores this question in relation to spaces that are nowadays considered as centres in the cultural field. Three types of ‘centre’ are discussed here – Taman Ismail Marzuki (tim), Salihara and foreign cultural centres. Each have has its own characteristics and relationships with audiences which will be described below.

Audiences in Cultural Enclaves

One of the valuable legacies of policies introduced at the time of transition from the Sukarno period to the New Order, with strong political stimulus from the then Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, was the building of the Taman Ismail 3 In 2012, Indonesia ranked fourth in the world for Facebook users, with 42.5 million subscribers, its Twitter accounts numbered fifth in the world, and it was first in world use of the location-based social media site Foursquare (Nugroho 2012). 4 With 278 million subscribers, Indonesia is cited as the 4th largest mobile market in the world (http://redwing-asia.com/market-data/market-data-telecoms/ accessed 14 March 2014). 5 As Jennifer Lindsay reports, small, privately owned performance and exhibition spaces have become key sites of arts activities, as older artists with some available funds have established such spaces and built artistic communities around them (Lindsay 2008).

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Marzuki art centre, which opened in 1968. During the 1980s, Taman Ismail Marzuki (hereafter tim) was considered a space which represented the extension of the government’s reach into the domain of the arts and culture, creating a sense of grandeur, formality and authority. Through bringing together different artistic disciplines – theatre, dance, music, film, literature and fine arts – tim became a meeting place for all arts aficionados, from artists, critics/curators, cultural workers to visitors, who all became important elements in strengthening its position as a cultural centre. tim’s authority as a centre stems in part from the programs in its early years, such as experimental performances from Rendra and Bengkel Theatre, Sardono Kusumo with Samgita Pancasomya, and Slamet Abdul Syukur with his compositions that were progressive by the standards at the time. In addition, there were various festivals staged at tim, including international scale ones such as the Arts Summit Festival and the Indonesian Dance Festival, along with performances initiated by foreign cultural institutions, which established links between Indonesian art/artists and global arts exponents. As something still new to society in a young nation, modern theatre and modern dance found a place particularly among the younger generation of artists, as a space to study and absorb new artistic experiences. In the 1970s children came to tim to study arts, as well as get to know a world of modern art that had just started to grow and develop in Indonesia.6 In terms of post-2000 developments, with the spread of arts spaces, and the increasing porousness between high and popular arts, tim is no longer the only place for young people to congregate. tim’s location in the same area as the Jakarta Arts Institute ensures continued close proximity of tertiary level students. Moreover, the cross-disciplinary spaces have been retained. However, it is interesting to note that in general young people tend to attend tim as consumers of performances or exhibitions rather than more active participants in its arts scene. In the year 2000 tim housed three performance venues, that is Graha Bhakti Budaya, the largest space with a capacity of 1000 people, the Teater Kecil, an arena-style space holding 400 people, and, in the Jakarta Arts Institute, the Teater Luwes, which can hold between 300 to 400 spectators. While the Teater Luwes offers more flexibility, the two main theatres are designed for conventional style performances that tend to be colossal in scale or of a traditional nature, or produced by non-government organizations. At the same time as the new arts movements are moving into experimental fields, arts practitioners themselves are no longer actively looking to tim for performances, other than 6 See Taman Ismail Marzuki dan Pusat Dokumentasi Sastra HB Jassin (1996).

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those staged by well-known performers, especially as part of a large festival, or by foreign artists. The majority of tim’s loyal patrons are those who have been involved in the performing arts for a long time, including those from groups that are now no longer active. Other groups include journalists and ngo activists. For the majority of tim’s audience there is a feeling of a nostalgic link to the space, both as a place as entertainment as well as a nursery of ideas I’ve been coming to tim for almost 20 years. At the time I was often involved with Teater Kubur. My friends and I met with many practitioners of both theatre and other arts. We discussed many things, not only to do with the arts. More often about politics, especially as many of us were involved with the pro-democracy movement. M, 39 years old, cultural activist

Groups which routinely put on performances at tim include Teater Koma and Teater Gandrik from Yogyakarta. Teater Koma’s performances are amongst those most keenly awaited by general audiences. Such audience members are not regular tim patrons but do loyally attend performance by certain groups. This is especially because they find these performances entertaining or easy to understand. I’d never attended any cultural events at tim before the year 2000. I’d previously enjoyed watching the type of performance that entertained. I really enjoyed Teater Koma’s Sampek Engtay. Ever since then I’ve become a loyal follower of Teater Koma. Each year I come to watch them at tim. I’m a bit reluctant to watch other performances, as I’m worried that I might not understand them. Novi, male, 43 years old, event organizer

In addition, there is another group of patrons from outside the context of cultural circles, consisting of professional workers who at some stage have been part of the tim community. For instance, as children they may have taken part in painting lessons, been involved in children’s theatre, or other activities. Their coming to tim to watch performances from established groups is one way of linking themselves to the past, and might be interpreted as expressing a sense of ownership of the public space. Many years ago I used to come to this place every week. On the 2nd Floor of the Graha Bhakti Budaya there’s tim’s children’s library where my father registered me once I could read at the age of five. Audience member at tim event

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For the first category of audience members mentioned above, those who are involved in creating performances themselves, there is a desire to watch performances of certain aesthetic quality. That quality is found in performances which are ‘new’, ‘fresh’, ‘compelling’ and relevant in terms of theme. M indicated those qualities are evident in performances by groups from overseas, for example the German theatre group Dorki Park, a performance from France, and several others. Although there are now other cultural spaces, M is still loyal to tim, in particular as his circle of friends is still willing to treat it as their meeting place. Patrons from the second and third groups do not particularly expect to have an aesthetic experience. They go there to watch in order to be part of a cultural movement in the community, to escape their daily routine and to join in expressing a critical view of actual political and social phenomena. Teater Koma is theatre that is so realistic it’s no surprise that people from all walks of life can enjoy it, even if their understanding of it is shallow, you know… In fact if we want to think about it, however briefly, the significance of the dialogue is full of meaning, and depends on how we choose to interpret it. Whether or not we just want to follow the story, or want to find more in it that makes us question ‘Is it really like that?’ or ‘Yeh, that’s really true!’ Comment on internet network



Komunitas Salihara, the Salihara Community

The idea of ‘community’ in Indonesia relates to the notion of a collective entity, in which a number of people gather together with a joint aim or a shared interest in something. In Indonesia communities usually represent a more fluid entity than an organization, so that when a group chooses the word ‘community’ the values they tend to want to emphasize are those of open-ness, togetherness, mutuality and informality. In that way they hope to be able to attract more people because of the fluid relationships in their group and the fact that they don’t require official membership. In my view community often relates to a concept of ownership, in that members are expected to demonstrate a strong sense of ownership towards an organization because they play an active role there. How, in what way, audience members at the Salihara complex regard themselves as a ‘community’ will be explored below. Komunitas Salihara is a new space built as a further development of a concept initiated by Komunitas Utan Kayu (kuk), the Utan Kayu Community, a

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smaller arts venue located in the Utan Kayu area closer to the city centre. From the mid 1990s through to the 2000s, kuk represented an alternative group or space which quickly seized the position of a ‘centre’. ‘Centre’ here does not refer to a large space or proximity to power (government) but rather to the ‘power’ to determine aesthetic standards, to identify good, excellent and strong works, as well as those which are not up to standard. In addition, kuk also played an important role in disseminating contemporary discourse in cultural studies, especially via publication of the journal Kalam, kuk was established at the time that the discourse about alternative spaces began to emerge and become a significant part in the development of contemporary art in Indonesia. Spaces such as Rumah Seni Cemeti and Kedai Kebun in Yogyakarta exemplified the way in which ‘alternative’ became the new ‘centre’, marked by an organic process free of bureaucracy which could quickly absorb global aesthetic developments. From the outset kuk was characterized by a cross-disciplinary and crossgenerational energy. Its small space contained organizations such as Galeri Lontar, Teater Utan Kayu (which was multi-purpose, used for dance, music and theatre performances as well as literary readings), the isai journalist community, radio 68H, along with the Liberal Islam Network. With such a pluralistic profile it is no surprise that community members were from a range of professions, in particular journalists, activists, and arts practitioners. This space introduced and promoted small-scale performances, which were experimental and had a significant impact on the aesthetic vision of young artists. In the mid 2000s, the administrators felt there was a need for a larger space, to facilitate the huge enthusiasm of younger artists to create experimental work. Construction of the Salihara art complex in South Jakarta began at the beginning of 2008 based on the consideration that the majority of arts patrons in Jakarta live in the southern and central areas of the city. The complex was officially opened in 2009 with the holding of the inaugural Salihara festival with invited performing artists from Indonesia and several from America and Europe. With its eclectic presentation of contemporary works, moving between the new and the traditional, the established and the alternative, high art and pop art, this Komunitas may be regarded as a progressive ‘centre’. The audience at Salihara is dominated by young people, the majority of whom are arts practitioners, while the rest are those who come looking for new forms of entertainment. They are an urban middle class group who are intimate with new technology and global popular culture. Unlike tim patrons, most of them do not come with nostalgia for a heroic past – although that does not imply there is no romantic element among Salihara patrons – rather they are motivated by

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the desire to be part of art events and obtain new aesthetic experiences or to meet public figures. What most attracted me and in the end made me really want to go there was when I saw info on Facebook that there was an upcoming event of Female Writers reading their works at Teater Salihara, and one of them was Djenar Maesa Ayu. The presence of someone like Djenar at Komunitas Salihara spurred me to finally go there. After that I felt there was a link to the place. Comment in online communication

Salihara has become a space where the new generation of arts aficionados meet and new ideas are fostered. The audience generally shares the same habitus, the same lifestyle and values, as the artists, even though occasionally there are more traditional style performances, resulting in a larger gap between performer and audience than is the case with a writer like Ayu. However the groups that are more grounded in tradition have their own followers of the same background as the patrons who usually go to tim to watch Teater Gandrik, Teater Koma or some more traditional performance. Importantly, one of the main drawcards for patrons is performances by top class performers from overseas. Salihara provides artists and aficionados the opportunity to be part of the international performance community. Such performances are also greatly appreciated by general patrons. Friday evening, 22 January 2010 yesterday we (read: Sang Lirak and Sang Lirik) had the first opportunity to see a dance performance by the group Condors at Salihara Theatre. This group presented a contemporary dance which I’d never imagined before, it was so good that I (Sang Lirak) was speechless and didn’t know what to say. I like going to Salihara because I can see a lot of performances from overseas. So we can see shows of exceptional quality without having to go overseas. In short I’m glad there is a place such as Salihara in Jakarta. Comments on email network

The diversity of performances and interdisciplinary works presented at Salihara has allowed it to it become a new melting pot, which brings together artists, intellectuals and the general public in a kind of space not all that common post-1998. As well as an arts space, Salihara has become a place for philosophical and contemporary cultural studies discussions. There is no lack of participants for public discussions held at Salihara, with some events involving

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well-known speakers exceeding the seating capacity of the space. Visitors to Salihara are not only in contact with present-day aesthetic trends but also aware of socio-cultural discourse as part of the thought world of the new urban middle class.

Foreign Cultural Institute Spaces

In Jakarta, Foreign Cultural Institutes such as the Goethe Institut (German), Erasmus Huis (Dutch), the British Council (English), the French Cultural Centre, the Japanese Cultural Centre and the Italian Cultural Centre have become important sites in the development of contemporary art networks. These organizations provide spaces for arts practitioners and audience to enjoy contemporary performances, both conventional and alternative. Contemporary art practitioners need such networks to expand their frame of reference in ways which are not really being offered by state institutions, including art schools. The important role of these foreign cultural institutions actually began in the 1970s as is evident from a note in the diary of the young activist Soe Hok Gie, in which he mentions film screenings at the French Cultural Centre as sites to find alternative entertainment. At the same time, through providing spaces for the development of the artistic skills of novice artists, these foreign institutions indirectly establish networks that make a positive contribution to the future of young artists. My creative experience this year has been incredibly diverse and extraordinary. I saw Sujiwo Tedjo’s Semar Mesem, which was unbelievably good. My friend, Santi, danced Javanese dance in it. I managed to see several pieces by Japanese and Indonesian choreographers at the Goethe Institut. There was also the Introdans performance, and I saw the European Film Festival. Audience member at foreign culture centre event

An important segment of the audience for performances or exhibitions in these cultural centres are those who have become community members through language study (each centre has a language course). These patrons enter the arts activities via the language door. This strategy also increases the audience network as it brings novice groups into contemporary art spaces or events. At the same time, the general public who are not studying at the centres benefit from exposure to international art ideas which they are not likely to get via the main forms of media entertainment on television or at the cinema.

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In the early afternoon Budi and I continued on to ccf Salemba, Jakarta Pusat, to watch a free film. It was the European Film Festival. It was great. Before we watched the film and met up with two friends, we made use of the free wi-fi in the ccf cafe. We then went to the gallery to see the exhibition of film posters. We had a quick look, and took some photos until we were satisfied. Internet communication

As these foreign cultural institutes are conveniently located and put on many shows that have wide public appeal, they are frequently visited by tertiary students. Through contact with the arts events organized by these institutes, visitors also make links with arts events in other places, including those at tim and Salihara. As well as attracting a new public from society in general, especially from the younger generation, these institutions also provide a bridge connecting the arts community with a different generation. Frequently at these arts events we find members of the older generation who come for nostalgic reasons. Most of them have previously lived in or visited the specific countries, and feel a longing to enjoy again something of that country’s culture which is no longer part of their daily life. I come to Erasmus as I previously lived for seven years in the Netherlands. Sometimes I miss the culture there, as I was active in attending arts events while there. If nothing else by coming to Erasmus Huis I can read Dutch magazines, watch films or see a Dutch music performance. I also like to go to the Goethe Institute or the Italian Cultural Centre. Sometimes I meet old friends who can also speak Dutch, which is enjoyable. Older audience member



New Strategies for Engaging the Audience

One aspect of contemporary performance practice that deserves examination is the increasing diversity over the past few years of strategies for building up audiences. Audience recruitment is a crucial aspect of the management of performing arts spaces given the lack of infrastructure for arts education of the general public, the rapidly developing mainstream entertainment industry, and the demographic structure of Jakarta, which increasingly separates venues. Urban structural conditions mean that each performance space has to determine its target audience based on demographics. South Jakarta, for

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instance, is considered to be the centre of middle class life. Salihara was established in South Jakarta as contemporary and more experimental performances are considered to be closer to the lifestyle of the urban middle class. Meanwhile tim is the centre for activists or members of the older generation. Consequently, it is difficult to specify the particular target audience of a performance in Jakarta as audience composition is usually determined by location. Jakarta is quite different to other large cities where the different art centres are located reasonably close together.7 Conventional forms of publicity for performances, such as the erection of posters, banners or billboards in public spaces, are no longer considered very effective. This is true especially in Jakarta, where the absence of a culture of walking means that the idea of finding information in the street remains little more than a collective visual memory. Moreover, as this kind of advertising is expensive, most promoters have reduced their budgets for printing and banners. The activities undertaken by video arts communities and other arts activist groups to develop ‘interactivity’ with the audience – going to shopping malls, holding festivals on the city outskirts – are naturally difficult for performances in formal venues such as Taman Ismail Marzuki or the theatre at Salihara to emulate. Here there are structural constraints on both audiences and performance spaces8 that theatre artists have often tried to dismantle in sites outside these venues, in virtual spaces. In this context the use of media such as Internet is becoming more and more productive. Over the last few years performances and art events have been promoted via mailing and email networks, as each arts group or venue manager has their own virtual invitation lists. These media represent effective means of advertising as they provide potential audience members with time to obtain information about the location, actors/dancers, ticket cost, as well as the artistic concept of the performance. 7 In Yogyakarta, for instance, in theatre venues such as the Taman Budaya, Teater Garasi, or arts spaces such as Kedai Kebun, audiences are constituted of the same group of people. It is not possible for each of these venues to schedule performances at the same time, as it is the same people they seek to attract. Sometimes in Jakarta there are three or four events on the same day and at the same time, forcing people to choose based on proximity or who is attending or performing. 8 In my observation there seems to be a general fear among artists of becoming distanced from their environment, of their creative processes moving away from actual events occurring in the community. Consequently, they seek to interact with the community and directly involve the audience as part of the performance. However, I consider there are other forms of arts, concepts of performance, artistic practices and creative ideas, which cannot involve the audience in that way. Galleries still exist, museums are still relevant as they play a different role and attract ‘communities’ in a different way.

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Apart from providing a channel for information and advertising, mailing lists also serve as sites for discussion among theatre aficionados. For instance, Teater Koma’s mailing list is particularly active with extended exchanges of views. One example concerned the length of a show – What is the ideal duration? Is five hours too long? One question can elicit 50–60 responses. In my view these are some of the ways in which audiences can become part of the history of the performing arts. In the past two or three years Facebook has become a part of the social life of the majority of the (urban) middle class and an important part of the audience network for performance. Facebook is not only a source of information but also provides an interesting discussion space for an art group’s activities.9 Facebook also provides the venue manager with the opportunity to provide a ‘preview’ for the audience about the performance. In this way it has virtually taken away moments of shock or surprise. Almost all performance venues – especially private ones – have a Facebook account, which is used as an important part of publicising their events. Moreover, via Facebook, performers/artists, managers and audience members are more connected and are able to develop a two-way dialogue. These virtual networks allow audiences to comment on a theme or discourse, which is then taken up by a wider public, leading to the possibility of the arts as an instigator of social discussion. In the past most discussion took place in a face-to-face context after a performance. However, as few people are confident enough to talk in public, on-line discussions overcome the psychological problems of commenting on a performance.10 Another element that is important to any audience recruitment strategy is to create programs that involve well-known public figures. Salihara, for example, introduced a jazz program by inviting well-known musicians such as Tohpati or Dewa Bujana, with the result that a wider public who usually would not watch something considered high art came along and mixed with regular Salihara patrons. 9

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The close relationship with Facebook has influenced audience behaviour in another way – the habit of photographing. Although there is a strictly enforced prohibition on taking photographs during a performance, especially at Salihara, it is one that can be bypassed. As members of a tech savvy younger generation, audience members seek to demonstrate that they were at Salihara, were at the National Gallery, and are a part of the culture appreciating class. Their photos are uploaded to Facebook as proof. If in the past it was a reporter who took photographs for the purpose of a review or documentation, nowadays it is most often an audience member who does so for his or her personal documentation. As a researcher I know that respondents are often tense in a face-to-face encounter and the atmosphere is somewhat formal. In contrast comments made on Facebook seem to be more spontaneous and honest.

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Closing Thoughts

In analyzing the background of the audiences who attend the three venues that are the ‘case studies’ of this research, it is interesting to observe changing public expectations of the arts. In the 1990s, the public hoped to become part of a group which considered itself subversive and critical of the government. During the New Order period, especially its last decade, freedom of expression was something that was rare and expensive, in particular in the mainstream media. In a sense, then, the arts became a means to express a political position. The political change that occurred in 1998 represents an important transition point, giving rise to a shift in the expectations of arts audiences concerning the form and content of the arts. Contemporary audiences are part of the generation that has had greater access to information networks, which have emerged out of the explosion of freedom of expression. This new generation is often considered to be apolitical, especially in their position concerning actual political events. Rather than undertaking direct advocacy on actual socio-political issues, they are more preoccupied by projects constructing new identities. In engaging with cultural spaces, audiences are no longer involving themselves with real social issues, but rather indicating their appreciation of spaces that celebrate individual expression. Even though the themes of plays by Teater Gandrik or Teater Koma post-1998 still convey critical reflection on the contemporary political context, engaging with issues of social justice, audiences are more likely to appreciate the performance as an aesthetic experience than critically discussing its content. In spaces such as Salihara or Foreign Cultural Institutes, audiences can choose a range of artistic expression, and make cross-disciplinary shifts that allow them to engage with diverse artistic forms including film, theatre, dance, music and visual arts. The issue of identity, particularly as it relates to the cultural habits and values of individual audience members, is an important connecting thread. In some cases, because of the smaller size and intimacy of the performance space, an interesting relationship between the performers and the audience is able to develop, providing a space for direct interaction and discussion of various global arts phenomena. This new generation of audience members values breadth of cultural experience. They enjoy a wide range of material, from traditional through to contemporary, works with political content and others purely aesthetic in focus, which are lightweight and contemplative, pure entertainment and high art. Some audience members traverse these forms as something that needs to be

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sampled as widely as possible. While some have a venue ‘preference’ – a proportion of them prefer tim, some Salihara, while others attend the arts spaces of foreign cultural centres – nowadays there is an increasingly random interchange of audiences between performance venues. This change is largely due to the increasing diversity of the kinds of performances offered in each venue. Nevertheless there is a certain shared sensibility among this younger generation of audience members, which helps define the concept of contemporary (performing) arts in Indonesia. This sensibility, which has emerged out of the wealth of information they absorb, along with their unfettered engagement with popular culture, draws younger audience members to a particular kind of performance, emphasising popular, spectacular visual imagery, music from the pop or independent fields, and themes related to the lives of young people such as identity, consumerism, local myth and legend, along with serious socio-political issues. The relationship between audience and arts practitioners has become closer and more constructive compared to some years ago. Audiences have now become a tangible part of an event’s ‘creation’, particularly through internet communication, facilitating exchange of information and allowing audience tastes to be taken into account and treated as a reference point. In certain ways, these audiences have developed a significant bargaining position in relation to the growth of contemporary performing arts in Indonesia. References Bennett, Susan. 1997. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London and New York: Routledge. Dick, Howard. 1985. “The Rise of the Middle Class and the Changing Concept of Equity in Indonesia – An Interpretation.” Indonesia 39: 71–92. Goffman, Irving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. Anchor Books edition. —— 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co. Lindsay, Jennifer. 2008. “A New Artistic Order?” Inside Indonesia 93: Aug–Oct 2008. Accessed 14 March 2014 http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/a-new -artistic-order. Nugroho, Yanuar. 2012. “Clicktivism and the Real World.” Inside Indonesia 110: Oct–Dec 2012. Accessed 20 March 2014 http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature-editions/ clicktivism-and-the-real-world-5. Rahardjo, M.D. 1999. Masyarakat madani:agama, kelas menengah dan perubahan sosial. Jakarta: Pustaka LP3ES Indonesia.

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Robison, Richard. 1990. “Problems of Analysing the Middle Class as a Political Force in Indonesia.” In The Politics of the Middle Class in Indonesia, ed. Richard Tanter and Ken Young, 123–136. Clayton: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. —— 1996. The New Rich in Asia; Mobile Phones. McDonalds and Middle Class Revolution. London and New York: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2004. Performance Theory (A revised version of Essays on Performance Theory, 1988). New York: Routledge. —— 2006. Performance Studies – An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Swastika Alia. 2004. “Biografi penonton Teater di Indonesia: Yang retak dan bergerak.” Lebur 2(2): 13–37. Taman Ismail Marzuki dan Pusat Dokumentasi Sastra HB Jassin. 1996. 25 Tahun Taman Ismail Marzuki. Jakarta: Pusat Dokumentasi Sastra HB Jassin. Tanter, Richard and Kenneth Young, eds. 1990. The Politics of the Middle Class in Indonesia. Clayton: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. Tsao, Tiffany. 2012 “Love the Mall, Love the Earth.” Inside Indonesia 108: Apr–Jun 2012. Accessed 14 March 2014 http://www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles/ love-the-mall-love-the-earth. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press. —— 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: paj Publications. Young, Kenneth. 1990. “Middle Bureaucrats, Middle Peasants, Middle Class? The Extra Urban Dimension.” In The Politics of the Middle Class in Indonesia, ed. Richard Tanter and Ken Young, 147–166. Clayton: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.

chapter 12

Notes from the 2009 Symposium on Performance in Indonesia Ugoran Prasad I am about to tell a story about a symposium held at a university site, unlike the usual type of academic event taking place in university environments. Departing from the familiar ‘dramaturgy’ of a scholarly symposium, its aim was to place various cultural productions on the table in order to create a conjoined practical map. The mapping process was seen as a possible way for cultural producers in Indonesia to define common concerns and envisage future collaborations. The map we managed to draw together was a sketchy one, full of ellipses. This is its story. Early in 2009, a decade after 1998, I was invited to take part in reorganizing mspi, Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia. The Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts. This body, established in the early 1990s, had supported the performing arts in Indonesia through its efforts to strengthen knowledge infrastructure by facilitating research, publications, and seminars in the field. However, over the preceding few years, the board members of the institution, including prominent figures in the Indonesian performing arts such as Sardono W. Kusumo and Sal Murgiyanto, had felt an increasing need to find ways to resituate the institution within the current context of performance and cultural aesthetics. Our preliminary discussions emphasized the fact that the artistic practices of the performing arts in Indonesia had always been part of the larger sphere of cultural performance production. Hence, to find new ways of facilitating the development of knowledge infrastructure in Indonesian performing arts, we must first draw the current map of our performance culture and its stakeholders. Based on this idea, I initiated a small group discussion involving several individuals from various practices and disciplines. Intan Paramaditha who had initiated a cinema studies group in Jakarta, and Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, artistic director of Teater Garasi Yogyakarta, were the first to respond enthusiastically to the invitation. Nuraini Juliastuti, Kunci Cultural Studies Center’s co-director, and Ade Darmawan, director of the video arts collective ruangrupa in Jakarta, completed the circle. In our first few meetings, we managed to establish several key parameters within our contemporary cultural field, derived from our own experience and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004284937_014

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observation. Initially, we used the term ‘performance production’ to refer to practices in theatre, dance, performing or performance art. But later we concluded that ‘performance’ has become an important mode of expression and engagement within a larger field of cultural production, which includes public campaigns, festivals, demonstrations, and other diverse cultural and political events. Over the last decade, cultural productions in Indonesia have explored areas wider than was possible during the New Order regime. Some of the actors involved in these processes may now even despise the term reformasi, political reform, but in 1998 they would have uttered the word with a strikingly emphatic and hopeful tone. They had taken part in overthrowing a regime and moved forward. Some of them now perform complicated urban and alternative space projects, some facilitate workshops to empower the community, turning cultural consumers into producers, some work on experimental arts, some explore the possibility of artist-initiated practices, some redefine activism, some engage in alternative academic work regardless of the lack of support from the formal institutions. In sum, they have made ways to engage with the public through paths that have never been traveled before. Over this past decade, the audience has been rendered surprised, shocked, perplexed, amazed, nauseated, bored and/or empowered by their performances. From this realization, we decided that it was about time to find out how these cultural actors in their diverse forms of practice situate and conceptualize their activities, and what kind of findings they gather from these practices. For this endeavour, the small circle that we had formed was clearly no longer adequate to address these big, hypothetical questions.

Setting Up

So there we were in a three-day event, gathering in a conference room at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta at the end of 2009. Some of us in that room were activists, scholars, visual artists, while others were performance and theatre artists, musicians, journalists – individuals from various fields and backgrounds. Some of the participants would present their on-going projects, questions, assumptions and hypotheses, strategies and agendas; work to be done. All of us, about a hundred individuals, would be expected to speak and listen. Exchanges were about to happen. There were no keynote speakers, no panels, and no paper presentations. What we had were only focus group discussions. This was more like a workshop forum, but in terms of scale we aimed at a wide array of topics; 12 focus

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group discussions, fgds, ranging over all kinds of issues. In fact each of these fgds deserved their own committed workshop and symposium. But as cultural studies professor and feminist activist Melani Budianta said at one of our committee meetings, let us un-learn. To reconsider how we have been travelling along our paths in cultural activism in Indonesia for the past decade, we should, once again, be experimental, be open. We dared to call this gathering a Symposium of Performance in Indonesia. After the first session of our symposium, a short introduction from the committee members, Halim hd, an activist who spends most of his time in cultural work moving between different places in Indonesia, criticized the fact that we had not been able to find representatives from Kalimantan and most of the eastern parts of Indonesia to join those present in the room. He was right. This forum hardly represented all actors in contemporary Indonesia. Besides the omission Halim mentioned, we also had not managed to invite heads of political parties, key people in the government (such as the President of the Indonesian Republic or the Chief of the Police), members of the representative bodies – those who belong to the institutions that govern the power structure, the producers of ‘strategy’, in the terms coined by de Certeau (1984, 34). As a collective of mere ‘tacticians’, tweaking and finding paths within the existing strategy, we were only a small part of the masses. We should have invited others who also constitute the masses: activists of the Batak Parmalim movement, victims of the East Java mudflow, the Papua Merdeka independence organization, Moslem radicals, and many more. But not yet. For so many reasons, mostly clichés, we could not invite them. Ade Darmawan, a committee member, was the most persistent during our organizational meetings in asking about the outcome of this symposium for the participants. As active spectators of what happens in forums in Indonesia, the committee members had various ideas about why and how the symposium mattered, ranging from the fact that new developments had occurred in actual performances in recent years to the urgency of looking at the sites of cultural production through the lens of performance. For Ade, however, this was not enough. His experience as director of ruangrupa, one of the most progressive urban movements and space initiative institutions since their emergence at the end of the 1990s, probably has made him aware of the kind of tendencies and expectations likely to arise out of something labelled a ‘symposium’. He suggested that we anticipate various expectations from the participants, to choose which ones to facilitate and which to leave out. For myself, although I am more interested in drifting, I also believe, as theorist and activist Guy Debord once suggested, that in drifting one should also have a method (Debord, 1956). We then projected how each forum would

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occur. Our projection was soon translated into frames: topic abstracts, facilitators’ frameworks, and so on and so forth. We hoped this would meet everyone’s expectations, somehow. What was more important in our view was not the fulfillment of every wished-for outcome but the convergence of variety, difference, debates and arguments emerging from such expectations. Just as Ade’s unfulfilled expectations, those of the other committee members’ and my own had been translated into a joint enterprise, there was no reason for us not to remain hopeful of the on-going process of this symposium. Both factors, the inadequate representation of cultural actors and the intangible map of expectations of the participants, motivated us to include number #1 in the symposium title. Yes, this was the first symposium, and we are aiming at a second, and perhaps a third, along with, most importantly, smaller works in between. The works that we organize in between the big events will need to find and depart from an existing intersection. The keyword to signify this intersection is performance, in its broadest sense.

Questions, Distribution of Themes, and on Using the Word Performance

Erving Goffman defines performance as “all activities of a given participant on a given occasion which serve to influence in any way the other participants” (1959, 15–16). We may refer to ‘the other participants’ by many names; audience, spectators, observers, voters, consumers or co-participants. Richard Schechner, a pioneer in performance studies, suggests that there are two subjects in studying performance: first, the subject that ‘is’ performance, and, second, the subject which is seen ‘as’ performance (2006, 38–40). This statement indicates that there are things that are not intended to be a performance, given the social and cultural context, but can still be perceived as one. We might do what we do based on a certain objective, but we are the authors of each of our works. When our work materializes, we cannot stop anyone from perceiving it as a spectator looking at a spectacle. Rather than measuring our qualification to use the word, we imagined what this perspective would allow us to do. It would expand our stakeholders; it would allow us to rethink our cultural production and expression from various different standpoints; it would allow us to enrich the discussion on agency and empowerment; it would allow us to envisage cross-fertilization between different tactics, it should allow us to question the construction of identity. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet (box quote, Schechner, 2006, 3) explains how crossing the boundaries of media, genres, or cultural traditions should enrich the

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modalities of practical forms. As the stage was ours, we believed the possibilities would be open ended. Drawing on this wider view of performance, we envisaged the performance sphere in terms of 12 different fgd topics: performance in relation to politics, history, religion, gender and sexuality, body, space, spectatorship, local expression and global networks, youth movement, low versus high art aesthetic debates, the market place, and academic/non-academic institutionalization processes. This is not a small number, and the subject encompassed by each fgd is gigantic. Take, for example, the topic ‘Performance of the state, politics, and law’. Let us see the abstract of the topic: Besides elaborating on the performativity of political events, this topic explores the relation between the state and the citizen. The first subject is the one that dominates – the rule-maker in the public sphere – whereas the latter is the one who responds by producing tricks to evade the existing rules. While trying to uncover how changes in political performativity in the public sphere shape the cultural strategy of the state, this topic studies the tactics of the citizen performed in cultural activism and productions, especially those who are using performance and public events as their main framework and or medium. symposium proposal

As an abstract, the paragraph is filled with jargon. We know most of the terms without fully grasping them. The concept of performativity, for instance, is a recently made-up word. This concept, according to Richard Schechner, is hard to pin down. The term points to a variety of topics, among them the construction of reality including gender and race, the restored behaviour quality of performances, and the complex relationship of performance practice to performance theory (Schechner 2006, 123). As a start, we aim to use it loosely to indicate something that is ‘like a performance’ in each context of our activities. We use the word not because it sounds cool or even because we really understand it; we simply hold onto everything that is helpful. Is there any other word to help us name the dimension of performance in particular phenomena, the feature in cultural expression that creates a spatial relation between them, the ones who present and perform, and us, the ones who watch and laugh? And, isn’t it in this spatial relation, the complex relation between participants, that meaning is created? Each statement, according to Austin (1963) is performative; it performs an action as we utter and express it, and this act is situated in social relation.

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Freer expression is one thing experienced in common over the last decade in different Indonesian cultural fields. We might remember that during the Suharto regime, we were so accustomed to whisper that we forgot the real sound of our voice. The walls have ears, they said, back in the midst of the student movement period. It was a glorious time when an ordinary student could feel paranoid fear of those military intelligence agents. It was like an action movie: rebelling, fighting, or being kidnapped. Recalling the struggles of 1998 allows us to be romantic. But we can’t be, not for long. It is always on our minds now: political expression is allowed but do we really understand what has changed? What kind of new languages have we produced to extend and make use of the citizen space? Twice at the time of the symposium Indonesians had voted for their own president, directly. Several presidential candidates engaged us in the performance of political seduction. This direct contact between the candidates and the voters is new, while political education for voters is limited. Look at the statistics; housewives were the winning factor in the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and some of these women stated that they chose him because of his paternal qualities, evident in his kebapakan (fatherly) appearance, and handsome looks. This case indicates that democracy was ‘performed’ through direct vote and that the elected president presented a successful make-believe performance. However, it conceals a lot of things behind the scenes, such as the lack of political awareness training in the national education system. Never before has the performance space in Indonesian politics been so complex. Alongside state politics, we had in our hands a series of topics that reflected horizontal tensions between citizens. Certain issues, such as the controversy over the erotic performance of a dangdut popular music singer Inul, heightened by the national mass media, to the suppression of an Islamic sect, Ahmadiyah, were discussed in a number of sites: ‘gender and sexuality’, ‘religion and secularism’, ‘media and spectatorship’, ‘history and forgetting’. If we investigated further, we would find out that these sites are intertwined with each other, for example, gender and religion, secularism and spectatorship, or media and forgetting. In other topic areas, performance and space, and performance and the body, we tried to explore another dimension of these horizontal conflicts through discussions of the performer-spectator relationship. Performer-spectator relations, especially in current artistic practices emphasizing interactivity, serve as a site to look at the experiential micro level relations of horizontal conflict, especially at how the performers and the spectators situate and articulate themselves in relation to one another.

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The other topics were meant to discuss some practical dimensions of the participants’ working fields. The ‘local-intracultural as intercultural and transnational site’ is a topic that traces local-global practices and issues in cultural activism; ‘the youth subculture’ topic highlights the important role of our post-98 generation, and ‘the expanding market’ topic discusses modes of converting cultural capital into economic capital. Knowledge institutional­ ization, meanwhile, revealed similar efforts in many cultural institutions to work on research, translation, journal and book publications, and creating public libraries. Each fgd started by collecting practical and critical assumptions and questions from the participants on certain given topics. There was a short time to elaborate these questions, but not as thoroughly as in a standard symposium presentation. At this point, this symposium put more emphasis on exchange of questions and assumptions. The focus group topics are, once again, enormously broad. We do not believe that our mapping process can be completed by a single symposium that hardly looks like one. This is why, after this three-day gathering, we are planning further.

The Event

Since each session involved three fgds on different topics, and lasted about 3–3.5 hours, participants in the three-day symposium could participate in, at the most, four fgds, plus the opening and closing sessions. There were also video and project presentations in each session as side forums, presenting projects by ruangrupa (2 projects), Kunci-Teater Garasi, and Jatiwangi Art Factory. Some of the participants chose their own preferred topics; some were invited by the committee to participate in particular discussions, based on their practical or academic expertise. There were short gatherings in between sessions in which fgd facilitators summarized the content of their sessions for all participants. There were 74 participants coming from different part of Indonesia, representing a wide range of cultural activism, from lgbt (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) activist to member of pro-secular religious movement, from cultural thinker to tattoo artist. The engagement of each participant in this forum including mine, was partial, in terms of the event as a live and embodied experience. My narrative of the symposium event, no matter how well I have equipped myself with transcripts and notes from all fgds, is necessarily incomplete.

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Scattered Intersecting Findings

Each fgd, although its focus was specific, frequently engaged and intertwined with the topics of other groups. These are some of the recurrent topics in each fgd, in no particular order: The Performing Local and Global fgd collected some interesting information on post-98 de-centering of power in cultural production. The emergence of cultural producers outside the axis of the cities Yogyakarta-Bandung-Jakarta on the transnational circuit has been visible and promising. Projects such as Jatiwangi Performance Art Festival, Jember Fashion Week, an indie-film collective in Banyumas, and theatre activities in Padang Panjang, illustrate the impact of a more rhizomatic mode of communication through the internet, as a space to both access information and to publicize local activities, providing direct access to a wider world. While reviewing the rise of alternative spaces in some cities, we had an extended discussion on the notion of locality, the fact that the so called ‘big cities’ tend to move toward celebrating diverse diasporic identities and expanded localism rather than developing cohesiveness and uniformity. In Jakarta and Bandung, each alternative space cultivates its own ‘family’ of audience members. Issues such traffic congestion determine attendance at different spaces more than preference for or distribution of art disciplines. Though many cities outside the big urban centres in Java have an apparent shared local arts identity, it is much harder to identify such a phenomenon in Jakarta or Yogyakarta as a singular entity rather than spaces for diverse localities. The fgd on Performance and History discussed efforts to expose many silenced versions of ‘national’ history, as dictated by the previous regime, while celebrating the rise of diverse local histories, promoted after 1998 by various cultural actors, from local authorities to community activists. At the practical level, we began by reconsidering three common words in discussing continuity and linear time: history, tradition, and traditional. In the performing arts, these three words have been used simultaneously and interchangeably, and most of the time they create convolution. Experience from contemporary work such as Slamet Gundono’s Wayang Suket performances and the productions of the Jogja Hip Hop Foundation helped us shape several questions. Looking at dance in Java as an example, it is, for sure, part of history. Is Javanese court dance a traditional art? Or is it part of Javanese dance tradition? In what way should the history of cultural accumulation by the courts be regarded? The participants discussed the notion of ‘traditional art’ as having a pigeonholing, essentializing effect, similar to the New Order’s use of jargon such as ‘eastern customs’, that disregards the fact that archipelago was a site of intersections of

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many cultures. New Order history in representing part of Java as the official Java, had institutionalized only the art of the keraton (kingdom, palace) and not that of the kawula (common people)? How about history of coastal Java? How about the history of colonial Java and the outer islands in comparison to postcolonial New Order Java and non-Java? How to acknowledge a huge work like the Sulawesi epic I La Galigo? How about dance culture in Kalimantan, Papua, and the other thousands of islands in Indonesia? The participants agreed that it is very important to underline the fact that there has been a lack of attention to and effort to promote equality among cultures in Indonesia. The intra-cultural sphere in Indonesia is still a work in progress. The discussion covered many other aspects of performing arts tradition including contemporary experimental theatre and performance and interactive projects in the visual arts. Experience from the ‘September Something’ project, a collective visual art project by various young artists, curated by Agung Kurniawan of the Kedai Kebun Forum, revealed that the recent generation of visual artists, those who were born in the mid-to-late 80s, are living in different realm of History. They have not been exposed to what happened in the political crisis and mass murders of 1965, even to the state version of the event. By contrast for those who were born in the 70s and early 80s, the state version of the so-called Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the Communist Party’s September 30 1965 Movement), which was immortalized in the state-commissioned blood-and-guts movie of the same name by Arifin C. Noer, was an obligatory element in the school curriculum, institutionalizing terms such ‘pki’, ‘Communist’, and ‘Gerwani’ connoting national trauma. Problems in art archives were also discussed at length. Experiences in film archive practice suggest that what is lacking is not access to technology, given the recent huge advances in available digital technology, but the awareness of history as a paradigm of practice, how the archiving process itself contributes to institutionalizing artistic projects as forms of knowledge. Non-governmental archival initiatives such as Sinematek (film) or the literary documentation centre Pusat Dokumentasi Sastra hb Jassin, to cite some examples, still suffer from lack of support from the government, while, at the same time, both serve as the only established archival institution in their fields. Discussion of Performing Gender and Sexuality focused on three areas, identity politics, relations between performing sexuality and the state, and relations between gender and the media. Joned Suryatmoko, in his observation notes (2009), reports that participants drew a map of the field, identifying competing forces (state, religion, arts circles, academy, market, funding institute), resistance and negotiation (identity politics and gender perspectives), and transmission mode (approaches in transmitting resistance). Many of the

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participants expressed some ambivalence in situating themselves in the field, for example by questioning whether, because they are women, they are necessarily expected to voice women’s issues. In the cinema field, Indonesia has a bigger percentage of women directors than Hollywood, 14% to 6%. However, doubt was expressed as to whether, qualitatively, these women directors have been able to actively promote gender issues. Speakers argued that, while increasing participation by women has become a common policy in cultural activism, it is not an adequate way to measure shifts in the gender paradigm on the wider plane of cultural activity. Q Film Festival, as a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (lgbt) activist body, queried how the women percentage policy related to the dynamics of their institution. In contrast to heterosexual institutions, the percentage of males in their group could not be seen to indicate male dominant perspectives. The participants discussed at length how the ideology of the victim has been dominant in the way they articulate their advocacy. They took as a sample case the issue of the rape victims of May 1998. Activist advocacy had become a new form of violence towards the victims and ultimately the issue, as it did not engage with political and social discourse but emphasized pity and melodramatic elements. In the case of the women’s labour blogger movement, a different approach was taken, as participants were not trying to romanticize the violence that happened in the field. The participants agreed on the importance of being self-critical concerning the sentimentalization of gender issues, as well as being alert to the gentrification process that can occur when middle class cultural producers appropriate a particular gender issue. On lgbt activism, the participants acknowledged the tendency towards segregation and self-exclusion in sexuality discourse and activism, even among women activists and cultural producers. Inong, leader of the group Sahita, which performs classic Javanese court dance through the persona of middle-aged women rather than the usual beautiful young girls, explained how such work reveals the fierce competition between women which has always been visible in gender performativity. In other forms of local traditional dance, the increasing presence of women performers has seen a decline in the participation of male transgender performers, as found by Nisa Aulia in her research on the form randai Minang in West Sumatra. There was strong sense of urgency in this forum; the participants decided to continue meeting in the following months while collecting new strategies for articulating sexuality and gender issues. The fgd on Performance and Politics, another forum in which I participated, focused on examining contemporary relations between the state and the citizen. Nirwan Ahmad Arsuka formulated the connection in a generalization strongly endorsed by the other participants, that the state is present wherever

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they are not needed, and, vice versa, absent wherever they are needed. The Anti-Pornography law provides an example of the first proposition, while absence of attention to public security by the authorities in incidents of violence by the radical Islamic group Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defenders’ Front) is an illustration of the second. The participants agreed that the state tends to remain absent from cases of horizontal tension between citizens, especially in relation to religion. Violence and hate groups based on religion have become apparent in the last decade. These groups adopt the same stance as most cultural and political activists, claiming freedom of expression as part of their democratic rights. Experience from the Pornography and Film Law case, where religious groups such Front Pembela Islam staged huge rallies supporting the proposed legislation, show how their radical, non-secular stance has been used by the state to ‘threaten’ the civil society movement, given the fpi’s long track record of violence, ranging from raids on pubs and restaurants during the fasting month of Ramadhan to vicious attacks on their direct religious opponents, the groups Jaringan Islam Liberal and Ahmadiyah. Direct public election has made political parties invest in their performativity throughout this last decade. Projecting an image of pluralism and multiculturalism has been seen as important, even by some parties who have, paradoxically, limited the positions of women or non-Muslim members in their parties. Most participants agreed that the strengthening of civil society has faced several significant set backs due to the nature of pro-democratic secular activism. Rather than creating a sustainable environment, the pro-secular movements tend to work together only in emergency situations. This emergency response mode failed miserably in the case of the Anti-Pornography law instituted in 2008. Artists and activists managed to produce a strong critical response when the draft of the Anti-Pornography law was introduced in parliament in 2006, through public discussions and demonstrations. At that time, they succeeded in pushing the pornography law committee to revise the draft in response to their demands. Yet they lost the momentum of their success by not working to maintain an ongoing movement. In the artistic field, concern about non-democratic processes is not being conveyed sufficiently strongly to audiences. In fact, even the most political art performances tend to speak to their own cultivated followers. While pluralism is a basic middle class value of exchange between the producer and the audience in the artistic field, it has to be acknowledged that it is still far from being accepted in society as a whole. In other words, artists need to invest more in working directly on a wider social plane. The same approach should be adopted in other forms of non-artistic cultural activism, where each activist group tends to work only in a specific area, involving specific participants and audiences.

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Participants in the Knowledge Institutionalization forum shared a common assumption right from the start, as most of them have been doing informal scholarly work in various fields. This shared assumption is that the hierarchy of knowledge institutionalization, in Bourdieu’s terms, where the modern academy serves as the power holder, collecting, accumulating and distributing knowledge, does not exist in Indonesia. Academic institutions in general do not work directly with the field of cultural production, although many individual intellectuals remain active, mostly outside the stream of their university policies. The most prolific gender studies journal in Indonesia today is not published in academic circles or by a university study centre. Similarly, journals on theatre, visual arts, and films are published outside academia. Even the development of the cultural studies field was initiated by a non-university study centre, the Kunci Cultural Studies Center. The lack of strong university journals in most cultural fields in Indonesia indicates the lack of a critical scholastic tradition on cultural production. In the arts, the absence of critical studies has been discussed for years and some collectives such as ruangrupa Forum Lenteng, and Teater Garasi have created their own research centres, which emphasize particularly practice-based research projects. From these fgd, some intersections and common interests are apparent. Self-exclusion in each specific working field has limited sustainable networks and exchanges, while the building of civil society either in relation to the state or by creating a democratic horizontal environment is facing great challenges. Comparison of these findings with perspectives from other groups further strengthened the general picture. It was apparent in the fgds on youth movements, on religion, and on aesthetics that activities in these three spheres have also been largely confined to responding to specific demands from stakeholders. The fgd on Space and Performance discussed how citizens were reclaiming space, while also reiterating the problems mentioned in other fgds, the lack of public spaces and the commercialization and privatization of the cities. The Alun-Alun Space project (Kunci Cultural Studies Center and Teater Garasi), for example, a collaborative project involving various multi discipline artists and scholars, investigated the operation of the southern alun-alun (Yogyakarta palace’s ‘plaza’) as an open space for public usage. Its findings explored several key issues such as the construction of power in the alun-alun, civic engagement, urban myth, public access and commerce. While the project celebrated citizen tactics in creating an alternative in response to a lack of public space, it took a critical position toward the absence of accountability of the state’s cultural policies. Other participants shared similar observations concerning conditions in various cities, including lack of cultural investment by local governments in making public spaces and facilitating public access to cultural

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products. The blooming of alternative art spaces has not been immune to these trends, especially in the visual arts area, where many artistic works have been appropriated by collectors and public access limited. Meanwhile experience from several urban space projects highlights possibilities for collaboration between artists’ initiatives and their audience. See, for example, ok Video, an important video works festival organized by ruangrupa that has invited both artists and members of the public to engage with particular urban issues through video making. The fgd on Performance and the Body examined the intersection between artists’ work and its social context. Drawing on their bodily experience, the participants elaborated on the way they use their body as a mode of resistance. Through their performance, Inong and the group Sahita subvert standard assumptions about traditional court dance and the youth and beauty of its dancers. Arahmaiani use her body in her performance art to challenge the social conceptions of audiences, while Gunawan Maryanto has involved himself in physical theatre out of an anxiety about the inadequacy of language that he felt soon after the 1998 reformation fever had passed. Participants also discussed how bodily expressions have become more performative over the last decade. From his experience as a tattoo artist, Atonk finds that altering the body has become common and acceptable among the younger generation in contrast to the previous generation, partly because of the influence of global media. While much discussion focused on how the body has become subject to commercialization and state political control through censorship, Agus Nur Amal, a storyteller who draws on Aceh’s strong oral performance tradition, proposed that the body still serves as the last site of resistance. He discussed how Islamic law in Aceh has produced a new kind of public performance by the state, consisting of public caning. He argued that this law is not fully accepted by the public, but normative pressures to be regarded as good Moslems prevent even the most radical critics from voicing their disagreement. The public, in his view, has altered the meaning of this performance, intended as public education through display of humiliation and individual tragedy, by treating it as a comedy, a subject of laughter He argues that this mode of spectatorship, this laughter, is a form of public resistance.

Envisaging Steps Forward

Each fgd, as they created their own dynamics, voiced different findings and needs. The fgd on performance and the body, for instance, agreed that they wanted to investigate further how the body is present in many different sites of

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social space. Some of the other fgds reflected on this issue, especially in discussions about censorship and the Anti-Pornography law as well as debates about sexuality. The fgd on Gender and Sexuality, in particular, agreed to schedule a further discussion session, and held a follow-up fgd in Jakarta some months later, as explained below. Overall, we had chosen a topic based in time and space, performance in post-98 Indonesia, but we were not aiming for generalizations. Each discussion, its objectives and results, followed its own dynamics, yet we found that we had been in the same sphere, historically, politically, and culturally. As we shared the trajectory that we had taken, we came up with an intertwined map. Antariksa, co-founder of the Kunci Cultural Studies Center, and one of our symposium facilitators, asked what we would do with the map that we had drawn together. In the closing session, the participants agreed on several agendas. Committee members, forum facilitators and observers, as well as the participants, were invited to write their individual notes on the work of this symposium. Mine is here, in your hands. As further steps, we would like to maintain our working groups, possibly continue existing fgd forums, and find ways to create joint experimentation with various forms of civic strategies, before eventually discussing plans for our next symposium. To what extent, in what ways, we will do that, is still a work in progress and open for intervention.

Taking Steps Forward

Five months after the symposium event in Yogyakarta, as we were struggling with our event documentation, Intan Paramaditha, one of our committee members, initiated a second meeting of the Gender and Sexuality focus group that she had facilitated in the symposium. This time, we moved the meeting place to Jakarta in order to involve several women artists and activists who could not attend the first symposium, such as Mitu M Prie (lgbt/hiv activist), Nan T. Achnas (filmmaker) and Ayu Utami (author). We also managed to invite three quarters of the previous forum participants. Building on our findings at the first forum, the follow-up event was aimed at developing new strategies in articulating and advocating gender and sexuality issues. Besides affirming several problems mapped out in the first fgd, the second fgd also highlighted the importance of ongoing networking among the participants in the forum. As we reflected on the symposium event and reviewed the discussion transcript of each fgd, we decided to continue to work in small working groups on specific issues and trajectories. We decided that the working group on Gender

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and Sexuality might serve as a strategic anchoring point connecting different fgds, such as the fgd on politics, religion, and the body. As a practical example, two members of this fgd, Intan Paramaditha and Naomi Srikandi, after meeting at the first symposium, worked on a theatre piece based on a short story by Intan, Goyang Penasaran (literally ‘Dance of Anger and Desire’, provisionally titled ‘The Obsessive Twist’), which deals with issues of sexuality, religion and violence raised in their forum. The performance, staged for the first time in December 2011, portrays a village dangdut dancer, widely desired and admired, with many avid male fans, but denounced as immoral by her beloved former Islamic religious teacher and his followers. The intense contradictions of the situation build to a vengefully violent outcome. The play was staged again at the Salihara Arts Centre in Jakarta in 2012, along with a discussion forum addressing the treatment of issues of gender and religion in recent performance and film. The working group on Knowledge Institutionalization, consisting of several symposium participants who are currently continuing their academic study outside Indonesia, is also active. While preparing the foundations of a larger consortium focusing on knowledge institutionalization in Indonesia, we are also trying to situate this small open group within transnational networks, with the aim of expanding knowledge exchange and dialogue with groups that face similar challenges. A meeting that was held at the kitlv Institute in Leiden in December 2011 pursued this aim by inviting perspectives from outsiders on post-1998 Indonesian cultural production. Our transnational inquiry has also encouraged the group to learn more about and make comparisons with cultural practices in other Asian, African, South and Latin American countries, as well as Eastern Europe. We have discovered that some contextual challenges in Indonesia, although seemingly unique, have also been haunting other places. While our mapping processes have managed to explore various sites, we are far from making any prescriptive collective design for cultural intervention in Indonesia. Such a design probably could, and maybe should never exist, in any case. However, the symposium collective certainly agrees on the importance of sustaining the network that we have managed to create, as an ongoing forum for discussion and possible intervention. Maintaining this kind of sustainability in itself, as we have learned, is a demanding and humbling task. References Austin, John Langshaw. 1963. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press, London.

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Debord, Guy. 1956. “Theory of the Derive.” reprinted in Internationale Situationniste vol. 2, 1958. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, California. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor, New York. Schechner, Richard. 2006. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, New York. Suryatmoko, Joned. 2009. “Observation Notes on Sexuality and Gender Forum.” Unpublished, spin, Yogyakarta. Symposium on Performance in Indonesia I, 2009, unpublished steering committee report, mspi. Symposium on Performance in Indonesia I, 2009, unpublished fgd transcripts, mspi.

chapter 13

Concluding Comments

Identity, Community and the Marketplace in Contemporary Indonesian Performance* Ariel Heryanto, Chua Beng Huat and Denise Varney



Ariel Heryanto

One point I would like to comment on is the use of the phrase ‘post New Order’ in the title of the conference workshop, and as a reference point in individual contributions. I was hoping that people would problematize the term rather than simply taking it for granted as a description of a particular era. It suggests that there is something quite specific about this period, that it is significantly different from the New Order period. It prompts the question: what is this difference? I feel that not enough has been said in past two days about what is specific about ‘post-New Order’. Perhaps we can consider an alternative, broader term ‘post-Cold War’. This term would allow for comparisons among Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and to allow us to engage with the region that we know so little about. Discussing a post-Cold War era would also open the space for a reexamination of 1950s politics as related to culture and art, particularly of the work of the Community Party-affiliated cultural organization lekra. I cannot think of any other institution in entire history of Indonesia that has done what lekra did, namely the most ambitious attempt to theorize and to put into practice what they believed to be the progressive links between politics, art, and culture. Unfortunately, major political violence brought this project to an abrupt end. One wonders how they might have fared if they had been allowed to continue to pursue their project. When discussing Indonesia’s politics and arts, you risk missing a lot if you do not refer back to the 1950s. One can speculate that from lekra’s point of view nothing significant has changed since the 1950s, except its own destruction. There are changes here and there since 1965 in the links between arts and politics in Indonesia, but how significant are they? The fact that we are still talking about a post-New Order era, perhaps paradoxically indicates that we are still stuck under the shadow of the New Order. Why must the New Order * These comments, transcribed from presentations at the workshop on which this volume is based, refer to workshop versions of the chapters in addressing the key themes of the book.

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still be there in our frame of analysis? Why cannot we do something better than simply add a prefix ‘post-’ to speak of the present? I look forward very much to the time when we decide that the New Order is just over and it was one stage in a broader and messy history. It was not necessarily the most important one. I have the impression that many of us are still operating under the shadow of the New Order, taking revenge against the New Order, in celebrating qualities that we were not allowed to express then. It’s a kind of recapturing of the self in the past. Under the New Order when I was born, when I grew up, we were not allowed to have a divergent self. We were defined by the powerful in Jakarta; they declared who we were, and how we should behave. With the fall of the New Order, for the first time in thirty years many of us declare we know who we are. It doesn’t mean that we do know. But we think that we do. The expression of old repressed identities is not without problems. Some of the papers indicate problems with decentralization, with pluralities in this period in that the new diversity can also be reduced and simplified for a number of reasons, and an essentialized identity repeatedly reproduced, as if we are already in post-New Order Indonesia. The prefix ‘post’ there can be problematic. Even in the case of modified forms of ‘New Self’ which are not necessarily essentialized, in this ‘little New Order’, localities or identities are not equal. Some are more powerful, more empowered than others. For example, a ‘local’ Jakarta remains a dominant one. Likewise, Javanese culture is still much more dominant than others. I suspect this inequality is partly attributable to the working of the mass media. The mass media have been responsible for celebrating this new sense of self and identity as well as distributing identities, and promoting them, in uneven ways. For example, the Jakarta-derived youth language bahasa gaul differs from New Order-styled Indonesian, but bahasa gaul still dominant over the many varied youth languages across the island of Java and beyond. This imbalance is an inevitable result of the Jakarta-centric media production and dissemination. I’d also like to discuss the issue of participation and promise. The idea of community is fascinating. For me community is a utopia. It is not a description of reality anywhere. It’s alluring because it promises the idea of egalitarianism unlike the family, keluarga. What we call keluarga still presupposes an unequal relationship between father and mother as commonly depicted in the ideal image of an Indonesian family. In contrast, community is non-hierarchical, and also organically-linked. We need to borrow the European term for this utopia, because we do not know or remember if something similar exists or existed in pre-Indonesia history.

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The idea of komunitas gives us the consoling sense that we belong to each other. Unlike the term ‘society’ that refers to something abstract and systematic, komunitas carries sentimental meanings of face-to-face and authentic social interaction. However, all communities are necessarily imagined constructs. And worse still, each is constructed in multiple and competing versions. That something is imagined doesn’t mean that it’s not real. It’s not necessarily imaginary, it’s simply being imagined. But the relationship between the imagined and the real is a challenge that compels us to think very critically and not simply conflate the two as being one and the same thing. Perhaps unwarrantedly, I cannot help feeling a little nervous when seeing the sudden rise of popularity of the term komunitas in contemporary Indonesia. The history of Indonesia has taught me that when some words or ideas suddenly become popular, they come as a mirror image: they suggest that the reality is the opposite. If komunitas is so popular, could it be an indication that we are losing more communities? Could it be that we are currently expressing a deep-seated nostalgia, and not simply imagining utopia? Here are a few examples from previous history. During the final few years of Sukarno’s rule, there was a great deal of propaganda about nasakom, about the unity of nationalism, religion and communism. I grew up in that time when we all were required weekly to sing at school nasakom Bersatu, ‘nasakom Unites’. And what happened then was actually just the opposite, nasakom didn’t unite but made us determined to kill each other. Then under the New Order we were told of the importance of pembangunan, awakening, development, and what happened was a great peniduran, putting to sleep. Under the New Order, the slogan ‘stabilitas dan keamanan’ (stability and security) prevailed, precisely at a time when the greatest portion of the population was stripped of any genuine sense of stability and security. When we talked about reformasi after the New Order collapsed what transpired was the opposite. No significant reform took place, especially with regard to nepotism, collusion and corruption. So when I hear people talk about komunitas-komunitas, I excuse myself for feeling suspicious that in fact this may indicate the breakdown of communities, as attested to by the rise of militant primordialism. I’d like to close by saying that what needs to be further discussed is the material aspect of cultural performances and by this I mean finance, networking, material benefits, profit making and the like. I think it’s so important that when we discuss non-material issues such as cultural values, we do not lose sight of the material basis of relevance, we do not separate cultural performance from the material investments required, as well as the material and nonmaterial rewards that such activity promises.

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Chua Beng Huat

Over the last two days, we have been given particularly rich information about different practices of cultural production, involving people who are struggling with very limited resources and in constrained positions, yet still trying to create something. So, in that kind of spirit I just want to clarify three conceptual points that I think, hopefully will move the discussion forward. The first is the question of community. The simple, natural thing for academics to do is to ask “What do you mean by community?” The issue first arose when community disappeared with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th century. So people have been looking for community for two centuries. We could continue in that way. But to me use of the term ‘community’ at this particular time, historically, is actually very important. Because I believe that we are living in a period in which the language for being social, the language for social connection, is particularly impoverished by the failure of socialism. No-one is there now even to talk to about being socialist. The problem goes beyond just the real failure of socialist Russia and progressively marketizing China. Socialism does continue to appeal, emotionally, morally. Community is a way of recovering the social, in a reaction to the failure of real socialism. So, in the context of the progressively, continuously individualizing tendencies of global capitalism, I think the alternative discourse is actually com­ munity, with all the sentiment that goes with the term. When you talk about community, unavoidably, you emphasize the local. So, for me the stress on local community is in fact a kind of attempt to reterritorialize one’s sense self, to respond to the kind of globalizing tendencies that deterritorialize everything. What’s interesting about the local in Indonesia as Ariel has indicated, is the return of the repressed. All the effort put into organizing local festivals and other cultural events is a way of recovering something repressed not just by the New Order but also in the face of globalization. Academics today, hearing the word ‘local’, react almost instinctively against it, against its inferred suggestion of essentialism. But celebration of the local is often a strategic response to globalization by people who find themselves in the same space at the same time, rather than an expression of sustained, long term identity. The local community imaginary collaboratively produced represents a kind of place making out of the social space in which people find themselves. Some local community arts groups that I know in Yogya really come from all over Indonesia, but they find themselves here, now, and doing things here. The local, interestingly, is constructed out of a desire to imagine the world as otherwise in the place that people find themselves.

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Apart from the risk of essentialism, another problem of the local is that of getting beyond particulars to try to arrive conceptually at what is going on. This involves not merely describing cultural forms and activities but in a sense imposing a theoretical framework on them. I see this as the work of academics, not necessarily that of cultural producers. The role of academics is in fact to conceptualize and to theorize what they see and hear as audience members. Without their conceptualization the local runs a very serious risk of being seen as interesting but unique, and in being unique therefore irrelevant. In the context of this workshop I might hear very interesting information about Minangkabau story telling and oral tradition, for example, but I don’t know what to do with it. By maintaining a level of abstraction academics are able to develop a comparative frame of thinking. They make the material reusable, making it possible for the audience, for the reader, to invest in the idea, so that they can take the idea and experiment with in the future. For me, the collaboration between myself as academic and arts practitioners on the ground involves me in trying to conceptualize what I have seen and heard and attempting to make it usable. How do I engage other people in investing energy into potentially imagining their own location otherwise? My last point is this idea of pop and popular. I want to suggest to you that actually those two words are completely different. Historically revolutions always begin with the popular not the pop. When we use term ‘popular’, we should refer to local cultural practices that are shared in common by location rather than thinking in numerical terms. The popular is always local, always original, the culture of the local practice which always has the political potential for change. And the notion of local popular always emphasizes performance which invites active participation, whereas pop culture involves passive consumption. In contrast, pop is actually an intentionally produced media product that is commercially driven and aimed at profit rather than social change. And pop is necessarily short lived in order keep commodity production and consumption going, whereas the popular generally has long tradition among the people who practice it. Even if it is no longer in practice social memories and traces are left behind that can always be refined in the Foucauldian sense, then recovered and reinscribed into the present. Of course, the two always get confused because the popular is always vulnerable, always at risk of being commercialized. You are not a good capitalist if you do not know how to capitalize on local practices and make them into a commodity, to appropriate the popular to make it pop. The other interest thing is that pop culture sometimes gets absorbed into popular and becomes political. One the best examples of this would be underground rock music. The risk and

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resistance should be understood in this way. So, the possibility of crossover is always there. And precisely because crossover is always there we need to see how it works, analyze how this flow goes through. We should see it as a kind of exchange between pop and popular and not as a confusion of the two. In essence the two systems are always influencing each other. So, I think that the discussion will become much clearer if the distinction between pop and popular is actually maintained.

Denise Varney

It seems to me that Indonesian cultural performances in the ‘post-New Order period’ share similarities with what Anglo-European and American social theorists are calling new, second, alternative or liquid modernities. Indonesia has emerged from a centralized authoritarian regime into a period of decentralization, democratization and pluralism and this constitutes a new period of modernity. On the upside, many papers discussed the effects of decentralization and democratization as contributing to a pluralist vision of Indonesia that is grounded variously in ‘local’ and ‘community’ spaces. These are also, as Ariel has suggested, imagined utopian spaces and the search for utopian spaces has also featured in romantic and modernist dreaming. So the question I propose is: what does it mean to be emancipated in the new global spaces of modernity? And what role does cultural performance play in producing those new emancipated subjects? And what experimentation and new genres are emerging that give form to new thematics and concerns of the period? New Modernity also produces crises and anxiety: the great modernist thematics: ‘alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation and isolation’. One of the anxieties mentioned in several papers is the loss of the common enemy and the crisis of political theatre. The idea that the loss of the common enemy would open a space of emptiness in cultural production resonates with sentiments expressed in reunified Germany in 1989. This was especially felt in Berlin. West and East German theatres were suddenly, overnight, no longer divided by the common enemy of the Other on the other side of the wall. For West Germans, the Other was the authoritarian regime of the old communists, the ailing Honecker and the Stasi secret police; for East Germans it is was the Honecker regime and the capitalist West. The great playwright and director Heiner Müller predicted that the loss of the common enemy would be devastating for the theatre. But then as he said, he looked in the mirror and saw that he too was the Other and the work would indeed go on.

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Germans quickly found common ground in coming to terms with the past. More recent enemies had stood in the way of dealing with the Nazis, the Holocaust, and Stalinism. People had little tolerance for older style political theatre, but responded to performances that looked further back than the recent past, to re-think history. There was now time to look back. German reunification prompted a process of coming to terms with the past. So maybe one project of ‘post-New Order’ Indonesia is to think historically about the present. The question then becomes how cultural performance can assist the process of dealing with the past, of reconciling and healing. That is, recognizing who oppressed whom and in what circumstances, how families were separated and cultures devastated; acknowledging suffering while also helping people move on to enjoy the benefits of the period. Can performance look both ways, articulating the demands of the new era while acknowledging the past? A further element in the discussion of the loss of the enemy is the loss of identity, especially among people previously united by opposition to the New Order. The papers suggest that a theatre movement with a shared agenda of opposition to the New Order in the past has been replaced by diverse groups, without a common goal. Some are described as market and show-business oriented, expressing themselves through hybrid and fusion live and intermedial performance. These sound to me like figures of new or liquid modernity. They appear to be unaffiliated with political ideologies and class, free from the constraints of performance in the here and now of time and place, they have access to global culture through the internet, Facebook, YouTube. The example of deterritorialized ethnic fusion music seems to suggest signifiers floating around like molecules to be picked up by disparate groups who are not fussed about a fixed identity or affiliation. So what new genres of performance give form to or capture these new liquid identities? It seems new media and dance are the most adaptable to this new fluidity. At the same time devised performance created ‘democratically’ by the artists themselves is more in keeping with the current environment than the old model of play-making dominated by the playwright and director. This might perhaps explain why none of the papers discussed dramatic literature in the post-New Order period. Is the written play obsolete in the post New Order dramatic landscape? Does the death of the great Indonesian dramatist Rendra signify the end of dramatic literature? If a new kind of dramatic literature emerges, how will it give expression to the legacy of this era?

Index Abe, Muhammad  32 Aceh Arts Council (dka)  179 Aceh Independence Movement (gam)  174, 175 Aceh special autonomy  167 tsunami  172, 176–177 Achnas Nan T.  250 Adipurnomo, Nindityo  102 Affinity groups  185 Affinity spaces  74–75 Afisina, Reza  109–110 Agustinus, Ronny  99, 106 Ajeg Bali  122, 126, 141 Amal, Agus Nur  171–172, 178, 249 Anak Wayang Indonesia  28 Anderson, Benedict  86 Andy, sw  27, 32, 40–43 Antariksa  250 Anti-Pornography Law  15, 17, 23, 127n19, 247, 250 Ap, Arnold  207–208 Arahmaiani  249 Ardianto, Rudy  68 Arti Foundation (Yayasan Arti)  129–130 Arwana, Tukul  73 Asian financial crisis  64 Atonk  249 Audiences  14–15, 123, 161, 162–163, 189, 234–235 and arts spaces  221–231 recruitment  231–233 Ayu, Djenar Maesa  229 Babad Kampung project  27, 45–66 as history writing  47–51 Bajra Sandhi see Sanggar Seni Maha Bajra Sandhi Bali Arts Festival  125–126, 140–141 Bali Post  141 Bali tv  141 Bandung Center for New Media (BCf NMA)  104 Banyuning see Kelompok Teater Kampung Seni Banyuning

Barker, Joshua  84 Bengkel Mime Theatre  40, 41, 42 Body, the and performance  15, 249 politics of  99 Boon, Jan see Robinson, Tjalie Boon, Rogier  209, 213 Boon, Siem  213–214 Brűckel-Beiten, Mary  209 Budianta, Melani  239 Butterfly Seer, The  190–192 Cangkrukan  11, 83, 86–93 Cemeti Art House  102 Censorship  2, 5, 13, 249, 250 Collaborative art works/ performances  100, 101n6, 111, 177 Collaborative projects  33, 105, 110, 111, 112–113, 136, 137, 159 Common Room  101, 104 Community/communities  11, 15, 96, 107, 120, 186 alternative forms of  83–84, 90–95 as utopia  254–255 concepts of  28, 98, 227 construction of  11, 83–84, 93 performance practices  31 questioning the concept of  31, 74–75, 254–256 types of  13–14, 31–32, 112 See also Affinity groups, gardu, kampung, Local/Locality Community-based learning  123–124 Cultural production scholarship on  248 Dance Balinese  124, 130–131, 133–134 contemporary, in Aceh  175 wayang dance drama  29 Danusubrata, R. Dadi P.  151–152, 154, 155, 158 Daratista, Inul  73, 214, 242 Darmawan, Ade  105, 107, 237, 239 Debord, Guy  239

262 Decentralization  46, 64, 258 Derksen, Ellen  209, 213 Dibia, Wayan  135–136 distro  104n8 Djamil, Firman  8n18 Dokarim (Abdul Karim)  173 Dono, Heri  98 Essentialism  9, 37, 66, 256 and notions of tradition  244 Etnoreflika  110 Facebook  30, 33, 80, 158, 222, 224n3, 229, 233 Fang, Lan  89 Festival Kesenian Yogya  24 See also Yogyakarta Arts Festival Festival Mata Air  11, 67–81 Festival Teater Yogya  26–27 Festivals  12–13, 24, 105–106 112, 141–143 See also Karnaval and names of individual festivals Foeh, Melanie  206 Forum Betawi Rempug (fbr)  85–86 Forum Lenteng  101, 248 Front Pembela Islam  247 Gamelan performance in Australia  186–189 Gandrik see Teater Gandrik Garasi see Teater Garasi Gardanella see Teater Gardanella gardu  11 changing function of  84–86 as community  86–90 Gee, James  74–75 Gender and cinema  246 and performance  133–135, 245–246 performativity  246 politics of, in video art  99 Genggong  193–196 Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru  101, 102 Geulanggang Labu  174 Ginsir, Djoni  213 Globalization  24, 27, 31, 46, 66, 256 Goffman, Erving  240 Gundono, Slamet  8n18, 29–30, 33–36, 244

Index Halim, HD  31, 239 Handayani, Very  27 Harsono, FX  102–103 Hermina, Dhian  213 Himpunan Seniman Muda Indonesia  213 Hip-hop  24, 30 hivos (Dutch Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation)  104, 105 House of Natural Fiber (honf)  101, 111–114 Hujatnikajennong  107, 110 Hybrid/Hybridity  10, 24, 36 culture  212, 214 musical  9, 212 performance  192, 200 See also Identity Identity and performance  185, 188, 200, 234, 235 and pop culture  199–200 essentialized  254 formation  164, 196 hybridized  201, 203 local  5, 8, 149–150 local, through music  92 neighbourhood  46 representation of  32 Indonesian Institute of the Arts (isi)  103, 125, 126, 140 Inisiatif Komunitas Kreatif (Creative Community Initiatives)  9n19 Installation art  113–114 Intercultural projects  189–196, 212 International Conference on Sundanese Culture (kibs)  150 Jaarsma, Mella  102 Jabo, Sawung  193–194 Jakarta  32 deradjat Celcius  105–106 Jathilan  24, 25, 30 Jatiwangi Art Factory  101, 243 Jemaah Islamiyah  121 Jogja Hip Hop Foundation  244 Juliastuti, Nuraini  103, 237 kampung  11, 45–66 and urban development  65

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Index as affinity space  74–75 as unit of control  63 definition of  48, 70–72 officialdom and performance  77–78 See also Community Kampung Halaman  110 kampungan  48, 72, 73, 94 Karnaval  24, 25 Kedai Kebun forum  26 Kelompok Teater Kampung Seni Banyuning  132–133 Kertarejasa, Butet  23 Klinik Seni Taxu  101 komunitas  28, 31, 73, 120, Komunitas Salihara  28, 224, 227–230, 232, 233, 234, 251 Komunitas Tikar Pandan  171, 179 Komunitas Utan Kayu (kuk)   227–228 Komunitas Wayang Suket  29 kumpulan  205 Kunci Cultural Studies Center  26, 237, 243, 248, 250 Kurniawan, Agung  245 Kusumo, Sardono W.  225, 237 Kwon, Miwon  74 Lawalata, Aïs  206 Ledeng  29 Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional (lkn)  128n22 Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat (lekra)  128n22, 253 Liquid Modernity  15, 258–259 Local/Locality and history  244–245 community  256 culture  24 hierarchies of  254 narratives  27 performance spaces  244 social structures  122–125 Luh Luwih  133–134 Mahjoeddin, Indija  190–191 Malaysia  7–8 Malna, Afrizal  32 Mambesak  207 Maryanto, Gunawan  27, 249

Mashuri, Imawan  91–92 Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia (mspi)  237 Massey, Doreen  75 Media mass  5–6 literacy  111–112 See also New Media Art Megawati see Soekarnoputri, Megawati Monyong, Taufik  94 Murgiyanto, Sal  237 Murti, Krisna  98 Nardayana, Wayan  137 National Gallery, Jakarta  102, 106, 110 New Media Art  111–112 Multiculturalism Australian  182, 184, 194, 199 Dutch  203 Indonesian  127n19, 194, 247 nasakom  255 New Order  45, 52, 58, 61, 63, 71, 72, 85, 149, 254 and cultural expression  2–4 and institutionalization of the arts  175 and middle class  223 modern theatre in  22–23 Noer, Arifin C.  3, 245 Nu-Substance  104 ok Video  105, 106–107, 109–110 Ostentrik, Teguh  98 Padhepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardjo  26 Paik, Nam June  98 Papermoon  26, 27 Paramaditha, Intan  250, 251 Pasar Kangen  27 Pasar Malam  203,205 performances  205–208 Tong Tong  208–213 Indonesia  216–217 Performativity  247 and gender  241 Performing Arts High School (smki)   125, 136 Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia Australia (ppia)  197

264 Photography  103, 108 Place  11, 26, 65 sense of  75–76, 79, 80–81 Pluralism  15, 25, 43, 247, 258 See also Regionality Pop culture Indonesian, in Melbourne  196–199 See also Popular Culture Popular art forms  49 Popular Culture  5–6, 73, 99 and pop culture  257–258 Popular Music  7 Post-New Order/Post-1998  46, 64, 121–122, 127–128, 149, 216 alternative terminology for  253 and local identity  164 and middle class  223–224 and performing arts in Aceh  170–172 and performing arts in Bali  127–128 and pluralism  43, 258 changed climate of performance in  4–5 state and civil society in  246–247 Praptowihardjo Mpu  213 Prie, Mitu M  250 Priyo, Cak  87, 88, 90, 91 Q Film Festival  246 Reformasi  23, 121, 216, 218, 238 Regional Autonomy  4, 5, 8, 12, 23, 120, 121–122, 149 and cultural preservation  150–151 Regional theatre  154 Regional variation  8, 12 Regionality  2, 16 and cultural pluralism  244–245 Rendra  3, 22 Riantiarno  3 Robinson, Tjalie  209 Ruang Mes  56 101, 103–104 ruangrupa  101, 105–106, 109, 115, 237, 243, 248, 249 Rubiyana, Ritta  213 Sahita  249 Salihara see Komunitas Salihara sanggar  28, 41, 101, 102, 123, 124–125 Sanggar Çudamani  130–131

Index Sanggar Seni Maha Bajra Sandhi  131–132 Santoso, Joko Bibit  30, 35 Saung Angklung  213 Sawitri, Cok  138–140 Schechner, Richard  222, 240, 241 Script writing  159–160 Semar  33 seni kerakyatan  73 Sherriff, Adrian  190–191 Sidia, Made  136–137 Siegel, James T.  169 Slank  73 Snouck Hurgronje, Ch.  173 Social empowerment  109 Social critique and performance  1, 2, 22–23, 127n19, 136–137, 196n24 Soebroto, Ki Ledjar  215 Soekarnoputri, Megawati  85, 121, 175n14 Soemardjo, Ria  192–193 Soleh, Imam  29 Space(s)  81 alternative art  26, 228, 249 arts  26 foreign cultural institutes  230–231 public  108, 248 utopian  258 variety of, in performance  26–27 See also Local/Locality Srikandi, Naomi  251 Suardana, Kadek  8n18, 129, 130, 132, 142, 143 Sugianto, Ketut Edi  206 Sundanese-language Drama Festival (fdbs)  147–164 Student festival (fdbsp)  157–158 Sura, Nyoman  138 Surabaya av Nerds  11, 84, 93–95 Surabaya New Media Art Centre See Surabaya av Nerds Suryalaga, R. Hidayat  151–153, 158 Syariah law  4n10, 13, 167, 168–170, 175 Syariah politics  177–180 Syukur, Slamet Abdul  225 Tajudin, Yudi  36–40 Taman Ismail Marzuki (tim)  224–227, 232

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Index Taman Untuk Kehidupan (tuk)  68, 76–80 Tanggul Keprihatinan Budaya  30 Tante Lien  206 Teater Arena  23 Teater Bengkel  22, 225 Teater Bolon  147–148, 158n14 Teater Dinasti  22 Teater Gadjah Mada  27 Teater Gandrik  22, 23, 226, 229, 234 Teater Gapit  3n9, 23 Teater Garasi  14, 26, 27, 36–40, 177, 221, 237, 243, 248 Teater Gardanella  26 Teater Gidag-Gidig  28 Teater Koma  226, 227, 229, 233, 234 Teater Ruang  30 Teater Sunda Kiwari  148, 151–153 Teater Temmu  40, 41, 42 Television  107–108 Topeng Shakti  133–134 Tourism  12, 123 Trenggono, Indra  27 Tromorama  101

Tua, Engkin  213 tv Eng Ong  167–168, 171–172 Utami, Ayu  250 Venzha (Vincensius Christiawan)  111–112 Video Art  11, 94, 98–100, 103, 106–111 Video Battle  103–104 Video Lab  101, 107–108 Waag Society  113 waft  101 Wayang Kampung Sebelah  73 Wicak, Benny  93–94 Widodo, Suko  87, 88, 90 Wijaya, Putu  3, 153 Woiski, Max Jr  212–213 Yogyakarta Festival of Arts  46–47, 62, 113–114 See also Festival Kesenian Yogya Young people/Youth  77, 147–149, 151, 160–162, 164